In the halcyon days of the televangelists, when Jim Bakker stood shoulder to shoulder with fire and brimstone preachers such as Jerry Farwell, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart, the collection plate always seemed bottomless.
For Bakker, it meant a Christian theme park in a leafy Charlotte, N.C., suburb, a fleet of black Cadillac limousines, vacation homes, regular orders of truffles flown in from Brussels, a gold-plated bathtub, mink coats for his wife Tammy Faye and an air-conditioned doghouse at the family compound.
In return for your unbending faith, he told viewers of his popular television show “The PTL Club,” God will bestow you great wealth and other blessings. And to get things rolling, he added, just call the 800 number on the bottom of your screen.
By the time it all fell apart amid a sex scandal and a fraud conviction, Bakker landed in prison and took stock of his life. He renounced the prosperity gospel he once had preached, wrote a raw and wrenching biography about his missteps and vowed to work with the needy and most vulnerable when he was released.
Once free, however, he set up camp at a Christian compound deep in the Ozarks, armed with a darker message. The End Times are upon us, he told viewers on his reborn television show, and the signs are everywhere — terrorist attacks, epic storms, thunderous earthquakes, frayed relations among world superpowers, a pandemic that refused to release its grip.
To get viewers to the Rapture he said was sure to come, Bakker sold buckets of freeze-dried food with a shelf life of 30 years, fuel-less generators, doomsday guides and a magical elixir — “Silver Solution” — that could cure the coronavirus and other unpleasantries. “Imagine — the world is dying and you’re having breakfast like a king,” he told viewers.
And, as before, the authorities were hot on his tail.
A man of confounding contradictions, Bakker died Monday, his wife announced in a statement on his Instagram account. He was 86.
“He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry,” read the statement from Bakker’s wife, Lori Bakker. “Jim loved people deeply. He loved this ministry, and he loved the friends and partners who stood with him throughout the years.”
Baby-faced with dark lacquered hair and oversized glasses, Bakker became the sunny alternative to the hell-fire bombast of Swaggart and Falwell when he and his wife introduced themselves to America when “The PTL Club” debuted in 1976.
The show, an acronym for Praise the Lord, was breezy and chatty, styled after a late-night talk show with a lineup of guests, performances by Christian musicians and the never-a-mean-word banter between Bakker and Tammy Faye, who would frequently burst into song, tears dribbling down her cheeks.
Together the Bakkers spoke of the souls saved and the hardships overcome by those who put their lives in the hands of the Lord. And as often, reminded viewers of the need for donations to keep their crusade barreling forward. Before long, according to evidence introduced at Bakker’s fraud trial, more than $1 million a week was pouring into “The PTL Club.”
Capitalizing on their fame and fortune, the Bakkers opened Heritage USA, a Christian theme park complete with a $12-million water park, a hotel, nightly Passion plays and a Disneyesque Main Street where guests could buy palm-size Jesus dolls, 24-carat gold crosses and boxes of Heavenly Fudge. As the guests rolled in, developers built condos and homes for those who wished to live in such a place.
It was all heady stuff for Bakker, who often said that as a youth he had few expectations. Born Jan. 2, 1940, James Orsen Bakker was raised in Muskegon, a commercial ship port in Michigan just across the lake from Milwaukee. He said his parents were deeply religious and so strict that even simple pleasures such as singing were forbidden.
At North Central University, a Minneapolis Bible college affiliated with the Assemblies of God, he met Tammy Faye LaValley. They married four months later, dropped out school and launched their television evangelism careers as hosts of a children’s puppet show on Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. They eventually set off on their own to develop a show that paired church and pop culture, “The PTL Club.”
By the mid-1980s, “The PTL Club” had a daily viewership of roughly 5.7 million and more than 6 million visitors a year were rolling into Heritage USA. But it would all quickly vaporize.
It started with a rendezvous in a hotel room in Clearwater Beach, Fla., where Bakker met up with church secretary Jessica Hahn, a sexual encounter he successfully kept under wraps for years by reportedly paying her hush money. But when Swaggart caught wind of the tryst, he saw an opportunity to topple his rival and took the matter to the Assemblies of God, the church fellowship both preachers belonged to.
