by David Virtue, VOL
The televangelists hid their sins. The Episcopal Church repealed them. And when neither worked, the bishops closed ranks. Jim Bakker’s death is a reminder that no one in this story would submit to judgment
One by one they die off. Conmen for the Lord. The latest, Jim Bakker, bowed out on Monday at the age of 86, having disgraced the gospel and the Lord he professed to love and serve. Jimmy Swaggart went before him in July of last year, at 90.
His wife Lori announced the death on social media, calling him a pioneer of Christian television. That he was. He was also a convicted felon.
At that time, I expressed concern over the Bakker scandals. I viewed them as indicative of deeper issues within the televangelist movement and the church at large. I was critical of the moral failure of prominent figures like Bakker saying they would undermine the credibility of Christian leadership and accountability within the church community. It would even undermine the gospel itself. Leaders are held to a higher standard. See James 3:
Give the man his due. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker built something remarkable out of puppets and a borrowed television studio. By the 1980s the PTL Club was a satellite empire and Heritage USA, their Christian theme park in South Carolina, drew millions of visitors a year. Bakker had a showman’s genius and an uncanny gift for making ordinary believers feel they were part of something God was doing.
Then it all came apart. In 1987 it emerged that Bakker had a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room seven years earlier, and that roughly a quarter of a million dollars had been paid to keep her quiet. The Assemblies of God defrocked him.
Worse was to come. In 1989 a federal jury convicted him of fraud and conspiracy for selling “lifetime partnerships” at Heritage USA, promising lodging the ministry could never provide, while ministry money went to mansions, luxury cars, gold-plated bathroom fixtures and an air-conditioned doghouse. He was sentenced to 45 years. The sentence was later reduced, and he was paroled in 1994 after about five years behind bars.
And here is the part his obituaries will skip. In prison Bakker read the words of Jesus for himself and concluded that the prosperity gospel he had preached was a lie. In 1996 he published a book with a title few preachers have ever dared to use: I Was Wrong. It was, for a moment, a genuine act of repentance.
It did not last. He resurfaced near Branson, Missouri, selling buckets of survival food to the faithful for the coming apocalypse, and in 2020 he hawked a silver solution on air as a remedy for the coronavirus. The State of Missouri sued, and he was forced to refund buyers. The man who wrote I Was Wrong went back to passing the plate.