Jim Bakker is dead, at the age of 86.
Among the grosser religious grifters of American history, Bakker was a pure thief, someone who may or may not have really believed in his version of far-right Christianity, but who really truly believed in money. Luckily for him, no matter what horrible things he did, no matter what horrible things he said, no matter how much money he stole, the idiots were always happy to fork over more to the man who said the things about the end of the world that they really want to hear.
Bakker grew up in the far-right version of the American church. Born in Minnesota in 1940, Bakker was in the Assemblies of God, a far-right version of evangelical Protestantism founded at a convention in Arkansas in 1914. It was both politically conservative and dedicated to holiness ideas of Christianity that largely rejected the parts of the modern world it didn’t like. New technologies like the radio? No, no, that was good, modernism allowed us to spread the word of God. But women’s rights? What a horror. So these movements always had to try to balance the technological transformations that opened up hearts and minds and wallets to Jesus while rejecting all the social changes those technologies wrought. Bakker didn’t pioneer that balance—people such as Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson had started that process decades earlier, but Bakker would have to deal with that on television and he managed it easily.
Bakker attended North Central University, an evangelical Bible college in Minneapolis. There, he met Tammy Faye LaValley. Jim and Tammy Faye would eventually become the First Couple of Evangelical Grifting. They married in 1961 and dropped out to become evangelist preachers. Who needed a degree to learn the Big Grift?
They spent the next few years moving around, speaking at revivals, and building connections in the growing New Right that sought to connect evangelical Christianity with far-right causes. It’s important to remember that before the 1970s, voting rates among hard-core evangelicals weren’t very high and they weren’t much of a political force. Many thought that engaging with something as sinful as the government was below them, especially when both political parties seemed to represent a secular nation. Bakker worked hard to change that.
In 1966, Pat Robertson, who along with Jerry Falwell, really did more than anyone else to build this far right political coalition, hired Jim and Tammy Faye for his Christian Broadcasting Network. CBN was really just getting its legs and viewership wasn’t very high. But the Bakkers could now speak to the masses.
They started a children’s show with puppets, like a far-right version of Mister Rogers, if Mister Rodgers was focused on getting kids’ parents to fork over their cash before Christ came back to smite the sinners. Your cash could guarantee you would be on the right side of that equation. Come on Over was a big success, one of the first CBN had. Finally, extremist right-wing parents could indoctrinate their kids by placing them in front of a television with puppets and not be exposed to that also quite Christian but also sane Fred Rogers. Impressed, Robertson hired Jim Bakker to host another show—The 700 Club. This would become the signature show of CBN for decades, though not with Bakker. He and Tammy Faye were ready to go on their own and Robertson didn’t want to be overshadowed either.
Jim and Tammy Faye decided to start their own broadcasting network to compete with CBN. Trinity Broadcasting Network began in 1972 with another married pair of evangelical grifters, Paul and Jan Crouch. TBN was quite successful, but not with Bakker. It turned out that Bakker and Paul Crouch hated each other and could not find a way to work together. It seems that no one really liked Jim Bakker. He was a complete slimeball and grifter, even among other grifters.
So the Bakkers left again to start their own syndicated show. The PTL Club began in 1974 and over the next fifteen years would be perhaps the most popular Christian show out there. Even my Lutheran mom watched it. She bought their records too. She later denied this and I was outraged by these lies. She finally admitted that she liked their singing and OK, sure, she did buy them. But to be fair to my mom, I’d be embarrassed by this fact too. Incidentally, it doesn’t much surprise me that the mainline Protestant churches and even the Catholic Church is in decline, since so much of the larger cultural Christianity that even they consume come out of the evangelical world. So why not just become an evangelical, especially when it intersects with white supremacist and resentment-based politics that you also share and wish your liberal Lutheran or Episcopalian pastor would articulate?
The whole PTL grift was amazing. And let’s be clear—they rose fast. In 1972, they were living in a trailer. By 1978, they were millionaires. First, Tammy Faye was so ridiculously over the top and campy that it should have been impossible to take her seriously. There’s a good reason that she became something of a gay icon later in her life. After the decline of her empire, she started claiming that she was always just about love and acceptance, which was both a total lie and an impressive shift in her personal grifting, though grifter she 100% always was.
But Jim, he was just a giant nothingburger. He had a certain charisma I guess? And I suppose he had the kind of male authority that makes these evangelical idiots give over their money. But he was just a wet noodle. I dunno, the 70s and 80s were weird times in American culture and who knew who could get big in an era where spirituality was up in the air and a lot of semi-charismatic hustlers could profit off the yokels.
And to be clear, this was all about the cash. They didn’t even hide it. Bakker had a dream—build a Christian theme park and separate more fools from their money. That became Heritage USA, built in Fort Mill, South Carolina. It was hugely successful! For awhile there, it was the third most popular theme park in the United States, only behind Disney World and Disneyland. By 1986, five million people a year were paying money for this!
