Jim Bakker Wasn’t A Televangelist: He Was A Cable TV Star
(ANALYSIS) Ten minutes before showtime, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker — standing in clear view of the audience — huddled with producers to discuss final details of the upcoming show.
With a minute to go, they waited calmly just offstage until the announcer cued them to dash out with giddy excitement, offering apologies for almost being late. The studio audience played along and cheered.
Journalist Louis Moore, and his wife, Kay, were there because this 1982 "PTL Club" stop was required as promotion for their book "When You Both Go to Work," offering advice for two-income Christian couples.
“What was Jim Bakker good at? Well, he was good at bringing Tammy Faye on stage and letting her do her thing. ... She was so interesting, and Jim Bakker was just there,” said Moore, recalling that day. At that time, Moore was poised to become president of what is now the Religion News Association.
Bakker didn’t appear to be interested in the Moores, according to my notes from that taping, during my religion-beat years in Charlotte.
“Jim didn't interact with us at all. He was hard to relate to or to follow what he was saying. That was strange for a talk-show host,” said Moore, reached by telephone.
Journalists called Bakker a “televangelist,” but he never showed interest in being a pastor or an evangelist. His hero was Johnny Carson. Moore noted that Bakker's “goal was clearly to be a talk-show host. That was his life. ... He loved sitting behind that desk in front of the cameras.”
After his death on Oct. 5, at age 86, news reports chronicled Bakker's rise from doing a Christian puppet TV show for children to building the PTL Satellite Network and the 2,500-acre Heritage USA theme park near Charlotte.
Bakker raised millions selling shares to condos for faithful donors, with rides, skating, tennis courts, a miniature railroad, a shopping mall, a biblical-drama theater and a water park with a giant water slide. The problem was that Bakker kept using money he raised for new buildings to complete work on unfinished projects. PTL sold more timeshare contracts than he had rooms for buyers.
By 1987, Jim and Tammy Faye's lives turned into a soap opera. In national news coverage, the focus was on his 1980 tryst with a young church secretary named Jessica Hahn, which led to a $250,000-plus check to buy her silence. In the end, Bakker went to prison for nearly five years.
After years of scrutiny, Bakker called the Charlotte Observer newsroom when he was forced out at PTL. The newspaper's obituary included this quote: “I sorrowfully acknowledge that seven years ago, in an isolated incident, I was wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate.”
One of those PTL associates had leaked lurid information about Bakker's affairs with women and men. I took several of those anonymous calls. This mystery man named names, including Hahn, and shared private telephone numbers. He didn’t tell me what he claimed later — that he had been sexually involved with Jim Bakker. Under oath, Bakker denied that claim.
When I left Charlotte, I gave the Observer's great investigative reporter, Charles Shepard, copies of my notes. He later confirmed that my caller was evangelist John Wesley Fletcher. After years of work, Shepard connected the PTL dots, and the Observer won a Pulitzer Prize.
Bakker was not, I stressed to editors, an ordinary Pentecostal preacher. His "prosperity gospel" messages were reaching viewers all over America, not just in Bible Belt ZIP codes. Many of his viewers and donors were fleeing shrinking mainline Protestant churches.
Bakker wasn't a “televangelist”: He was a cable TV star. The New York Times and other publications noted that, on peak nights, Bakker had 13 million viewers. That's the size of the audience years later for Oprah Winfrey. In today's cable market, Fox's “Gutfeld!” talk show averages 3.01 million, and ABC's “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has about 2.52 million.
Looking back, said Moore, it’s clear that Bakker was on the cutting edge of the now massive world of nondenominational, “charismatic” Christianity.
“That was a time when there was so much ferment in churches. There was distrust building up in old labels and denominations,” he said. “People were on the move, headed into the whole amorphous, Bible-church, independent kind of thing that was springing up. Jim Bakker rode that wave. ... That was when everything started changing.”
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Terry Mattingly lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.