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Creators: This episode was created by Smith College students Payton Armstrong, Portia Caruso, Alaina Economus-Stout, and Sophia Esparza.
[Content note: this episode contains a discussion of sexual violence]
Transcript
Intro music: “Praise the Lord Theme Song”
Sophia: Out of the back seat of their used Plymouth Valiant, Jim and Tammy Bakker fostered an entertainment empire. The rise and reign of PTL was a monumental moment in entertainment history. The Bakkers had successfully created something that mixed religion and faith with pop culture and television. At their peak, millions and millions of loyal viewers across the world tuned into PTL, pooling money from their pockets to finance this evangelical empire. However, as with all good things, they must come to an end. The scandal that rocked PTL and the Bakkers was saturated with financial fraud, blatant deception, and acts of immorality. Using the word of God, the Bakkers managed to cover up the shaky foundations on which PTL stood. But eventually, the match caught fire and effectively burned them to the ground.
Alaina: Jim Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan on January 2nd, 1940 to Raleigh and Furnia Bakker. Jim often said that his family often lived in poverty, but in actuality, his family were able to afford luxuries, such as Cadillacs, and televisions, and they eventually moved to a mansion in a really nice part of town when Jim was a teenager. Jim was born premature, which resulted in a longer hospital stay than usual, so he wasn’t able to see his parents as a small baby. But even after he came home, his parents considered him to be “so fragile, that they did not allow his brothers and sisters to even breathe on him.” After this he craved physical touch and attention, not only from this, but also because his parents were extremely strict and very unaffectionate. He spends his entire life seeking physical touch and attention. One thing that bonded Jim and his family was of course church; they were Pentecostals.
His grandfather was one of the original organizers of the Central Assembly of God, which is kind of a specific denomination of Pentecostalism now it’s the largest sect of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are extremely strict, they did not watch movies or TV. They did not dance, they did not bowl, they did not play cards, they didn’t listen to rock music. Basically anything that you would think of kind of a typical 1950s family doing, they probably were not allowed to do it. However, as a child, Jim would sneak out of church, go across the street to the drugstore and he would drink pop and listen to rock music on the jukebox with his friends. He’s trying to find out like this tension between Church and culture that I think, at PTL, he really aimed to overcome and he tried to blend those two things together. So in school, his teachers described him as a slow learner, so he wasn’t that great academically, but as he got older, he kind of began to form his own identity outside of academics. He became known for promoting and organizing events. So he was in photography club and school newspaper, and when he was 15 he directed a variety show. And it was so popular that it became an annual event at the school. Under ambition and his senior year book Bakker wrote, “to do best possible in everything I do.”
That like, really just kind of stuck with me, like thinking about what, you know… did he achieve that? You know, like, is this his definition of the best that he can do? I don’t know. His turning point in his religious life – but I think really his adolescence in general came on December 16, 1956 when he accidentally ran over three year old Jimmy Summerfield with his father’s Cadillac.
Portia: Oh my God. What?
Alaina: At first it seemed like the boy… Yeah he ran- he ran him over. He backed him over in the driveway, basically. Kind of like, your worst nightmare.
Portia: Woah.
Alaina: It seemed like he was going to die—the boy was going to die, at first, because his injuries were so severe. But he actually ended up making this miraculous recovery. Like, no one could explain it. So this miracle, Jim said later, was what convinced him to pursue a more religious path in life. So instead of going the route of journalism and photography, kind of what he had been pursuing in high school, he decided to attend North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While attending Bible college he began attending the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium, which is an independent Pentecostal church, run by husband and wife preachers Russell and Fern Olsen. So I think really early on we can really see the roots of PTL in Jim’s life. It was here that Bakker received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, which included speaking in tongues. This is like a really extreme kind of rite of passage for all Pentecostals. I think it’s really interesting that he never did this at his parents’ church.