Heritage USA included everything you’d want—a hotel, rides, prayer rooms, a skating rink, and of course a place for the Bakkers and friends to broadcast. Bakker had started promoting this back in 1978. He called Heritage USA a “total living center” that would eventually attract residents to live there in various villages based upon supposed American themes, ranging from “Old New England” to “California contemporary.” He also stated it would “never be finished until the coming of the Lord.”[1]
The morons just forked over the cash. Evangelicals are such easy marks. Jim Bakker knew that inherently. By the late 70s, he was drawing in over a million a week in donations on the PTL Club. Of course people asked him about the money. I mean, it’s not hard for even the media to see a grift like this and be awestruck that the hoopleheads and the yokels would fall for it. But the TV evangelists were ready for these kind of questions. They simply bathed themselves in the glory of Christ and said they were channeling their personal lord and savior. Bakker responded to the use of the media to raise all this cash that “I believe if Jesus was alive today, he would be on TV.” Sure, OK.
I always love the mental gymnastics people like this do over the inconvenient parts of the Bible like the rich man going through an eye of the needle and Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple and such. But people make the Bible say whatever they want it to say that fits their personal desires and politics and if that means just ignoring the parts that don’t reinforce what you are already doing, hey man, whatever. The fact that these people will do this while also saying that the Bible is literally God’s word and must be followed to the letter is extra amazing though.
Bakker also got directly involved in politics, completely blowing up the line between church and state, not that he cared any more about this than Falwell or Robertson. In 1980, just eight days before he was to announce his presidential run, Ronald Reagan went on TV to give an interview. The interviewer was Jim Bakker. The exchange, as reported in Rick Perstein’s astounding compendium Reaganland is remarkable. The parts quoted by Perlstein go like this:
Bakker: “Mr. Carter said some things that are right. But doesn’t appoint an evangelical Christian, and he doesn’t act like an evangelical Christian. And this has bothered us all. But your stand all the way back, on all these issues that are so important to our, so important to us—
Reagan, interrupting: “Do you ever feel that if we don’t do it now, if we let this become another Sodom and Gomorrah, that we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?”
Bakker: “This is the most important election ever to face the United States. I really believe that. And with the controls on religion—I don’t think anyone knows what happened in our leadership. In the crushing of religion in this country.”
Reagan nodded in agreement and would run interference on Bakker’s bullshit for years.
Now, it’s not as if the IRS and other regulatory agencies weren’t wondering what was going on with all the cash. As early as 1979, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into where the money went. It filed a report in 1982 that demonstrated at least $350,000 Bakker said would go into foreign missions that instead went into his bank accounts and to pay for Heritage USA. Then in 1985, the IRS created an internal report noting that Bakker had used $1.3 million in donations for his personal gain between 1980 and 1983 alone. So there was plenty of hard evidence against him.
But see, this is where the Reagan administration stepped in. People such as Jerry Falwell and Ed Meese and others had built up the Reagan brand by appealing to evangelicals. There was no way they were going to alienate those people because the Bakkers broke the law. I mean, these were not people who cared about law breaking when it benefitted them! So the administration squashed the investigations.
Will it surprise you that Bakker liked to dip his Jesus pen in the company ink? Consent? What, was that for Satanists or something? In 1987, it came out that Bakker and his buddy John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped Jessica Hahn, a PTL secretary, back in 1980. They then gave her almost $300,000 as a payoff to shut her up. Bakker had a separate set of books to cover up the financial improprieties through PTL and other related activities anyway, including occasional rapes and coverups.
The Charlotte Observer did a deep dive report on Bakker’s activities. He denied it was rape and said it was consensual, though that doesn’t explain such a lucrative coverup (which is over ¾ of a million in today’s dollars). Hahn went all-in on her new-found fame, poised for Playboy, appeared on Married with Children, and lived a fairly wild lifestyle there for a few years. But that didn’t really help Bakker, whose fans had to reckon with him being a completely different person than he presented.
Then allegations about homosexuality appeared. There were plenty of allegations about this for years. Former PTL director Jay Babcock testified that he had sex with Bakker. The disgraced preacher responded by saying before cameras, “I’ll tell you before God I’ve never had homosexual sex with anyone and certainly not with Jay Babcock.” But PTL records also showed that Babcock had been paid $620,000 from the organization’s funds between the beginning of March 1986 and when Bakker resigned in March 1987. I don’t particularly care one way or another about the truth of this. What I care about is the hypocrisy, especially since Bakker was a virulent homophobe on his show and would remain so for the rest of his terrible life.
