Jim Bakker obituary

Original article by Michael Carlson

Jim Bakker, who has died aged 86, was one of the most popular and influential US television evangelists of the 1970s and 80s, but he was brought down, as were many of his preaching contemporaries, by the twin sins of greed and lust.

Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, built an empire around their Christian chatshow PTL (for Praise the Lord), which spawned their own satellite TV network based in Charlotte, North Carolina. At their peak, their broadcasts attracted more than 13 million viewers and $1m a day in donations; and their Disney-style theme park, Heritage USA, at Fort Mill, South Carolina, drew six million visitors a year. In 1980, Bakker joined President Jimmy Carter on Air Force One to pray for the American hostages held in Iran – but Bakker’s support and that of his fellow conservative evangelicals soon proved key in electing Ronald Reagan president.

The Bakkers preached the “prosperity gospel”, growing from the Calvinist idea that material success was a sign of God’s blessing, and flaunted those blessings. “Excess and success are close together,” Bakker claimed. They never skimped on opulence, with everything from a fleet of luxury cars to jewellery for Tammy Faye and an air-conditioned dog kennel.

But the mansion crumbled from within when, in 1987, Bakker was revealed to have paid $265,000 in hush money to Jessica Hahn, a secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry, who said she had been drugged and raped in 1980 by him and his fellow PTL host John Wesley Fletcher. Hahn then told her story and posed for Penthouse magazine, while Fletcher wrote his own story for Penthouse, The Devil in Jim Bakker, claiming he had been both Bakker’s lover and his pimp for other gay men.

Bakker was stripped of his ministry in the Assemblies of God. He resigned as head of PTL and was replaced by Jerry Falwell, who called him “the greatest scab and a cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history”. Bakker had passed PTL on to Falwell to prevent another Assemblies of God preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, from taking it over. Swaggart, who faced his own sex scandal years later, called Bakker “a cancer on the face of God”.

The sex scandal opened the doors to revealing Bakker’s frauds. PTL was nicknamed “Pass the Loot”. Under Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission, the government regulatory agency, had buried its investigation into the Bakkers’ soliciting donations for overseas aid that instead went to Heritage USA and into their own pockets. The Internal Revenue Service had sat for years on a report recommending that PTL should lose its tax-exempt status. But the Charlotte Observer’s reporting of PTL selling far more “lifetime memberships” guaranteeing annual three-night stays at Heritage USA than it was able to provide, led to a trial.

In 1989, a jury convicted Bakker on all 24 counts, and Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Potter sentenced him to 45 years, saying: “Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests.” That animus led to the sentence being reduced to eight years on appeal. By the time Bakker emerged from prison, Tammy Faye had divorced him, and married Roe Messner, one of the principals of Heritage USA. Messner would be convicted of bankruptcy fraud two years later.

Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan. His father, Raleigh, a machinist, and his mother, Furnia (nee Irwin), came from Pentecostal families. Jim studied at the Assemblies of God’s North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where in 1961 he met Tammy Faye LaValley. Although he was engaged to his high-school sweetheart in Muskegon, three weeks later he and Tammy Faye married, leaving college and becoming travelling evangelists.

In 1966 they caught the eye of Pat Robertson, who hired them for his Christian Broadcasting Network. Their children’s show, Come On Over, featuring Tammy Faye using puppets, became so popular that Robertson gave them a talkshow, The 700 Club, named in the then-optimistic hope of attracting $700 a month from loyal viewers.

They left Robertson in 1973 to co-found the Trinity Broadcasting Network in Los Angeles, where they launched PTL. After quickly falling out with their partners, they moved to Charlotte, where they created the PTL Network. “I believe if Jesus were alive today, he would be on TV,” said Bakker, a statement that helped inspire Ray Stevens’ 1987 hit song, Would Jesus Wear a Rolex?.

At Bakker’s 1994 parole hearing, his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, pledged to “guarantee that Mr Bakker would never again engage in the blend of religion and commerce that led to his conviction”. That did not last long. His 1996 book I Was Wrong was more a rationalisation than confession. Bakker worked at the Los Angeles International Church (also known as the Dream Center), where in 1998 he met and married Lori Beth Graham, a youth preacher who had a strong resemblance to Tammy Faye. By 2003 they were broadcasting The Jim Bakker Show from Branson, Missouri.

Bakker’s pitch switched from prosperity to apocalypse, selling “doomsday survival gear” including freeze-dried beans on toast. He said PTL now stood for Prophets Talking Loud and used natural disasters as examples of God’s vengeance against Americans who did not support him – and later Donald Trump. Barack Obama, he said, was “a representative of the antichrist” and he called Hillary Clinton “the bride of Satan”.

During the Covid pandemic, Bakker sold colloidal silver supplements he claimed could cure the disease. He was prosecuted by state authorities in Missouri and Arkansas and forced to refund buyers.

In 2020 he had a stroke.

He is survived by his wife and their five children, Maricella, Lori, Clarissa, Marie and Ricky, and by a daughter, Tammy Sue, and son, Jay, from his first marriage.

• James Orsen Bakker, television evangelist, born 2 January 1940; died 5 October 2026