Accused of “moral failure” by the fellowship, Bakker resigned and Falwell replaced him as president of PTL. Once there, Falwell examined the company ledgers and realized he had a problem. Among other things, Bakker had offered nearly 160,000 people the opportunity to reserve a room at the 500-room Heritage Grand Hotel for three nights a year for life for $1,000 — a mathematical impossibility.
Bakker was eventually sentenced to 45 years in prison and fined $500,000 after jurors found him guilty on 24 fraud and conspiracy charges, which accused him of swindling his followers out of nearly $160 million and using much of it to fund his extravagance lifestyle. His sentence was later cut to eight years.
“Please don’t do this to me,” Bakker said before he was led away in handcuffs.
His attorney told The Times after his client was sentenced that Bakker had suffered a nervous breakdown during the trial and was overcome by vivid hallucinations, imaging that those packed in the courtroom were “frightening animals intent on destroying him.”
Behind bars, Bakker learned that Tammy Faye had filed for divorce, a final blow that left him questioning his faith, he later told Larry King. Ultimately, though, he said he “learned more in prison than in Bible college” and read the Bible in full for the first time, coming to realize that he had been leading “an ungodly arrogant lifestyle” as he chased wealth.
“You can worship money or you can worship God,” he told The Times when he moved into a small apartment in Burbank with his son after his release. “But you can’t worship both.”
The apartment served as a base camp after he released his memoir, “I Was Wrong,” and plotted a national book tour. He also did volunteer work at the Los Angeles International Dream Center, where he was welcomed warmly by the poor families and troubled youths who sought a fresh start there.
It’s also where he met Lori Beth Graham, an evangelist and frequent speaker at the center who described herself as a survivor of an abusive marriage and a hard-partying lifestyle as a youth. Both were broke, and she told the Charlotte Observer she had to borrow a wedding gown when they married in 1988.
The newlyweds moved to rural Missouri, just north of the Arkansas boarder, and set up camp on 800 rolling acres that had been purchased by developer Jerry Crawford, a onetime PTL partner who credited Bakker with saving his failing marriage. Bakker put down roots quickly, establishing his Morningside Church and a studio for “The Jim Bakker Show.”
In many ways, Morningside was a miniature version of Heritage USA, with a street lamp-lined avenue called Grace Street, a faux town square with a 15-foot statue of Jesus and old-timey shops like Grace Street Creamery and Morningside Beauty Salon. Guests were free to wander in as Bakker and his wife taped their new show.
But if “The PTL Club” capitalized on the wealthier-the-better ethos of the 1980s, Bakker’s new show was filled with post-9/11 darkness and apocalyptic visions of what was to come. He claimed hurricanes, train derailments and mass school shootings were a judgment of God and predicted a second American civil war if President Trump wasn’t re-elected
Now white haired with a neatly trimmed beard and sunken cheeks, Bakker’s once upbeat delivery and playful repartee with guests had been replaced by a grim figure.
The soundstage where he and Lori Beth reached out to viewers was often filled with buckets of survival food — Tasty Pantry Deluxe Bucket (buttermilk pancakes, black bean burgers and more) and Fiesta Pail (refried beans, taco-flavored plant-based meat and more) and a sampler bundle he claimed was enough for 23,375 meals for a $2,500 donation. It could feed a family of four for years, he promised.
Not that it would matter much during the depth of Armageddon, reviews of Bakkers’ food buckets were less than glowing.
“We couldn’t agree on which was worse — the thick potato soup that felt like eating wet cement, the strong chemical overtones in the chocolate pudding or the disturbing radioactive orange of the macaroni and cheese,” a team of NPR tasters wrote in 2015.
But it was the Silver Solution and Bakker’s claims that it was a cure for COVID-19 that caught the attention of authorities. The Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration sent him warning letters to cease making false medical claims and the attorney general in Missouri filed suit, alleging he was deceiving viewers by pushing a fake panacea for the virus.
In response, his program was dropped by World Harvest Television and GEB America Network — two of the few networks that carried his new show — and was cut off by credit card companies. Under mounting pressure, he agreed to pay restitution of $157,000 and stop pitching the product.
Telling viewers that he was, again, on the brink of bankruptcy, he urged viewers to save his ministry by sending him cash or checks.
“SOS, save our station, save our ship, help us stay on the air,” he said. “We need a miracle here.”
Bakker is survived by his wife and two children, Tammy Sue and Jamie, known as Jay. Tammy Faye Bakker died while battling cancer in 2007.
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