The entire TV evangelical world turned on Bakker after these allegations went live. Jimmy Swaggart went on Larry King and called Bakker a “cancer in the body of Christ.” Then a few months later, he got busted for buying sex in New Orleans. Amazing. Jerry Falwell went even further, saying Bakker was “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” I mean, OK, but maybe look in the mirror dude. Moreover, let’s not forget that Falwell was a huge Bakker ally for years before this. But it’s clear that Falwell saw an opportunity to eliminate a rival and consolidate his control over the TV evangelism world and so he just stuck a shiv in Bakker’s corrupted gut. Falwell also went on TV and named other men he believed Bakker had stuck his dick in, including other PTL employees.
Whether the other TV preachers were truly more upset over the sex or the financial stuff is unclear to me. My belief is that they were a lot more upset by the financial stuff, since that threatened their business model of ripping off the idiots.
My favorite ironic part of all of this is that when NBC made a movie about Bakker’s scandal, Fall from Grace, released in 1990, Kevin Spacey was hired to play Bakker! Turns out that was fairly appropriate! Bernadette Peters played Tammy Faye.
Bakker’s sexual encounters did not matter legally of course. All the disappearing money mattered a heck of a lot more and that’s why Bakker ended up serving time. In 1988, he was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. He tried to weasel his way out of it of course, since he was obviously guilty. He even had a psychological breakdown in the courtroom. Dollars to donuts this was staged, but the judge sent him to a facility for a bit and then the trial restarted. He was found guilty of all 24 counts. He was then sentenced to 45 years in prison and fined $500,000. That was quite a sentence. He appealed and a federal appellate court reduced it to 8 years. He served just about 5 and was released in 1994. Somehow Tammy Faye was not charged with any of this, which is crazy since she wasn’t nearly as dumb as she seemed and there’s no way in hell she didn’t know. She was however later charged with bankruptcy fraud and sentenced in 1996 to 27 months in prison.
Tammy Faye finally left Jim. They divorced in 1992. But he would remarry. I guess he found another life partner in the grifting. Lori Beth Graham was also a televangelist, so I guess that explains it. They married in 1998 and adopted a bunch of children, who I mostly feel bad for and I hope they grew up and became decent, reasonably well-adjusted humans who are allergic to all religion.
Bakker is of course completely shameless. He never would go away, no matter what he did. It seems to me that still listening to Jim Bakker in the 21st century is a sign of complete depravity, just totally lost to the crazy. But he still had his shows and people still gave him money. He spent his later life hosing The Jim Bakker Show. This was a combination of talking about the Second Coming of Christ (which shockingly never actually happens, who could guess) and selling survivalist products. His website actually advertises itself as “Prophetic End Time News.”[2] Bakker’s End Times prophecies so just happened to follow the current political positions of the Republican Party. I know how shocking that is to read!
Now, how was someone going to prepare for the apocalypse, when the world will go to hell before Christ comes back? Well, Jim Bakker could help you with that. He had his own food products that he called Survival Food. Basically we are talking about MREs here. Bakker sold this on the principle of why not “have parties when the world’s coming apart?” Why not indeed, Jim.
NPR decided on a taste test. It will not surprise you that the meals taste horrific. I mean, no one ever claimed that Jim Bakker fans had good taste in food, so why try on that front? And of course there were different tiers. You could get the 50 day meal plan for $154 as a starter. But if you were really committed, you could get the Peace of Mind Final Countdown Offer, which provided you with 31,000 servings of food for a mere $4,500. A bargain, when you think about how the libs are going to be begging you for food when Jesus comes back.[3]
And of course Bakker was a Covid truther. For men like Bakker, Covid was nothing but another opportunity to sling lies and make money on the idiots. He sold supplements made of colloidal silver as protection against the virus. As early as the spring of 2020, the New York Attorney General’s office moved on Bakker to warn him to stop making false claims about his cures for Covid. The Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration did the same. Even Republicans acted, or some of them anyway. The attorney generals of both Missouri and Arkansas filed lawsuits against Bakker.
But Bakker had high friend. He hired Jay Nixon. Yep, that Jay Nixon, the former Democratic governor of Missouri, to defend him. So great to see leading Democrats using their influence to such benefit! Nixon argued that these attorney generals just hated Christianity. He said, “Bakker is being unfairly targeted by those who want to crush his ministry and force his Christian television program off the air.” To be clear, the AG of Missouri who filed that suit? Eric Schmitt, now the far-right Republican senator from that state. There’s a man who just hates Christianity!
In fact, this did have an impact. By April, claiming at least that he could no longer accept credit card donations because of the suits against him, he urged his supporters to send him cash. No doubt they did. He had a stroke in May 2020 and mostly has stayed out of the news since then, so I am guessing that despite claims it was minor, it wasn’t so minor.
And now Jim Bakker is dead. Thus ends the story of one of the great grifters in American history. Bakker demonstrates what a combination of hypocrisy and a complete lack of shame can do for you in this country. In conclusion, it is a true wonder that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.
