Jim Bakker’s Long Con

T he Book of Common Prayer asks the Lord to deliver us from “blindness of heart, from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy.” Jim Bakker spent nearly his entire life running toward those vices.

For decades, Bakker, who died this week at the age of 86, was a laughingstock, damaging the cause of organized religion in America to an incalculable extent. As one of America’s most visible televangelists, Bakker preached the “prosperity gospel,” justifying his lavish wealth by telling his viewers that if one lived a thoroughly Christian life, material wealth would be one’s reward. “God doesn’t want his people to go second-class,” he often said.

But Bakker’s private life was hardly the paragon of religiosity. In 1987, it was revealed that in 1980, he had sex in his Assemblies of God ministry with 21-year-old secretary Jessica Hahn. She said Bakker had raped her, which he denied; in 1985, he had paid her $265,000 out of his ministry’s funds to buy her silence, a transaction that, when publicly reported, created a national scandal. Bakker was later defrocked from the Assemblies of God after multiple men said they had gay sexual experiences with him. (As for Hahn, she later backed off her claim that it was rape.)

Even worse were Bakker’s financial misdeeds, squeezing every dollar out of his followers in order to fund his multimillion-dollar lifestyle. At the peak of his popularity, 13 million people watched his television show, The PTL Club, co-hosted with his wife Tammy Faye, while the couple, through their PTL ministry (it stands for “Praise the Lord” or “People That Love,” take your pick), raked in as much as $129 million. Those riches paid for their 55-foot houseboat, a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes, and homes all over America’s Southeast. The Bakkers’ hotel at Heritage USA, a theme park financed with PTL funds, featured bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures.

By 1987, PTL faced $67 million in debts, largely because of money Bakker and his wife had funneled to themselves. In 1988, Bakker was indicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy, with prosecutors calling him a “most brazen, accomplished con man.” They accused him of bilking the PTL donors out of $158 million by making a lifetime offer of free vacations at Heritage USA that couldn’t possibly have materialized.

Of course, Bakker was merely one of the televangelists dragging organized religion through the mud during the 1980s. Jimmy Swaggart, for instance, was caught with a prostitute in 1988, offered a teary apology, then was caught again in 1991.

Bakker’s fall now plays as a chuckle-worthy relic of the Reagan era: his wife’s mascara, the water slide, the air-conditioned doghouse. But his methods outlived his reputation. He wouldn’t be the last national figure to soak his supporters to fund a lavish lifestyle, nor the last to convince people of modest means that a man with a gold-plating fetish had their best interests at heart. Bakker preached the prosperity gospel. America now practices prosperity politics.

The first rule of the prosperity gospel is that the anointed are beyond question. When former PTL administrator Bill Perkins pressed Bakker about the ministry’s finances, Bakker simply answered with scripture: “Touch not God’s anointed and do his prophets no harm.” It is a remarkably efficient accounting standard. No auditors required, just a psalm.

The second rule is that money flows upward before it flows down. Oral Roberts called it “seed faith.” Give to the ministry and God will multiply your gift back to you. Hold back and your stinginess reveals a lack of faith, which also conveniently explains why your harvest never came. In 1987, Roberts told viewers that God would call him home unless they sent him $8 million. They did. (A Florida dog-track owner kicked in $1.3 million, apparently figuring a man with a divine deadline deserved better odds than a greyhound.)

Compare that to last month’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where President Trump promised a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” to every adult citizen if Republicans hold the House and Senate. The checks would amount to roughly $1.35 trillion, and nobody has explained how they could legally be issued. They would come with a single condition: the money must be spent on American-made goods. Demonstrate your faith at the ballot box, and the blessings shall rain down. It’s seed faith with a federal routing number.

The third rule is that religion makes excellent armor. Bakker wrapped his self-dealing in scripture so that criticism of the man became an attack on God. Trump has grasped the same principle, if with less subtlety. In April, shortly after picking a fight with Pope Leo XIV, he posted an AI-generated image of himself in flowing white robes and a red sash, laying a glowing hand on the forehead of a sick man. When even his Evangelical allies cried blasphemy, he deleted it and explained that he thought it depicted him as a doctor. (Few physicians make their rounds bathed in heavenly light, flanked by fighter jets and a bald eagle.)

A generation ago, Evangelical leaders insisted that character counted. It was the whole case against Bill Clinton. Today, much of that same leadership has become a courtier class to a thrice-married serial philanderer, treating loyalty to him as a matter of doctrine rather than politics.

Naturally, Bakker went all in. In 2016, he told viewers that Trump was a modern Saint Peter, foolish and profane, perhaps, but quick to follow Jesus. He scolded Christians who planned to sit out the election. The next year, he and his wife were among the Evangelical leaders invited to the White House, after which Bakker urged pastors to flood the president with letters of support. In January 2020, with impeachment proceedings underway, Bakker distilled the whole theology into a single sentence: “Only saved people can love Trump.” When his studio audience laughed, he insisted he wasn’t joking.

He also claimed that God had told him Trump was put on earth to give the church time to prepare for the end times, which for Bakker was less a prophecy than a sales opportunity. His comeback ministry near Branson, Mo., ran on buckets of freeze-dried doomsday food, and in 2020 federal regulators ordered him to stop marketing a silver solution as a coronavirus remedy. The man who once sold vacations that didn’t exist spent his final act hawking survival rations for an apocalypse that never arrived.

Conservatives used to understand that suspicion of concentrated power applies to the pulpit as much as to the Oval Office. Anyone who demands both your money and your unquestioning devotion while promising riches in return is selling something fishy. It hardly matters whether the merchandise is a timeshare at Heritage USA or a cryptocurrency issued by the current president.

Bakker may be gone, but his gospel of corruption lives on.