His father went to prison in disgrace. His mother’s mascara became a national joke. Yet somehow Jay Bakker survived an excruciating childhood to carve out a distinctive career as a punk preacher who is rapidly becoming a fashion icon.

As the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, once America’s most popular television evangelists, Bakker was 11 years old when his world crumbled in a sexual and financial scandal. It sent his father to jail and destroyed his family’s religious broadcasting empire, which was named Praise the Lord (PTL) but later became known as Pass the Loot.

Last week pictures of Bakker appeared in a national advertising campaign by one of America’s leading fashion designers.

Aged 32, he is featuring in adverts celebrating American diversity and individuals who, according to the Kenneth Cole menswear campaign, “walk in different shoes”.

They do not come much more different than Bakker, who may be the only pastor in America whose body is covered in tattoos, with “Help Lord” engraved on his knuckles. The motto of his Revolution church, which holds services in a Brooklyn bar, is “a church for people who have given up on church”.

Bakker’s emergence as part of a new breed of internet evangelists, who shun the money and glamour of modern mega-churches, amounts to a remarkable resurrection for a lost child. In disgust at the way his parents were treated, he became an alcoholic teenager and turned his back on the Christian establishment.

“It was just devastating,” he says of the trauma when his father was arrested and accused of defrauding his followers of millions of dollars to finance a lavish family life-style. “All these people you felt close to didn’t want to talk to you any more and said mean things about your parents. Everything around me had fallen apart.”

At their height, the Bakkers were hailed as pioneering tele-vangelists who used cable television to extend their ministry to 13m American households. Jim was the big-haired preacher with a golden tongue who in the 1980s was attracting $1m a month in donations.

Tammy Faye was his equally big-haired wife, who mesmerised audiences with her huge false eyelashes and black make-up, which would regularly run down her face as she wept over stories of suffering and heartbreak. As the money poured in, they acquired his and hers Rolls-Royces and air-conditioned kennels for their dogs.

Their world crashed when Jim Bakker had an affair with a PTL secretary and paid $265,000 from church funds for her silence. Two years later he was convicted on federal fraud charges involving Heritage USA, PTL’s $200m Christian theme park, which at one time had rivalled Disney World with 6m visitors a year.

“A big piece of my life was at Heritage,” Jay Bakker said last year. “There was really a sense of loss and insecurity and fear. My life, as I knew it, was over.”

Bakker became estranged from his father, who served five years in jail, then divorced Tammy Faye and now lives quietly in Missouri.

Yet Bakker remained close to his mother and was devastated when she died of cancer last year. “I know I drove her crazy as a kid, sneaking out and drinking, but at the end of the day we were always pals,” he said.

It was because of the treatment of his parents by the Christian establishment that Bakker vowed to have no part of orthodox ministry.

He is now the defiantly antiestablishment pastor of the New York branch of Revolution, which meets at 4pm on Sundays in a room next to Pete’s Candy Store bar in Brooklyn, then posts videos from its services online. More than 1m people visited the church site last year. Bakker and his wife, Amanda, also featured in a successful reality television series called One Punk Under God.

He admitted last week that his message of inclusion and acceptance was not always easy to convey.

Late in her life his mother became an icon among gay Christians, who revered her for her public displays of emotion and unswerving faith. He has since made waves as a rare evangelical supporter of gay marriage. “I’ve caught a lot of flak for that, lost a lot of speaking engagements,” he said.

One church video shows him with a mostly African-American congregation that cheers and laughs at his every mention of Jesus, until the moment he mentions gay marriage. Then the church falls deathly quiet and Bakker breaks into tears as he realises that he has alienated his audience.

“A church ought to be a place where we can agree to disagree,” he said sadly.

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