Jim Bakker, a pioneering televangelist later caught in scandal and financial crimes, died Oct. 5 at the age of 86, according to a statement from his second wife Lori Bakker. She did not share his cause of death.
Bakker rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s as the host of a popular Christian television talk show, originally called the PTL Club, along with his irrepressible first wife, Tammy Faye. The show was broadcast live, with a studio audience, five days a week, with little scripting. In front of the camera, Jim had a boyish charm and an uncanny ability to connect with audiences. At the end of each show, he would look directly into the camera and say, “God loves you, he really does.”
The show eventually reached 14 million American homes, with international broadcasts in 40 nations. Bakker used the television resources to build a 2,300-acre Christian theme park and ministry center, Heritage USA, near Fort Mill, South Carolina. The park had six million visitors at its peak in 1986, behind only Disneyland and Disney World.
Coinciding with his rise to fame, Bakker embraced the prosperity gospel, a message that fit the 1980s perfectly. “God wants you to be happy, God wants you to be rich, God wants you to prosper,” he wrote in Eight Keys to Success in 1980. He practiced what he preached, using PTL money to buy a 10,000-square-foot home near Charlotte, a Florida beach condo, and vacation homes in Palm Springs and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He traveled with an entourage, flying first class or in chartered jets, and bought expensive cars, boats, clothes, and jewelry. From 1984 to 1987, the Bakkers’ total compensation from PTL was $4.7 million.
Bakker suffered a spectacular fall in 1987 when his sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room in December 1980 was first revealed in the press. In 1989 he was found guilty in federal court of mail and wire fraud in connection with his ministry and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He served less than five years before his release, and subsequently started a new television ministry near Branson, Missouri.
Bakker introduced key innovations into Christian television. In 1974 he launched the PTL television network in Charlotte, broadcasting from a former furniture store with makeshift television equipment and half a dozen employees. He modeled his show after The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the height of cultural cool for middle-class audiences in the early 1970s. The set featured a Tonight Show-style desk and a couch and stuffed chairs for guests. Later, in the 1980s, the set evolved to incorporate a more open, homey feel. Along with live music, the show added its own band, similar to the Tonight Show band.
At its best, the television show was a crossroads where evangelical religion and American popular culture met. Everyone who was anyone among evangelicals eventually appeared on the show, including Little Richard, former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, Chuck Colson, Apollo astronaut James Irwin, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, singer Pat Boone, world heavyweight champion George Foreman, and actors Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Mr. T, Dale Evans, and Roy Rogers.
What the show lacked in polish it made up for in spontaneity and candor. In one episode, Jim brought a camel on stage to promote a Christmas program. As he described how magnificent the camel was, it peed a river across the set, all on live television. Viewers came to think of Jim and Tammy as part of their extended family. It was reality TV before the term was invented.
In 1978, PTL launched the first private satellite network, a year before ESPN. While the three major networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, hesitated to embrace satellite technology, PTL and a handful of other entrepreneurs jumped in. The satellite network beamed Christian programming into millions of homes 24 hours a day, making Jim and Tammy stars and opening up enormous fundraising potential. By 1986, PTL had a revenue of $129 million a year.
As the money flowed in, Bakker dreamed of something even bigger, a modern version of the old-time camp meeting. Heritage USA was unlike anything else in America—part community, part church ministry, part vacation resort—with a 500-room luxury hotel, a state-of-the-art television studio, and a $13 million waterpark. Bakker’s followers loved Heritage USA. There was something for everyone, from morning to midnight. But building it cost more than even the television money could support.
In the fall of 1983, Bakker came up with what seemed like the perfect solution. In exchange for a contribution of $1,000, PTL’s “lifetime partners” would receive four days and three nights free lodging at the Heritage Grand Hotel every year for the rest of their lives.
Bakker soon expanded the partnership program to fund a wave of construction that continually pushed the ministry beyond its means. He raised about $158 million from approximately 150,000 lifetime partnerships, which represented more than 100 percent capacity for the hotel and other lodging at Heritage USA. PTL was nearly always broke, leveraged to the point of collapse.
Bakker grew up in Muskegon, Michigan, where he graduated from high school. His father, Raleigh, worked as a machinist in a piston ring plant for 42 and a half years. Though his father always made a decent living, Jim grew up thinking of himself as poor. In fact, the Bakkers, like many Pentecostals, participated in the wave of prosperity that swept the nation in the post-World War II years. Their first home was made of cement block and painted orange, like a pumpkin. They later moved to a former lumber-era mansion with a grand piano in the living room. Raleigh preferred driving Cadillacs, which he bought used.
When televisions first became popular in the mid-1950s, Raleigh bought one over the objections of Jim’s mother, Furnia. To most Pentecostals, television represented an extension of movies and the theater, both gateways to vice, if not hell. But television also defined the good life, a message Jim internalized early on. Like everyone else, his favorite show was I Love Lucy.
