Tammy Faye Bakker, born Tamara Faye LaValley in 1942, helped build the PTL television empire with husband Jim Bakker, pioneering religious broadcasting as a scalable media product. At its peak the prosperity-gospel operation grossed over $120 million a year and funded Heritage USA, a Christian theme park that rivaled Disney in attendance.

This episode charts her staggering rise, the anatomy of the scandal that brought PTL down, and her unlikely pop-culture reinvention. Excommunicated by the religious establishment, she was embraced by the LGBTQ community she had shown radical empathy to during the AIDS crisis, becoming a camp icon on reality television before her death in 2007.

• Her early exposure to institutional rejection through her mother's stigmatized divorce
• The mechanics of the prosperity gospel as a monetization lo ...