He only did this after he had left home and left the influence of his parents, which clearly shows kind of a dissonance between his parents’ branch of Pentecostalism and his own – what he imagined his religious life to look like. So this was the first time that he had fully embraced his faith. He was beginning to find a new sense of direction. By his sophomore year, he said he knew he wanted to become a television preacher, with a wife who would be “an equal partner in ministry.” Very similar to Russell and Fern Olsen, except broadcast nationwide. Of course, he would soon find his partner in his classmate at North Central Bible College, Tammy Faye. Tammy Faye’s upbringing in International Falls, Minnesota, was a far cry from the Cadillacs and variety acts of Jim Bakker’s youth. She was born Tamara Faye LaValley on March 7, 1942. Her parents divorced when she was three and, upon her mother’s remarriage, Tammy became the oldest of eight children. Tammy and her parents and her siblings shared three small bedrooms and a house described as, “squalid and brown, with no indoor plumbing.” Tammy recalls a story of how Saturday night was a particularly crazy night in their household, because that was the night that everyone got baths. Obviously she lived in a working class neighborhood, where most of the adults worked at the local paper mill, and the kids were left to fend for themselves often times during the day when all of the parents would be at work. It was not, you know, the typical postwar ideal of mom staying home, dad going to work. It was not that at all.
And as the oldest, Tammy often functioned as kind of an uncompensated babysitter for not only her seven siblings, but also a lot of other kids in her neighborhood. Her family was part of the Full Gospel Assembly, another kind of Pentecostal church, however Tammy’s mother was not allowed to play the piano or even to kneel and pray at the altar, because the church viewed her as a harlot because of her divorce. Tammy recalls early memories of the preacher and his wife coming to their house and screaming at her mother, you know, telling her that she’s a whore and, kind of, really like, verbally berating her. However, Tammy kind of redeems her mother, because when she was 10, she experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues at her church, and after that Tammy’s mother was slowly welcomed back into the fold of the congregation. Never fully, but, because Tammy was able to speak in tongues and experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit, this kind of redeemed Tammy’s mother. Tammy was extremely popular at both church and school. She was described as being reserved, shy, and serious. Tammy was extremely short. Despite the Pentecostal belief that wearing makeup is a sin, she sold makeup at Woolworth’s because she was too short to work behind the candy counter.
After she graduated from high school, she decided to enroll in North Central Bible College, with the financial support of an aunt who was willing to pay her way. So Jim Bakker was a year older than she was. Her and Jim quickly connected when she arrived on campus. He actually asked her to marry him on their third date. But Tammy said that she had no doubts. She had no doubts about it at all. However, Bible College did not allow their students to marry during the school term. They decided to drop out and they were married on April 1, 1961 by Russell and Fern Olsen, the husband and wife preacher at the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium.
So they both continue to serve as ministers at that Pentecostal church, however after Jim and Tammy… A lot of preachers came to the Minneapolis Evangelistic Auditorium to speak, kind of guest preachers, and one of these preachers was from North Carolina, and he invited Jim and Tammy to come and preach at his church. At first it was—they were very unsuccessful. Their sermons were not very moving at all, particularly Jim. However, a Presbyterian boyfriend of one of the girls who was attending church, they actually managed to convert him and he spoke in tongues and, you know, was rolling around on the floor and all of, kind of, these images that you see kind of this miraculous conversion into Pentecostalism. So after that event, Jim was convinced that he could make it as a Pentecostal Evangelist. So in the fall of 1961, Jim and Tammy bought a used Plymouth Valiant and hit the road as traveling evangelists. Traveling the country to preach the gospel.
Sophia: Jim and Tammy decided that they would create a puppet show and, essentially, this puppet show was kind of created to broaden the appeal of the show to children. So they created Susie Moppet and Allie Alligator. And it worked. They drew a lot of attention of children in the community and, eventually, they drew the attention of Pat Robertson, who had started this small Christian television station in Portsmouth, Virginia. Jim and Tammy started to appear on this small Christian television station and, again, they had immediate success with the local community. So kind of the reason that they kind of explained why the show had such good, like, such a strong audience was basically because they were really good at talking to little kids and people like, this TV and press release described Tammy as “cute as a button” and, like, looking like one of the kids and, like, her personality kind of drew everybody in. So like 200 kids would jam into the small studio, just to see Jim and Tammy play with puppets and talk about religion.
