Jim Bakker, whose globe-spanning PTL ministry fell to scandal and fraud, dies at 86

Jim Bakker, the charismatic evangelical preacher who built a Christian television empire, only to see it collapse in scandal, recrimination and prison, died Monday, his wife said.

He was 86.

“It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,” his second wife, Lori Bakker, said on the Facebook page of his most recent TV show, “The Jim Bakker Show.” She did not disclose a cause of death.

Bakker’s son, Jay Bakker, who became a prominent evangelist in his own right with a much more liberal view of Christianity than his father’s, confirmed the death in his own Facebook post.

“We had a very complicated relationship and he was also my father and a grandfather and I need to mourn in my own time,” he wrote.

Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and his flamboyant first wife, Tammy Faye, was born in International Falls, Minnesota, but they embraced the South when they started a puppet show on a Virginia TV station in the 1970s. It soon turned into a high-energy, Southern-flavored talk show called “The PTL Club” on cable, attracting some of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s to tell their stories of having been “born again.”

Bakker launched the first Christian satellite network to beam his upbeat message — “God loves you. He really does” — into homes across the country and around the world.

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Along the way, they became known in the secular world for their easy tears, his welcoming but often strict message and her neon personality — and makeup.

Their ministry grew rapidly, and operating out of its new base in Fort Mill, South Carolina, along the North Carolina line, they built a multimillion-dollar empire complete with one of the world’s largest theme parks, Heritage USA, on the small donations of hundreds of thousands of believers, some of whom pledged their life savings to them.

But PTL — short, variously, for Praise the Lord or People That Love — collapsed in 1987, when The Charlotte Observer reported that it had paid more than $250,000 to Jessica Hahn, a church secretary with whom Bakker had a one-time tryst years earlier. Bakker confirmed the encounter to the Observer but said he had been “wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends and then colleagues who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate.”

Further reporting disclosed lavish spending on the Bakkers’ behalf, including an air-conditioned doghouse at their lakefront home and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. The Bakkers resigned from PTL, and in 1989, Bakker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years in prison; he served just less than five years before he was paroled.

Tammy Bakker resolutely stood by him for several years, but in 1992 she filed for divorce. She married the man whose contracting service built much of Heritage USA — and who provided most of the money to pay Hahn — and slowly rebuilt her life as a Christian TV personality who knowingly winked at her own image for secular audiences. She died of cancer in 2007.

Bakker returned to ministry after his prison term and in 2003 launched “The Jim Bakker Show” with Lori Bakker, whom he had married in 1998.

Bakker’s message was far different this time — apocalyptic and dismissive of the prosperity theology that brought him to fame. The show focused on a survivalist message, and Bakker built a new business based on promoting unregulated supplements. In 2021, he and his church settled a lawsuit from the state of Missouri that accused him of falsely claiming a health supplement called Silver Solution could cure Covid.

“He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry,” Lori Bakker said Monday night in announcing his death.