Jim Bakker, a television evangelist who lost his popular and prosperous ministry in a 1980s sex scandal and then lost his freedom for five years, imprisoned for having violated federal laws with his conflation of God and mammon, died on Monday. He was 86.
His wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death in a post on Mr. Bakker’s official Instagram account. She did not cite a cause or say where he died. Mr. Bakker had what was described as a mild stroke in 2020.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards. Their pulpit was the television ministry PTL, which stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love, and their appeal was a combination of sermons, songs and tears. Both had a penchant for crying in public. Tammy Bakker wept on the air so often that she made sure her thickly applied mascara was waterproof.
The Bakkers drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and brought in yearly revenue as high as $129 million. On a 2,500-acre site in Fort Mill, S.C., they created and sold shares in Heritage USA, a sort of Christian Disneyland, with water slides and skating to go along with prayer and Bible study.
Mr. Bakker (pronounced Baker) was a gifted speaker who made no apologies for doing well in the name of the Lord. “Excess and success are close together,” he said in 1985. “Anyone who is successful has got to be excessive.”
By any measure, he and his wife enjoyed a life of opulence, which he defended by saying that they needed “good bait” to be effective “fishers of men.” Their bait included six-figure salaries and bonuses for themselves, a 55-foot houseboat, a mini-fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, diamonds and gold jewelry, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, an air-conditioned dog kennel, and homes and apartments in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Palm Springs, Calif. The spending was so lavish, and the appeal for contributions so insistent, that some critics recast PTL as standing for Pass the Loot.
The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped. Mr. Bakker denied the accusation. Nonetheless, he tried to buy her silence in 1985 by tapping the PTL treasury to make a $265,000 payoff, equivalent to roughly $744,000 in 2022.
The transgression led to his banishment from the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. Other evangelists turned on him. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over the PTL ministry, strongly suggested that Mr. Bakker’s sins, despite his denials, included homosexual relations. With characteristic hyperbole, Mr. Falwell dismissed Mr. Bakker as “the greatest scab and a cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”
A full obituary will follow.
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