Because of their natural appeal to the public, they kind of drew in that loyal audience, and allowed them to fundraise money for the struggling station that they were currently a part of. And there was one night, actually, where they spent all night on television collecting donations to pay off the station’s debt. And basically like listeners would just give them their money, and basically all Jim and Tammy were doing was begging them to help the station stay afloat, and it worked. But eventually, as time drew on, Jim, in particular, began to have conflicts with another contributor to the station named Scott Ross, and these conflicts kind of began because of “cultural accommodations,” is how they put it, in control of the station. So Scott Ross wanted to put rock and roll music on the station, and Jim was kind of like, “no way. I don’t want to do that.” And he wanted to have more control over the station. So eventually, they were fired and in 1972 they left, and they founded their own nonprofit corporation which was Trinity Broadcasting System in Southern California. And SoCal was kind of the perfect place for them to grow their nonprofit tiny television program, because it was California in the 70s, and it kind of led them to a good place. So then, in the spring of 1973, the PTL club was launched.
And they began to broadcast five hours a night and seven days a week. Actually, this was very short lived because Jim’s prominent inability to share control led them to be unemployed in November of 1973. So PTL was created in spring of 1973 and then in November of 1973, they were fired. So they went back to Charlotte, and took PTL with them. And this is kind of where I noticed this really big trend where, as soon as the Bakkers kind of got any kind of platform, or they gained any kind of control over an airwave or ministry, they were kicked out because Jim wanted so much control over that station. And so then once they went back to Charlotte, they began to air with the Wheelers, who was this other prominent family, and the Wheelers kind of mark something important for Jim and Tammy, because this is kind of the beginning of the mismanagement of funds. Eventually what happened with the Wheelers, is that the Bakkers are pointing fingers at the Wheelers, and the Wheelers are pointing fingers at the Bakkers. They’re putting the blame out for the loss of ministry funds. In the beginning, I wouldn’t say that the whole money issue was the problem, as much as control was, but I think the Wheelers was where it began, when they moved back to Charlotte.
The later half of the 1970s kind of brought this massive growth for PTL. So, to give you, kind of, an estimate of this, their staff was half a dozen in 1974, and then it grew to 700 in 1979, so it was kind of this massive growth in a relatively short time period. So I think that kind of growth kind of gives you an idea of why, essentially, the main core foundations of PTL were kind of weak, like finances and whatnot. In November of 1979, the PTL network had expanded to over 218 stations. So how these stations work — because they were all over — how these stations worked, they have telephones weekly to raise money to cover the cost of running all these stations. So their goal every week was to get 2000 people to pledge a minimum of $10 a month to cover all these broadcasting costs. What helped, though, was the growth of the popularity of satellite TV.
It kind of created this perfect platform for PTL to be kind of common within every household, like a household staple. And it allowed this niche audience to grow, like this niche audience of really, really supportive PTL listeners that kind of tuned in all the time because it was airing all the time. So then this allowed them in May of 1978 to begin transmitting their programming 24 hours a day, because of satellite TV. So obviously they were growing really rapidly and one of Jim’s biggest passions, biggest goal for PTL, I guess, was to make it international. He wanted it to be everywhere. And when he said like everywhere everywhere. Okay, so kind of looking back to how kind of risky this PTL was, in the sense that they kind of went week by week funding themselves. And a majority of it was because Jim believed so intensely in God, that he kind of was like, “if God wants it, it’s going to happen.” And I have this quote by him where he says, “some people think you need money in the bank, before you can begin to operate in faith. I never have. Remember facts don’t count when you have God’s word on the subject.” And another quote is, “if you are in need of money, God will prosper you.” So I think that like those kind of really, really reflect about how loosely he cared about money and, in the end, he kind of use it to justify all of his actions because, when they started struggling with money — anytime they started struggling with money — Jim would go, “you know what, go ahead and write that check for $300,000.” And his partners would be like “Jim, we don’t have that kind of money in the bank.” And he’d be like, “no, go ahead and write it. I already know. Like, God’s gonna make it happen.” And sure enough, they would have $300,000 in their bank the next day. And Jim always said, “oh, it’s because God wanted it,” when in reality, they were hosting these 24 hour telethons, again, begging their audience for money.
