Jim Bakker
James Orson Bakker (born January 2, 1939 in Muskegon, Michigan) is an American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host (with his then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker) of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program. An infamous sex scandal brought about his divorce and effectively ended his time in the larger public eye.
History in Christian broadcasting
In the early 1960s, Bakker and his new wife Tammy (they met as students at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota and were married from 1961 to 1992) began working with Pat Robertson at Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, which at the time barely reached an audience of thousands. The Bakkers greatly contributed to the growth of the network, and their success with a variety show format (including interviews and puppets) helped make the 700 Club one of the longest running and most successful televangelism programs ever. The Bakkers then left for California in the mid-1970's.
Teaming with Paul and Jan Crouch, the Bakkers created the "Praise the Lord" show for the Crouchs' new Trinity Broadcasting Network in California. While that relationship lasted only about a year, this time the Bakkers retained the rights to use the initials PTL and traveled east to Charlotte to begin their own show, The PTL Club. This time, with the Bakkers fully in control, their show grew quickly until it was carried by close to a hundred stations, with average viewers numbering over twelve million, and the Bakkers had established their own network, The PTL Network. They attributed much of their success to decisions early on to accept all denominations and to refuse no one regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation or criminal record.
By the early 1980s the Bakkers had built Heritage USA (in Fort Mill, south of Charlotte), then the third most successful theme park in the US, and a satellite system to distribute their network 24 hours a day across the country. Annual contributions requested from viewers were estimated to exceed $1,000,000 a week, with proceeds to go to expanding the theme park and mission of PTL. Eventually, Jerry Falwell with the backing of a $20,000,000 drive took control of the PTL.[1]
Between 1984 and 1987, the Bakkers received annual salaries of $200,000 each and Jim awarded himself over $4,000,000 in bonuses. Their assets at that time included a $600,000 house in Palm Springs, four condominiums in California, and a Rolls Royce. In their success, the Bakkers took conspicuous consumption to an unusual level for a non-profit organization. PTL once spent $100,000 for a private jet to fly the Bakkers' clothing across the country. It also once spent $100 for cinnamon rolls because the Bakkers wanted the smell of them in their hotel room. According to Frances FitzGerald in an April 1987 New Yorker article, "They epitomized the excesses of the 1980s; the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness; which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence."
Scandals
On March 19, 1987, following threats of the revelation of the payoff to former secretary Jessica Hahn, whom Bakker's staff members had paid $265,000 to keep secret her sexual services to him, Bakker resigned from PTL. Jerry Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history." Falwell, controversial in his own right, was rumored to be using the situation to gain control of a leading broadcast competitor. Bakker's absence resulted in a fierce fight for control of the PTL Inspirational Network, then the leading Christian cable television network in the country, among several other prominent televangelists, which Falwell won. Upon taking over, Falwell fired Bakker's entire staff, and he provided much of the damning information presented at Bakker's later fraud trial. Under Falwell's leadership, the PTL Inspirational Network along with PTL's 2,500 acre Heritage USA resort was plunged into bankruptcy within a short time and was liquidated at a deep discount.
Financial irregularities in the PTL organization led to another scandal. From 1984 to 1987, Bakker and his PTL associates had sold "lifetime memberships" for $1,000 or more that entitled buyers to a three-night stay annually at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. According to the prosecution at Bakker's later fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships had been sold, but only one 500-room hotel was ever completed. Bakker sold more "exclusive" partnerships than could be accommodated, while raising more than twice the money needed to build the actual hotel. A good deal of the money went into Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3,700,000 for himself. Bakker, who apparently made all of the financial decisions for the PTL organization, kept two sets of books to conceal the accounting irregularities. Reporters from the newspaper The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, discovered and exposed the financial wrongdoings.
Conviction and prison
Bakker was indicted on federal charges of fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering. In 1989, after trial in Charlotte, Judge Robert Potter convicted Bakker of fraud and conspiring to commit fraud and sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison. Bakker's associate, Richard Dortch, senior vice-president of PTL and associate pastor of Heritage Village Church, also went to prison. In 1992, Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye were divorced at her request. Billy Graham visited Bakker in prison, as did his son, Franklin Graham, repeatedly saying, "Jim Bakker's my friend."
The Bakker scandals and conviction eventually affected the reputation of other televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, and Pat Robertson. (See Christian televangelist scandals.) Richard Dortch said that pride, arrogance, and secrets led to the scandals. While most people never face temptations on the same scale, he said, the ingredients are the same as in seemingly smaller failures. Dortch said the men in PTL's leadership felt they were above accountability, that they felt specially called by God and accountable only to Him. He said they didn't plan the scandal, but that it was the natural result of living for oneself rather than for God.
Defending Bakker, one of his attorneys said: "If a man raises over $150 million for a business that competed with Disney and the major networks and kept $3 million for himself, he may be guilty of mismanagement, naïveté, even stupidity, but should it be a crime? Do you think Falwell lives in a five-room house?" The defense failed and Bakker went to prison.
According to Jim Bakker's book I Was Wrong, the royalties from the books that he and Tammy wrote and the recordings that Tammy sold added up to $8,000,000. These royalties were given to PTL, though the Bakkers could have legitimately kept these for themselves. The board of PTL, independent of Jim and Tammy, awarded the Bakkers the 3+ million dollar bonus over a period of five years. They also determined Jim Bakker's salary of $200,000 per year.
In early 1991, a federal appeals court upheld Bakker's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, but voided Bakker's 45-year sentence, as well as the $500,000 fine, and ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held. At that hearing, Bakker was sentenced to 18 years in prison. One of his cellmates during his incarceration was political pundit and perennial Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. In I Was Wrong, Bakker devoted a chapter to LaRouche, praising LaRouche's sense of humor and his vast knowledge of the Bible and world politics.
After prison
In 1993, after serving almost five years of his sentence, Bakker was granted parole for good behavior. Upon his release, the Grahams paid for a house for him and gave him a car. At that point, many Christians found themselves able to forgive or at least accept him. In 1995, he addressed a Christian leadership conference where 10,000 clergymen cheered and gave him a 15-minute standing ovation. "I thought people would spit on me," he later recalled. "Instead, they received me with open arms."
On July 23, 1996, a North Carolina jury threw out a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 160,000 onetime believers who contributed as much as $7,000 each to Bakker's coffers in the 1980s.
The Charlotte Observer reported that the Internal Revenue Service still holds Bakker and Roe Messner, Tammy Faye's husband since 1993, liable for personal income taxes owed from the 1980s when they were building the PTL empire, taxes assessed after the IRS revoked the PTL ministry's nonprofit status. Tammy Faye Messner's new husband said Bakker and his former wife didn't want to talk about the tax issues: "We don't want to stir the pot." He also said that the original tax amount was about $500,000, with penalties and interest accounting for the rest. The notices reinstating the liens list "James O. and Tamara F. Bakker" as owing $3,000,000, on which liens the Bakkers still pay.
In 1996, Bakker published I Was Wrong, describing his rise and fall. In 1998, he released another book, Prosperity And The Coming Apocalypse, and, in 2000, he published The Refuge: The Joy of Christian Community in a Torn-Apart World.
In January 2003, Bakker began broadcasting the "New Jim Bakker Show" at Studio City Cafe in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife, Lori Graham Bakker, whom he married in 1998. He denounces his past teachings on prosperity, saying they were wrong. In I Was Wrong, he reveals that the first time he read the Bible all the way through was in prison, and that it made him realize he had taken certain passages out of context--passages which he had used as "proof texts" to back up his prosperity theology teachings.
Both Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were parodied in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with fictional VCPR radio guest Pastor Richards (David Green).