Bakker’s childhood harbored a dark secret, one that he kept from his family through everything that happened at PTL. As he tells it in his 1996 autobiography, I Was Wrong, when he was about 11 years old, he was sexually molested by a young man from his church who was in his late 20s or early 30s. The relationship ended about the time Bakker entered high school, but it was never far from his mind, leaving him with a confused sexuality. “The lifelong impact and the fear of exposure I felt as a result of being molested as a child cannot be told too emphatically,” Bakker later wrote.
Never academically gifted, Bakker found a different identity for himself in high school. In 1956, he directed a 15-act vaudeville-style variety show as a fundraiser for the school newspaper. Headlining the show was a young woman who reprised a “Miss Elvis Presley” act she had recently performed on Steve Allen’s late-night show on NBC. The show sold out and was so popular it became an annual event, which thrilled the young Bakker.
The turning point in his religious life, as Bakker later remembered it, was when he ran over three-year-old Jimmy Summerfield. He was pulling up to church on a snowy Sunday night in his father’s ’52 Cadillac, with his cousin George in the seat next to him, when he felt a bump. The boy had slid down a snow bank in front of the car. Miraculously, he survived without debilitating injuries. Bakker retold this story throughout his career, emphasizing that the miracle of Summerfield’s recovery convinced him to attend Bible college.
In September 1959, Bakker enrolled at North Central Bible College, an Assemblies of God school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tammy Faye LaValley arrived a year later.
Tammy was raised in a house without indoor plumbing in International Falls, Minnesota. Like Jim, she grew up attending Pentecostal churches and never wore lipstick until she was married. But she also loved singing and acting in high school productions. On their third date at North Central, Jim asked her to marry him. She said yes. “I had no doubts,” she later wrote.
They dropped out of college to get married in 1961 and then hit the road as traveling Pentecostal healing evangelists, mostly in the Bible Belt. In 1965, Pat Robertson invited them to start a children’s show on his tiny UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, based on a puppet act that was part of their ministry.
A year later, Bakker convinced Robertson to start a talk show, modeled on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, called The 700 Club. As Bakker later told it, he and Tammy would unwind after revival meetings by watching Carson in the trailer they pulled behind their car and wonder why Christian television could not be just as good. The 700 Club was a hit, but Bakker soon found himself at odds with Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) staff over the direction of the television ministry.
In 1972, the Bakkers left CBN and moved to the Los Angeles area. There they joined forces with Paul and Jan Crouch to start another Christian television station, which eventually became the foundation of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Bakker and Crouch parted ways less than two years later, and Jim and Tammy moved to Charlotte to start the PTL Network. PTL stands for Praise the Lord, or People That Love.
In December 1980, John Wesley Fletcher, a healing evangelist and frequent guest on Bakker’s television show, invited Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary from Long Island, New York, to Clearwater, Florida, ostensibly to babysit Bakker’s children while he and Fletcher conducted a telethon for a local station. Hahn later alleged that she was sexually assaulted, first by Bakker and then by Fletcher, before Fletcher took her back to the airport, giving her just enough money to return home. Bakker later claimed that their encounter was consensual.
As financial pressures mounted in the mid-1980s, fundraising became a more prominent part of the television show. During the summer of 1986, the Victory Warriors promotion pulled in nearly $35 million in less than two months. Within days there was nothing left. The money had all been spent on operating expenses and debt.
Bakker abruptly resigned from PTL in March 1987 when the Hahn story became public. The scandal was initially about sex, but it soon turned to money when it was revealed that PTL had paid Hahn and her representatives $265,000 in hush money. Fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell took over the ministry but quickly discovered that it was $65 million in debt and losing $2 million a month. He also accused Bakker of involvement in gay affairs and visits to prostitutes. The ministry filed for bankruptcy a few months later. Jim and Tammy tried to reclaim PTL, appearing on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, but to no avail.
Two years later, in 1989, Bakker went on trial for wire and mail fraud. Outside the courthouse a carnival atmosphere prevailed, reminiscent of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925. A witness collapsed on the stand, and Bakker himself had a psychological breakdown. He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years by US District Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Potter, though the sentence was reduced on appeal.
After his release from prison, Bakker renounced the prosperity gospel and launched a new ministry called Morningside near Branson, Missouri, with his second wife, Lori. Located on 700 acres outside the tiny town of Blue Eye, Missouri, on the border with Arkansas, Morningside is a miniature version of Heritage USA. With his new focus on the end times and coming apocalypse, Bakker embraced conservative politics and began selling survival gear and food to preppers, much of it packaged in five-gallon buckets. In 2021, Bakker and his ministry Morningside paid a $156,000 settlement after a lawsuit accused him of marketing a product called Silver Solution as a COVID-19 cure.
Bakker is survived by his wife Lori, daughter Tammy Sue, son Jay, and five children adopted with Lori.