He kind of used it as an excuse to write these almost fraud checks and ignoring all the financial concerns that ever arose in PTL because for him it was, if God wants it, it’s going to happen. The mark of their financial downfall, even though, obviously, there was a lot of financial crises between it, was really the construction of Heritage USA. Basically, Heritage USA was Jim’s vision of like “a Christian Disneyland,” is how they put it kind of. There was going to be a nursing home, there was going to be an amusement park, there was going to be these huge buildings, and it was all going to be like, centered around PTL. Basically when they signed the deed to buy the land for this vacation and retreat center, it really strained the cash flow of PTL, and this was because, like I said before, there wasn’t one big PTL fund. It was kind of every station for themselves. So they had to kind of draw this money out of these stations, who are already kind of going at a day-by-day kind of basis, so that that kind of really affected all of PTL. So the construction for Heritage USA began in January of 1978 and then already by June of 1978 they were behind by $2 million on their payments, because they were pulling so much cash out of their little station that they couldn’t fund them anymore. So within a couple of months, they are already by behind by $2 million.
At the time co-workers said that Jim’s ambition at reliance on God was overwhelming, and they couldn’t really do anything to stop him from pursuing his goals. Even Tammy herself. She said that she knew that they were struggling financially, but it didn’t matter to Jim. He would wake up in the middle of the night with an idea of a new building for Heritage USA and he would write it down. And the next day he would go to the construction company and begin construction on this idea that he came up with. And he kind of didn’t care about the finances to him. It was like you know I’m building this to worship God. It’s going to happen. In the book, written by John Wigger, PTL, this quote that really sums this up really well and it says that, “it’s like a house of cards as long as the millions of pledges keep pouring in, PTL is okay. But that’s an emotional issue which could stop at any time. It’s not that kind of sound, stable, financial picture that makes leaders confident,” and I think that goes to everything that Jim ever did financially within PTL. And eventually it caught up to him because, in the summer of 1978, the press kind of gets a hold of all these things I’ve just been doing in secret and the rest of the partners have been doing in secret, and the Observer article is published. This article is kind of notorious within Jim and Tammy and PTL history because it kind of, it was the first article that used past partners of PTL to kind of expose them.
It’s kind of interesting, though, because the day after this article is published, all these friends that kind of exposed Jim and Tammy like wrote to the observer and were like, “just kidding. We didn’t know you were exposing them on that kind of level, we want to take our quotes back,” and the Observer was kind of like, “no, that’s not how it happens,” because it kind of ruins their, it ruined their persona completely. So essentially what the observer article did is it attacked the Bakker’s on two levels, which is one, deception and two, poor management. And it basically said that this family style religious venture had turned into this multimillion dollar operation, and it wasn’t ready for that. And they kind of attacked the point that I had mentioned earlier, which was that the borrowing of money, this kind of embezzlement of money, relied so much on religion and faith that it kind of broke apart.
Portia: I just wanted to go back a little bit and talk about, you know, this original scandal that kind of came up that was related sort of to that last issue we’re talking about with Heritage USA, because as they were building this resort and the waterpark and like attracting families from all around making like a good, Christian theme park, like a good, Christian version of Disneyland where you would want to bring your family and spend a week and spend vacation. Which really, at this time was becoming more of a possibility because in Post-World War II America, as the economy was getting better, and as people were starting to have more stable jobs they had the ability to take more vacation time and spend time with their family. So this really came together at the perfect time in history for the expansion of PTL and for the expansion of American familial leisure.
It came together at the right time, but was also kind of the start of PTL’s downfall, because Jim Bakker tried to take this moment and exploit it as much as possible. In 1979, both Jim Bakker and the entire PTL ministry were the subject of an FCC, Federal Communications Commission, investigation for allegedly misusing the funds that they had raised. Which is a big no-no, super illegal and they alleged that about $350,000 that were raised by Jim Bakker and by PTL, to fund the ministry and, you know, put forth the Word of God, were actually being used to pay for Heritage USA. To pay for this resort. That’s a fraud of your viewers, because they’re donating his money thinking it’s going to go to one purpose when really going to another, but also the fact that they were using the airways, which are owned by the government. And not only were they using some of these funds for expanding Heritage USA, Jim and Tammy Faye were using them for personal expenses. Like, we see all of the lavish lifestyles that they’re living, and the multiple houses, they have all these really expensive cars, all the fancy clothes that Tammy Faye has. Just really living the high life, while their ministry is struggling because they can’t pay the bills every day.
