Crossroads Podcast: Recalling Jim Bakker’s Large Viewership Numbers

After years of being stalked by Charlotte reporters (including me), the Rev. Jim Bakker knew there was one task he could not escape in 1987 as he walked away from his PTL Club empire. He agreed to call The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.

The long Observer obituary for the famous, then infamous, religious broadcaster included a quote from that encounter in which he tried, once again, to hide his sins from the faithful who watched him on television and mailed him money.

That obit — “Jim Bakker, ‘Praise the Lord’ evangelist brought down by scandal, dies at 86” — was one of several discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. The crucial quote:

In a phone call to a roomful of editors and reporters at the Charlotte Observer … Bakker cast himself as a victim: “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.”

That “female confederate” was, of course, Jessica Hahn. But the Identities of the “former friends” and “colleagues” were the key to the multi-level scandal that took Bakker off the airwaves and, ultimately, sent him to prison.

However, if you search the extensive coverage of Bakker’s death you will not learn about the Rev. John Wesley Fletcher. He was the colleague who, for mixed motives at best, placed telephone calls leaking lurid claims about Bakker — which started the dominos falling and finally toppled Bakker from his PTL throne.

I was, apparently, the first reporter who answered one of those calls, while working at The Charlotte News, the afternoon newspaper in town. I will share some details about that at the end of this post. But first, we have to look at what the mainstream press had to say about Bakker’s life and work, as well as information that readers needed to know about the size and importance of his vast audience.

These two Observer paragraphs captured the heart of the Bakker story, as told by the mainstream press:

The Bakkers’ fall was as dramatic as their rise, though it played out much more quickly and with much bigger headlines: In March 1987, Bakker resigned from PTL just ahead of revelations that he had had a 15-minute tryst in 1980 with a 21-year-old church secretary named Jessica Hahn and that PTL had paid her more than $250,000 in hush money. …

The Bakkers’ crash led the network newscasts and the couple became the butt of jokes on late-night TV. “Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and the continuing saga of the PTL Club have taken on the irresistible dimensions of a national soap opera,” Ted Koppel, the anchor on ABC News’ “Nightline” told viewers in May 1987, just before conducting the first interview of the Bakkers since their exit from PTL. “It is, in its own way, as awful, as fascinating and as impossible to ignore as a gigantic traffic accident.”

It was fitting that the Observer report included a quotation from the skilled investigative reporter whose long, determined efforts to document the Bakker scandals finally produced the blockbuster report that survived dissections by lawyers and made it into print.

Charles Shepard, who anchored the Charlotte Observer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of PTL in the 1980s, said history will recall Bakker for his rise and his fall at PTL. “He’ll be remembered as a high point in the arc of the televangelism industry,” Shepard told the Observer, “and as a catalyst in the decline that followed.”

When I left the Observer in 1983, after the merger of the Observer and News teams, I handed Shepard a folder of photocopies of my notes about the mystery PTL caller. I also gave him some of the memos that I send to editors pleading, without success, for them to let Shepard and I work to get to the bottom of the allegations my caller made about Bakker’s finances and the PTL leader’s complicated, bisexual, private life.

I am convinced that with Shepard’s skills at investigative reporting, and my religion-beat sources in Charlotte-area groups, we could have broken the story several years earlier, perhaps saving the bank accounts and pensions of many PTL donors. But Shepard never gave up and did untold hours of work on his own, starting with a crucial lead in my notes, the caller’s farewell statement: “Just remember this name — Jessica Hahn.”

In Shepard’s epic book, “Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry,” he noted my small, but strategic, role in this drama. I appreciated that, to say the least. And Shepard later confirmed that my caller was Fletcher.

Editors were not interested in the alleged scandal, or were turned off by the bisexual politics in circles around Bakker. The fact that Fletcher had given me accurate private telephone numbers for several other PTL insiders was not enough.

Shepard noted, in his book: “The caller stopped calling. For now, the secret of Jessica Hahn was safe.”

The other key mainstream report on Bakker’s death was, of course, at The New York Times: “Jim Bakker, Television Preacher Felled by Sex and Financial Scandals, Dies at 86.” This key section near the top contained a statistic that stunned me.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards. Their pulpit was the television ministry PTL, which stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love, and their appeal was a combination of sermons, songs and tears. Both had a penchant for crying in public. Tammy Bakker wept on the air so often that she made sure her thickly applied mascara was waterproof.

The Bakkers drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and brought in yearly revenue as high as $129 million. On a 2,500-acre site in Fort Mill, S.C., they created and sold shares in Heritage USA, a sort of Christian Disneyland, with water slides and skating to go along with prayer and Bible study.

Mr. Bakker (pronounced Baker) was a gifted speaker who made no apologies for doing well in the name of the Lord. “Excess and success are close together,” he said in 1985. “Anyone who is successful has got to be excessive.”

Note the size of Bakker’s audience, in the peak years for his cable-TV empire — 13 million viewers a day (the show was recorded during the day, then aired at night).

How large is that audience? I asked the Grok AI program to find some strong references and, for starters, it noted that Bakker’s peak number “matches Oprah Winfrey’s peak in the early 1990s and is roughly four to five times the size of the biggest daytime or morning shows on the air now.”

How did his numbers compare to other talk shows at night, on cable networks or mainstream channels? Yes, Bakker worked in another era, of course, when cable competition was not as complex as it is now and YouTube was not pulling millions of viewers away from television.

Nevertheless, look at these evening numbers. On Fox News, “The Five” leads cable news at about 3.15 million viewers. The “Gutfeld!” talk show averages around 3.01 million. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has about 2.52 million. MS NOW’s primetime average evening audience is about 933,000 (“The Rachel Maddow Show” has 1.9 million) and CNN’s primetime average is about 608,000.

