Jim Bakker, a televangelist who once led a multimillion-dollar religious empire with his wife, Tammy Faye, before a sex sandal tarnished his reputation and a conviction for fraud and conspiracy sent him to federal prison, died Oct. 5. He was 86.
His second wife, Lori, announced the death but not cite a cause or say where he died. He had a stroke in 2020.
Mr. Bakker (pronounced “baker”) was a preacher and fundraiser on television for more than 20 years, developing a following that numbered in the millions. An ordained minister before being defrocked by his denomination, the Assemblies of God, he espoused a message that mixed wealth and success with salvation.
Mr. Bakker and his first wife were Bible Belt preachers before evangelist Pat Robertson hired them in the mid-1960s as personalities for his new Christian Broadcasting Network. Over several years, they refined their folksy, talk-show style of religious broadcasting with upbeat music, interviews, prayer and relentless fundraising, often punctuated by tearful pleas from one or both of them.
Mr. Bakker broke with Robertson in the early 1970s, establishing a separate broadcast network and a new show, “The PTL Club,” which stood for “Praise the Lord” and later for “People That Love.”
With Mr. Bakker’s boyish charm and his wife’s endless enthusiasm, accentuated by her thick makeup and elaborate wardrobe, “The PTL Club” became a mainstay of evangelical Christian broadcasting. The Bakkers built a ministry and financial juggernaut in Charlotte, and later in Fort Mill, S.C., that lasted from the mid-1970s well into the 1980s.
“The PTL Club” was broadcast each day from a packed 1,600-seat studio. Mr. Bakker’s 24-hour-a-day PTL television network reached 13 million households. Books by the Bakkers and gospel albums recorded by Tammy Faye were hawked on their shows, which also featured fundraising telethons.
The Bakkers also opened a 2,300-acre South Carolina theme park, Heritage USA, which drew 6 million visitors a year, making it the country’s third-largest attraction of its kind, after only Disney World and Disneyland. Mr. Bakker raised at least $150 million by selling “partnerships” in Heritage USA for $1,000 apiece, promising partners an annual three-night stay at the park.
“If the Bible says we are to be fishers of men,” Mr. Bakker reportedly said, “then a water park is just the bait. And I don’t see anything wrong in using some pretty fancy bait.”
Wealth and the outward trappings of worldly success were a major component of the Bakkers’ appeal, as critics quipped that the true meaning of PTL was “Pass the Loot.”
In the 1980s, the Bakkers’ salaries and bonuses soared well past $1 million a year. They had homes near Charlotte and in Florida, Tennessee and Palm Springs, Calif. Their bathroom fixtures were gold-plated, and even the doghouses — and their son’s treehouse — were air-conditioned. Tammy Faye Bakker sold a line of makeup and owned as many as a dozen mink coats. She often talked about her shopping sprees on “The PTL Club” and in interviews.
“God wants his people to go first class,” Mr. Bakker said. “We preach prosperity. We preach abundant life. Christ wished above all things that we prosper.”
The Bakkers were chauffeured by a fleet of three Cadillac limousines and had several top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benzes, a Corvette and at least one vintage Rolls-Royce.
By 1987, when everything came crashing down, the Bakkers’ TV network, theme park and related businesses were taking in at least $129 million a year. The enterprise was valued at an estimated $172 million.
The Bakkers were at the peak of their popularity in March 1987, when the Charlotte Observer — in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into PTL ministry finances — revealed that Mr. Bakker had a brief sexual encounter in 1980 with Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary from New York. The newspaper showed that PTL officials had authorized $265,000 in payments to Hahn to keep the dalliance secret.
Mr. Bakker stepped down from his show and related PTL interests “for the good of my family, the church and of all of our related ministries.” He claimed he had been “wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues,” as his downfall — and Tammy Faye’s tears — became a never-ending source of jokes for late-night comedians.
Amid charges of hypocrisy and extravagant spending, feuding erupted in the world of televangelism. At Mr. Bakker’s direction, Jerry Falwell took control of “The PTL Club” before walking away six months later.
Falwell, the founder of Moral Majority and a powerful spiritual and political force among conservative Christians, declared Mr. Bakker’s stewardship of PTL “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years.”