At a certain point, towards the end of PTL they were spending millions more than they were taking in, and they were claiming every day that they were getting all this money donated by their viewers and, since they had such a high viewership — they claimed around 20 million viewers — that it didn’t really matter because all these people were donating so they of course had all this money coming in. When, in reality, 20 million viewers would have made them the most watched show in the world according to John Wigger, in his book PTL. The most popular at the time was Johnny Carson, who had about 8.5 million viewers, so they would have been significantly ahead of him. In reality, they probably did not have that many and probably about actually only 1.3 million viewers, which is significantly less and also, it’s a fraud of their viewers to say this show is super popular and that’s how we’re raising all this money when in reality they’re not actually raising that money.
So the FCC investigation started in 1979 under the Carter administration — he’s a democratic president. And the President to follow him was Ronald Reagan, who got elected significantly in part to the support of the evangelical community and had done interviews with Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye, so he really relied on their support. And it just so happens that once Reagan became president, the FCC dropped this investigation and no charges were filed. And, in fact, the report had recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax exempt status because as a ministry, they didn’t have to be taxed because all the money they were raising was for religious purposes. When in reality, it wasn’t um So the investigation was dropped PTO continue to have their meteoric rise — at least on the outside, it appeared like a meteoric rise — with the show continuing all day, every day, having all these guests gaining real notoriety, you know, if you wanted any power in the evangelical community. You went on the show. You were interviewed by Jim Bakker, you talked with Tammy Faye. But really their finances, which weren’t public at the time, we’re in a dire, dire situation. They were in so much debt Jim Bakker would write a check for money he didn’t have, which is also fraud.
Even as they’re losing money in the ministry and on the TV show itself, he wants to keep expanding Heritage USA. He wants to make it into the premier resort. And have all these different attractions and build even more hotels and he doesn’t have money to pay for that, so he comes up with this idea of selling lifetime memberships where, if you paid $1,000, you would get a lifetime membership to stay at a room in the resort for four days and three nights every year for the rest of your life, which he said was really a good deal, because it would be valued at like 10s of thousands of dollars which is way more than we would have originally paid for it. They originally limited it to 25,000 lifetime partnerships, which would give them about $25 million, which is the money that they needed to finish construction. The money that they were raising was dedicated towards building one of these hotel buildings, and they realized that they ran out of money so they started selling lifetime partnerships for another hotel building, that they hadn’t even started building, to use that money to finish the original one. So, by the end of it they had sold tens of thousands of memberships and way, way more than they could possibly accommodate to the point where in their 500 room hotel. They would have had guests there in every single room more than 365 nights a year.
So they were over selling these lifetime partnerships, there was not enough space to hold all these people, and it was a massive fraud. They didn’t even finish the construction of the building because they kept running out of money and this is the fraud that eventually led to Jim Baker’s downfall. Between 1984 and 1987 as they were raising all this fraudulent money for Heritage USA, the Charlotte Observer, which became, you know, the main, it was the local paper because Heritage USA was located near Charlotte. Their investigation was the one that eventually broke the story to the public about what had actually been going on with, not only the finances, but also other scandalous things going on in Jim Baker’s life.
Payton: So, sorta the vibe around Jim and Tammy Faye and PTL in 1987 like we’ve been talking about, was kinda a vibe of what could bring them down, and for six or seven years nobody knew about Jessica Hahn and her allegations, and in 1987 in the Observer she came out with sexual assault allegations against Jim Bakker and a preacher named John Westward Fletcher. It also came out later that Jim Bakker had used PTL funds to keep Jessica Hahn quiet. And one of the reasons that Hahn has said that she kept quiet so long is that she felt she had an obligation to God to stay silent about the abuse, which I bring up to highlight the influence that Jim and Tammy Faye had on so many people. So, going back, Bakker wasn’t necessarily seen as a womanizer, and there weren’t any rumors of inappropriate behaviors with women.
In 1980, Jessica Hahn was a 21 year old church secretary from Long Island, and she completely idolized Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye, and actually got her first black and white TV in her home so she could watch the show every day. She especially loved Tammy and Tammy’s makeup, and would try to emulate that and just really loved them. She said as a young adult still, in 1987, she said “I thought they were the closest thing to heaven. Being brought up in a Christian home and being brought up to love God, I loved what Jim and Tammy Faye were doing.” So she first met John Westward Fletcher when he was an upcoming preacher, and preached at her Long Island church at home. They developed something of an aquantinship, and Fletcher asked Hahn to babysit his kids a couple times and she agreed to it.
