With the prosecution and conviction of Jim Bakker of the PTL Ministries on twenty-four counts of fraud and conspiracy, authorities entered into regulation and oversight of television evangelism.
On October 24, 1989, Federal District Judge Robert Potter sentenced Jim Bakker to an unusually harsh sentence of forty-five years in prison and a fine of $500,000 for fraud and conspiracy involving Bakker’s evangelical television enterprise, the PTL (Praise the Lord) Ministries.
The Bakkers both came from lower-class backgrounds. They met at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and were married on April 1, 1961. North Central’s rules against students marrying while attending school propelled the two to leave college and enter a life of evangelism through the Assemblies of God
The Bakkers’ success, especially their appeal to children through a Christian puppet ministry that Tammy Faye developed, earned them a chance to meet Pat Robertson,
Bakker gave an impromptu performance on a fund-raising telethon for CBN in which he broke down and cried as he appealed for donations. The telethon raised enough money to bail CBN out of debt and to fund the network’s operations fully for the forthcoming year. Given a chance to develop the late-night talk-show concept, Bakker created The 700 Club,
Shortly thereafter, the Bakkers formed a nonprofit corporation, Trinity Broadcasting Systems,
As the Bakkers’ popularity grew, they broke ground for a large construction project called Heritage Village, a $4 million miniature version of Colonial Williamsburg. This project, like all of Jim Bakker’s operations, relied heavily on donations for operating revenues. The television audience gave generously, with contributions rising from $817,000 in 1975 to $5.5 million a year later.
Bakker’s operations expanded rapidly. In 1978, PTL broadcasting was beamed over a $1 million satellite system for around-the-clock religious programming. Eventually, PTL satellite transmissions reached twelve million homes through thirteen hundred cable systems as well as independent systems. The primary show changed its name from The PTL Club to The Jim and Tammy Show
As Jim Bakker’s visibility increased, his studio audiences grew to such an extent that Heritage Village could no longer hold the visitors. The PTL Ministries thus announced plans in 1978 to move to another, larger facility, Heritage USA, a twelve-hundred-acre (eventually expanded to twenty-two hundred acres) site on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. Bakker’s plans for Heritage USA included a university, a two-thousand-seat auditorium, chalets, a campground, and facilities for swimming, tennis, and other recreational activities.
During the early part of his ministry, Bakker made simple direct appeals for funds to television audiences, often predicting an impending disaster for the PTL if money did not come in. Frequently he and Tammy Faye used tears to extract contributions from viewers. Although greeted with cynicism by critics, who often contended that neither the crises nor the emotions were genuine, these emotional appeals did not break any laws. Even then, however, Bakker lived an opulent lifestyle and received huge salaries and abundant perks from the PTL directors.
In 1983, Bakker graduated to a different type of financing. He informed PTL executives of a plan to build a 504-room hotel, called the Grand Hotel, on the Heritage USA property. It would provide a vacation getaway in a Christian environment. Bakker planned to offer “lifetime partnerships” for up to half of the hotel’s rooms, with each partnership available at a cost of $1,000. Lifetime partners could stay at the Grand Hotel whenever they chose. Construction started on the hotel in 1983, but Bakker did not pitch his plan to PTL viewers until February, 1984, at which time, he explained, the facility’s financing revolved around sales of the lifetime partnerships. Bakker announced that the number of partnerships would be capped at twenty-five thousand and that any applications beyond that number would be refunded.
By July, 1984, the PTL had accepted more than thirty-nine thousand lifetime partners (either fully or partially paid) for a facility that technically had availability for only twenty-five thousand. These sales gave the PTL an additional income of more than $3 million. The revenue from the twenty-five thousand fully paid lifetime partners, $25 million, was originally to have paid for the entire construction of the hotel and for lodging the lifetime partners. That money proved not to be enough even to complete the hotel. Over the next two years, using the pretext that they had received bad checks from some of those who applied for lifetime partnerships, Bakker reopened partnerships repeatedly. Each time, the total number of fully paid partnerships swelled. By May 31, 1987, internal records showed that PTL had oversold the Grand Hotel by forty thousand, netting the organization almost $67 million. Tammy Faye Bakker continued to tell viewers that the money from partnerships was not “pay-the-bills money” for PTL’s broadcasting expenses, and she appealed for more funds.
U.S. marshals escort former PTL Ministries leader Jim Bakker from his lawyer’s office on August 31, 1989, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bakker was taken under order to the federal prison hospital at Butner for psychiatric evaluation to determine if he was competent to continue standing trial.
While in the midst of the hotel scheme, Jim Bakker introduced new “limited lifetime opportunities” such as the Towers Hotel, another large hotel project, and Bunkhouse Units, a group of small lodges. Bakker used a chalkboard to explain the financing of the Towers Hotel to the television audience, a move that provided investigators with critical pieces of evidence against him in his subsequent trial. Like the Grand, the Towers eventually oversold by several times, and the original advertised limit of 30,000 was exceeded by 38,755, giving PTL almost $75 million in additional funds. The Bunkhouse Units netted 9,682 partners for only eight bunkhouse partnerships, pulling still another $6.6 million into the PTL.