Mr. Bakker accused Jimmy Swaggart, a fellow Assemblies of God preacher and a rival on the airwaves, of leaking the story about Hahn. Other evangelists spread stories that Mr. Bakker had visited female prostitutes and engaged in homosexual behavior, both of which would have been considered grave sins in conservative Christian circles. The Assemblies of God revoked Mr. Bakker’s ordination.
In 1988, a year after his fall from grace, Mr. Bakker was indicted by a federal grand jury on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the public. The 158,000 “partnerships” sold at $1,000 each could not possibly be redeemed at Heritage USA, prosecutors charged, because the facility did not have enough hotel rooms. When PTL was reorganized under Chapter 11 bankruptcy provisions, its debts were reportedly as high as $70 million.
Mr. Bakker broke down in tears during his 1989 trial and was found guilty on all 24 counts. In sentencing Mr. Bakker, the judge called him and Tammy Faye — who was not charged — “money-grubbing preachers.” Mr. Bakker was fined $500,000 and given an initial sentence of 45 years in federal prison. It was reduced to eight years on appeal, which was handled by Harvard legal scholar Alan M. Dershowitz. Mr. Bakker was released in 1994, after serving five years.
While Mr. Bakker was in prison, Tammy Faye divorced him and married Roe Messner, a building contractor who had been involved with the construction of Heritage USA.
James Orsen Bakker was born Jan. 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Mich. His grandfather had been a Pentecostal street preacher, and his father was a machinist. His mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Bakker had a lonely, sometimes difficult childhood. He was forbidden to watch television, but his father bought him an expensive tape recorder, which Mr. Bakker used to practice speeches. He was a disc jockey at high school dances.
At 18, he accidentally ran over a 3-year-old boy in a church parking lot while driving his father’s car. The child recovered, but Mr. Bakker was so stricken by the incident — and by the forgiveness shown by the boy’s parents — that he decided to become a minister.
At what is now North Central University, an Assemblies of God college in Minneapolis, Mr. Bakker met the ebullient Tammy Faye LaValley. When they married in 1961, they both had to leave the school because married undergraduates were not permitted.
Mr. Bakker nevertheless became an ordained minister, and he and Tammy Faye preached in tent revivals. They developed puppet shows to amuse children, and in 1965 they moved to Portsmouth, Va.
The Bakkers came to the attention of Robertson, who gave them a puppet show on CBN. In 1966, Mr. Bakker joined Robertson as a host of “The 700 Club,” the network’s flagship program. During an annual fundraising campaign, the network was about $40,000 short of its goal when Mr. Bakker jumped up and pleaded with viewers to call in with pledges.
“His voice broke and he began to cry,” Robertson wrote in his book “Shout It From the Housetops.” “The … camera focused on Jim’s face as the tears rolled down and splattered on the concrete floor.”
A network official grabbed Robertson’s arm, saying it was time to take the distraught Mr. Bakker off the air.
“ ‘No,’ I whispered,” Robertson wrote. “ ‘Hold steady. God is about to do something great.’ ”
The phone lines began to light up, and in the end, the station received more than $100,000 in donations.
Mr. Bakker’s raw emotionalism remained a key ingredient in his and his wife’s appeal through the years.
After his release from prison, Mr. Bakker married Lori Graham in 1998 and settled in Branson, Mo., a popular tourist and entertainment destination.
Tammy Faye died in 2007. Their son Jamie changed his first name to Jay and became a tattooed, body-pierced preacher in Minneapolis who espoused somewhat liberal social views. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Bakker’s survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Tammy Sue Bakker Chapman.
Mr. Bakker returned to preaching with his second wife and broadcast a religious-themed television show from Branson. He pitched a number of products on his program, including colloidal silver — particles of silver suspended in liquid — which he reportedly touted during the covid-19 pandemic as a potential cure for the coronavirus infection. The Missouri attorney general filed a lawsuit against him for misrepresenting the effectiveness of the products.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the New York attorney general’s office sent cease-and-desist letters to Mr. Bakker, who took a sabbatical from his broadcast after a stroke. In 2021, Mr. Bakker was required to repay $156,000 to people who had bought his unproven covid cure.
“We continue to fight the good fight of faith and take a stand against the evil forces and hatred that has come against our ministry,” his wife said in a statement at the time. “In Jim’s words, this has been the most vicious attack that he has ever experienced.”
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