Here is Grok’s conclusion: “So 13 million is not ‘a strong cable talk show.’ It is several times the entire primetime audience of the most-watched cable news network, and well above any regular series currently on cable.”

This leads to my main point about the coverage of Bakker’s death. While it is true that he was called a “televangelist” in mainstream news coverage, any study of Bakker’s life reveals that he was never really interested in ministry or in evangelism.

Bakker wanted to be a TV star. His hero was Johnny Carson.

While I was in Charlotte, I kept telling editors that Bakker was not a Pentecostal hero of some kind. To the leaders of his own denomination, the Assemblies of God, he was a loose cannon and a renegade. Some considered him a heretic, as he veered into preaching what many accurately called the “prosperity gospel.”

Thus, the Times noted, with good cause:

By any measure, he and his wife enjoyed a life of opulence, which he defended by saying that they needed “good bait” to be effective “fishers of men.” Their bait included six-figure salaries and bonuses for themselves, a 55-foot houseboat, a mini-fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces, diamonds and gold jewelry, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, an air-conditioned dog kennel, and homes and apartments in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Palm Springs, Calif. The spending was so lavish, and the appeal for contributions so insistent, that some critics recast PTL as standing for Pass the Loot.

The transgression led to his banishment from the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination.

It’s also important to know that Bakker was reaching viewers all over America, not just those living in pick-up truck world in rural ZIP codes. While in Charlotte I learned that many of his viewers and donors were fleeing liberal Mainline Protestant churches, seeking (tragically) a leader that they believed preached old-school values with TV charm.

Bakker wasn’t a “televangelist” — he was a major cable-TV star. He didn’t get to 13 million viewers on a peak night with sermons, Bible lessons and altar calls. Jim and Tammy wept, laughed, sang,and shouted their way into the hearts of millions of viewers in New South suburbs and many other parts of America. He was an early superstar on the cutting edge of nondenominational, “charismatic” Christianity.

Yes, there were blue-collar believers who looked at Jim and Tammy’s riches with a sense of yearning. But there were plenty of other PTL believers who were driving Cadillacs and surrounded by other symbols of white-collar wealth.

I will end with an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 1996, when Bakker released his “I Was Wrong” memoir about his rise, fall and then return to a humbled level of TV ministry. This will provide a few more details about my own thoughts about the closed-door dramas in the Bakker trainwreck.

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Bakker’s Other Conspiracy

It's impossible to tell Jim Bakker's story without mentioning his conspiracy theories.

The former PTL leader has always felt that people were conspiring against him – especially journalists, politicians and judges. After the 1987 collapse of his empire, he said he had been betrayed by other televangelists.

Naturally, Bakker adds variations on these themes in his tell- all memoir, "I Was Wrong." But one of its most intriguing details is evidence of yet another conspiracy that he doesn't want to discuss. Note this angry passage in Bakker's remarks as he resigned as PTL's president.

“I sorrowfully acknowledge that seven years ago ... I was wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate," he said. "They conspired to betray me into a sexual encounter at a time of great stress in my marital life. ... I was set up as part of a scheme to co-opt me and obtain some advantage for themselves over me in connection with their hope for position in the ministry.”

In other words, the first domino at PTL was a scheme that preceded Bakker's 1980 sexual liaison with Jessica Hahn, a conspiracy within his inner circle that preceded "Pearlygate." Yet Bakker has nothing new to say about these "friends and colleagues" and their scheme. In particular, he downplays the role of the bisexual evangelist John Wesley Fletcher, who arranged the tryst with Hahn, and he hardly mentions James and David Taggart, the brothers who many claim controlled Bakker in his final PTL years.

In his book, Bakker confesses many sins. He repents of his "health and wealth" theology, saying he sinfully twisted scripture. He offers 647 pages of near-stream-of-consciousness details about lessons he learned during his trial, divorce and prison years. But he continues to avoid some questions.

”For most Pentecostal and charismatic people, the most serious questions about Jim Bakker were all those allegations of moral misconduct. ... People haven't forgotten that," said historian H. Vinson Synon of Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va. "There does appear to have been a kind of subterranean, homosexual world inside PTL that has never been fully described. That's where so many questions remain.”

Many of the questions center on Fletcher. In addition to his ties to Hahn, it was Fletcher who made anonymous calls in 1983 spreading dirt about Bakker. One of those calls went to me, when I was working as a religion writer in Charlotte, N.C., and I later shared my information with reporter Charles E. Shepard, author of "Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry." Years later, Shepard confirmed that Fletcher was my mystery caller.

Fletcher mentioned Hahn by name in 1983 and also said David Taggart was Bakker's lover. Fletcher was bitter and said Bakker had failed to keep promises and had forsaken him during tough times. But Fletcher did not, during those calls, say what he later said during the "Pearlygate" media storm – that he, too, had been sexually involved with Bakker.

”I never knew a more corrupt person in my life, period, than Jim Bakker," Fletcher told me. “Now I see him for what he is.”

Today, those at the Massapequa (N.Y.) Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, where Fletcher preached in the early '90s, refuse to answer questions — merely saying that he recently passed away. Tabloid reports said he suffered from AIDS.

The key: Did Fletcher try to manipulate Bakker to gain power at PTL, starting a chain reaction? Or did Bakker betray Fletcher?

”I Was Wrong” neither asks nor answers this question. On the homosexuality issue, Bakker does include a chapter saying that, as a teen, he was molested – for several years – by a young man he knew at church. This left Bakker confused about his own sexual identity and he said that while in prison he sought, and received, assurances from a counselor that he isn't gay.

And so the story continues, with Bakker attempting a comeback as a humbled counselor for those who face pain in their own lives. Yet he clearly knows that his return is threatened more by the ghosts of his complicated sexual past than by the legal demons that sent him to prison.

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