During this period, Richard Dortch, a PTL director who held a high post in the Assemblies of God church organization, frequently served as Jim Bakker’s point man in meetings of the board of directors. Dortch consistently raised the issue of increasing Bakker’s salary, which the board always endorsed. He also tried to cover up the sexual encounter Bakker had with Jessica Hahn
In 1983, the Internal Revenue Service
In early 1987, undaunted by media criticism, mounting federal and state investigations of its operations, and a running battle with its own religious oversight body, the PTL announced plans for a $100 million ministry center. At the time, attempts to bribe Jessica Hahn into silence had failed, and the Assemblies of God, as well as the PTL, had to deal with Bakker’s adultery. Led by televangelists Jimmy Swaggart,
Following court cases against Bakker and some of his associates, Richard Dortch was convicted of wire and mail fraud. He pleaded guilty to reduced charges, for which he received eight years in jail, in return for his testimony against Bakker. In a federal trial, Bakker was found guilty of fraud involving the Towers partnerships. Judge Robert Potter found the crimes so serious that he sentenced Bakker to forty-five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker divorced in 1992, while Jim was in prison; he was paroled in 1994, having served only five years of his sentence. Bakker remarried in 1998, and in 2003 he began broadcasting The New Jim Bakker Show from Branson, Missouri, with his wife, Lori Graham Bakker.
With the collapse of the PTL, televangelism in the United States suffered dramatic setbacks. Jerry Falwell and his board resigned from their directorship of the PTL in 1987, and shortly thereafter, Falwell announced his resignation as president of the Moral Majority,
Prior to the PTL scandal, however, the finances of religious organizations remained relatively unexamined. With the costs of broadcasting so immense, virtually all televangelists had to appeal for funds over the air, regardless of how faithfully they carried out the commandment to be good stewards of God’s money. The Bakkers were part of a new type of Christian ministry, preceded by the extravagant Reverend Ike
The Bakkers accepted and expanded the prosperity message in the Bible, an approach called “name it and claim it” by critics. Believers were urged to use their faith to obtain material benefits. According to Scripture, a believer had to use prayer to ask for exactly what he or she wanted and then had to believe that God already had provided it. The process involved a continuous exercise of faith applied to the physical world and contained no promise of when the physical existence of spiritual goods would be made manifest. Jim Bakker later stated in his 1996 book I Was Wrong
The Bakkers contributed to attacks on their faith message through their personal abuse of the ministry’s money. Jim Bakker repeatedly received “bonuses” and pay increases far greater than those received by other evangelists and even out of line with the compensation of corporate executives, as measured by return on investment. By challenging investigations of PTL’s finances by the IRS and by newspapers as infringements on religious freedom while he used the public airwaves to perpetrate fraud, Bakker managed for almost two years to deflect public outrage that would have destroyed a business corporation.
The Bakkers never separated their private benefit from that of the ministry. They consistently drained ministry funds for private luxuries, including cars, swimming pools, jewelry, and vacations. Although other faith ministers have obtained similar luxuries, important differences existed: Their churches and facilities were paid for, they used the vast majority of their funds for ministry and not for additional appeals for money, and their congregations grew. The Reverend Frederick K. C. Price,
The PTL scandal reduced contributions to virtually all large-scale Christian ministries in the United States for several years. Perhaps more important, millions of loyal followers had their vision of successful, productive Christian ministers shattered by the deceit and un-Christian behavior of the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart. The spiritual damage caused by the PTL far exceeded the temporary decline in financial donations.
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Bakker, Jim. I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996. Bakker’s own account of his downfall, his time in prison, and his life after his release is presented as an inspirational story. -
_______. Move That Mountain. Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1976. Autobiography published long before the scandal provides information on Bakker’s early life and career. -
Hadden, Jeffrey K., and Anson Shupe. Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Sharply critical treatment of televangelists highlights the 1988 campaign of Pat Robertson for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Informative, although clearly biased against the “religious Right.” -
Robertson, Pat. The Secret Kingdom. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. One of the first books by a televangelist to reach a widespread audience. Explains many of Robertson’s political ideas as well as his religious beliefs. -
Shepard, Charles E. Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. One of the most thorough and personal accounts of the PTL available despite the author’s lack of understanding of the motivations of evangelical Christians. Exposes many aspects of the Bakker businesses and relentlessly focuses on Bakker’s personal character, including his sexual deviance and greed, as the primary factor in the PTL scandals. -
Tidwell, Gary. Anatomy of a Fraud: Inside the Finances of the PTL Ministries. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993. Collection of essays based on research conducted by students in a class called “Ethics and Evangelism” at Charleston College. Provides comprehensive information on the PTL bankruptcy proceedings and the responsibilities of the corporate officers.
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