At the same time, Fletcher was becoming kind of notorious at PTL, he had come on the show, for making sexual, inappropriate advances towards young men on the PTL staff. Which is just to kind of note his character. So with that in mind, basically John Westward Fletcher invited Jessica to Florida to meet Jim Bakker, which was a really big deal because he was her hero and she was super excited. When asked why she went and what her intentions were in 1987 when people were vetting her allegations, she said “I went with the intention of being again in the presence of some people who I had admired my entire Christian life.” And so she really went with the intention of just to meet Jim Bakker and to be in the presence of someone that she’d admired her whole life, is what she said.
It’s interesting, because she’s been wary about describing the encounter as rape, she doesn’t necessarily use the word “rape,” but she has said that “all I can tell you is that it certainly wasn’t an affair, it was something that I would never want to go through again.” And while I don’t think we should describe in detail, what she describes is very brutal and something that in today’s “Me Too” environment what she describes really could have resulted in criminal charges and a criminal investigation, kind of like what we’ve seen with Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men. But Bakker insisted that it was a consensual rencounter, but Hahn never backtracked on saying that this was not a consensual encounter, like, John Westward Fletcher and Jim Bakker were the perpetrators, but Hahn said she didn’t call the police because she wasn’t in the mindset to do it, which is consistent with what survivors of sexual assault say, especially in the 80s when the environment for her to come forward would not have been particularly welcoming, but Jessica Hahn wanted it to be quiet too.
Obviously for different reasons than Jim Bakker, but she didn’t want there to be a huge thing about it, but I think that part of it might have to do with paritially with her being 20 years old, so when it happened she would have been a young woman, so at this time she still would have been in her late 20s or 30s, so her taking hush money or being paid to keep quiet doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the validity of her accusations. Talking about the hush money later, Jim Bakker, using PTL funds, said “I hate to even give them a dime, but do what you have to do to get it solved,” which just speaks to the way Jim Bakker understood money and what you could do with it. It wasn’t just Jessica Hahn and her allegations against Jim Bakker that brought PTL down, because the ministry wasn’t going to survive, the staff was exhausted from this scheme, and they couldn’t keep it going, but Jessic Hahn was kind of this match that lit –
Portia: Yeah absolutley, I totally agree with that, it was not a stable organization to begin with, and a lot of people found it easy to blame this one woman, an coming out with a sexual assault claim, and trying to say like “she’s doing it for political purposes!” or she’s trying to ruin this guy who never did anything wrong, like he’s a man of God he absolutely did not do this, and just blame her for the downfall of this really beloved ministry and TV organization, but it was such an improperly managed show, and everything about PTL was going to come down soon. They ran out of money like you were saying, a lot of people didn’t want to work there anymore, and Jim Bakker was just not good a running the company so when there was, like you said, this match that lit the flame and lit the whole thing on fire, of hearing that he was not actually the great Christian man that they thought he was, there was for a lot of people, there was no reason to be defending him anymore. You can look at her as someone who “took down” quote unquote, this successful ministry and this Christian man, or you can look at her as a hero who spoke the truth.
Portia: In 1987, after the Charlotte Observer broke the story about PTL’s finances, as well as Jim Bakker’s sexual misconduct, there was a disclosure of a payoff to Jessica Hahn. So as all of this was going on, as all of this fraudulent activity was going on, Jim Bakker was keeping two different sets of accounting books: one with the real funds, and the other to hide all of the payments he was making to his family as well as to Jessica Hahn, to cover up the sexual misconduct that had happened years earlier. And the Charlotte Observer reported on this, and the money, the hush money that was paid to Hahn was made public. Following this revelation, Jim Bakker resigned from PTL, with the idea that he was going to eventually come back, once all of this died down.
One of his friends, another preacher, Jerry Fallwell, took over as the head of PTL, because he had feared that a different preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, was going to take over the ministy, because Swaggart had initiated an investigation into Bakker over allegations of Bakker’s sexual misconduct. Which is interesting, because he chooses Jerry Fallwell to take over, thinking that Fallwell will just let him come back as the head of PTL once everything dies down, but Fallwell doesn’t do that. He kind of kicks Jim Bakker out of PTL entirely. He’s not the mat that Jim Bakker thinks he can walk all over. In April 1987, Fallwell banned Bakker from returning to PTL, which was a big deal because this was an organization that Bakker had built from the ground up, this was his baby, he had put years of his life into this and it would not be where it was without him. And we see that, because over the summer, they lost a ton of viewers under Fallwell’s leadership, and he tried to raise about 20 million dollars to keep PTL on the air, and you know, it just didn’t work. They raised some money, but not enough to keep the show going and they eventually declared bankruptcy and there was no way PTL could come back from that.
It was taking hits not only from new leadership, but all of the scandals involving Jim Bakker, which as people were realizing they had given money to this guy, and it wasn’t really being used for the purposes that it had been intended, a lot of people had begun getting frustrated with. These are people who are giving their last dime, these are people who couldn’t afford to put food on the table but were still giving money to Jim Bakker because they believed wholeheartedly in what he was saying. As a result of all of these scandals, Jim Bakker was indicted on eight counts of mail fraud, fifteen counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy in 1988 by a federal grand jury, which is a big deal.
So in 1989, after a five week trial, the jury found him guilty on all 24 counts. The judge at the time, Judge Potter, sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison and a 500,000 dollar fine. This judge was kinda known for giving really harsh sentences, and typically those kinds of non violent crimes don’t carry such a long sentence, but it had made national news, reporters were covering it every single day, reporters wanted to know what was going on with this trial, and he got one of the worst sentences he could have gotten. While in jail, Tammy Faye divorced him, and remarried Roe Messner, who had been involved in Jessica Hahn and the payoff.
After a few years, Jim Bakker’s sentence was reduced to eight years, and he was parolled in 1994 after serving about five years of his sentence. He was released from federal prison in 1994 and still owed about six million dollars to the IRS. So as part of his release from prison, he was required to never again engage in the combination of religion and commerce that had got him arrested and convicted in the first place. However, now, in 2020, Jim Bakker has his own show on an Evangelist network again, called The Jim Bakker Show, where he has been preaching the word of God as well as selling a “silver solution” which, among other things, claims will “cure you of the coronavirus,” which for anyone listening to this, years from now, you probably still know what that is, but if you don’t, it really sucks, and this “silver solution” definitely does not cure it. So yeah, he’s been investigated by the federal government for that, he’s been sued by a couple people, because not only is he selling fraudulent medicine that he has no right to sell, but it’s also a clear violation of an agreement he made over 20 years ago that got him released from prison in the first place.
Transition: “PTL Theme Song”
Alaina: The rise and fall of PTL demonstated several important trends of American life in the latter half of the 20th century, including the power of religion and the rise of evangelism as a powerful force in American culture and politics, the risk involved with money and ambition and the tensions and connections between religion and culture. As Americans and the world continue to forge through increasingly uncertain times, many will turn to faith as their refuge. The story of PTL teaches us to be wary of those who will take advantage of that faith.
PTL Club 1987, Jim and Tammy’s Goodbye: People stand all over in saying Jim, we do forgive you, we do forgive Jim and Tammy for all of their sins, and we are so thankful that God has forgiven us. We don’t know what the future holds, but I can assure you Jim and Tammy will someday be helping people again, because God has helped us so very very much.
Sources
Funk, Tim. “Jessica Hahn, Woman at Center of Televangelist’s Fall 30 Years Ago, Confronts Her Past.” Charlotte Observer, December 16, 2017.
Messner, Tammy Faye. Tammy: Telling It My Way. New York: Villard, 1996.
Nightline, “Jim and Tammy Bakker,” Youtube, 49:12, 27 May 1987, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcCEsx_9n5Y.
Wigger, John H. PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
20/20 Extra, “What Televangelist Jim Bakker’s Heritage USA Theme Park Looks like Today,” Youtube, 3:51, 17 January 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmJJij0wpP8.
20/20, “Unfaithfully Yours,” ABC, 01:20:33, 19 January 2019, https://abc.com/shows/2020/episode-guide/2019-01/18-011819-unfaithfully-yours.