Jim Bakker

James Orsen Bakker
Born	January 2, 1940 Muskegon, Michigan United States
Occupation	televangelist
Spouse	Lori Graham Bakker
Children	Jamie Charles (Jay) Bakker Tammy Sue Bakker Chapman
Website	www.jimbakkershow.com/

James Orsen Bakker (born January 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan) is an American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host (with his then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker) of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program. A sex scandal led to his resignation from the ministry. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about his imprisonment and divorce and effectively ended his time in the larger public eye.

History in Christian broadcasting

In the early 1960s, Bakker and his new wife Tammy, (whom he had met while the two were students at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and were married from 1961 to 1992) began working with Pat Robertson at Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, which at the time barely reached an audience of thousands. The Bakkers greatly contributed to the growth of the network, and their success with a variety show format (including interviews and puppets) helped make The 700 Club one of the longest-running and most successful televangelism programs ever. The Bakkers then left for California in the mid-1970s.

Teaming with Paul and Jan Crouch, the Bakkers created the "Praise the Lord" show for the Crouches' new Trinity Broadcasting Network in California. While that relationship lasted only about a year, this time the Bakkers retained the rights to use the initials PTL and traveled east to Charlotte to begin their own show, The PTL Club. This time, with the Bakkers fully in control, their show grew quickly until it was carried by close to a hundred stations, with average viewers numbering over twelve million, and the Bakkers had established their own network, The PTL Television Network (also known as PTL-The Inspirational Network). They attributed much of their success to decisions early on to accept all denominations and to refuse no one regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or criminal record.

By the early 1980s the Bakkers had built Heritage USA (in Fort Mill, south of Charlotte), then the third most successful theme park in the US, and a satellite system to distribute their network 24 hours a day across the country. Contributions requested from viewers were estimated to exceed $1,000,000 a week, with proceeds to go to expanding the theme park and mission of PTL. Eventually, Jerry Falwell, with the backing of a $20,000,000 drive took control of the PTL.

Between 1984 and 1987, the Bakkers received annual salaries of $200,000 each and Jim awarded himself over $4,000,000 in bonuses. Their assets at that time included a $600,000 house in Palm Springs, four condominiums in California, and a Rolls Royce. In their success, the Bakkers took conspicuous consumption to an unusual level for a non-profit organization. PTL once spent $100,000 for a private jet to fly the Bakkers' clothing across the country. It also once spent $100 for cinnamon rolls because the Bakkers wanted the smell of them in their hotel room . According to Frances FitzGerald in an April 1987 New Yorker article, "They epitomized the excesses of the 1980s; the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness; which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence."

Scandals

On March 19, 1987, following threats of the revelation of the payoff to former secretary Jessica Hahn, whom Bakker's staff members had paid $265,000 to keep secret her allegation that he had raped her, Bakker resigned from PTL. Jerry Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history."

Financial irregularities in the PTL organization led to another scandal. From 1984 to 1987, Bakker and his PTL associates had sold "lifetime memberships" for $1,000 or more that entitled buyers to a three-night stay annually at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. According to the prosecution at Bakker's later fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships had been sold, but only one 500-room hotel was ever completed. Bakker sold more "exclusive" partnerships than could be accommodated, while raising more than twice the money needed to build the actual hotel. A good deal of the money went into Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3,700,000 for himself. Bakker, who apparently made all of the financial decisions for the PTL organization, kept two sets of books to conceal the accounting irregularities. Reporters from the newspaper The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, discovered and exposed the financial wrongdoings.

Heritage USA has changed hands a number of times. Recently, a portion of the land was purchased by Rick Joyner's Morningstar Ministries, who are currently in the process of restoring the property for use as a Christian retreat and conference center.

Conviction and prison

Bakker was indicted on federal charges of fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering. In 1989, after trial in Charlotte, Judge Robert Potter convicted Bakker of fraud and conspiring to commit fraud and sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison. Bakker's associate, Richard Dortch, senior vice-president of PTL and associate pastor of Heritage Village Church, also went to prison. In 1992, Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye were divorced at her request. Billy Graham visited Bakker in prison, as did his son, Franklin Graham, repeatedly saying, "Jim Bakker is my friend."

The Bakker scandals and conviction eventually affected the reputation of other televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, and Robert Tilton. (See Christian televangelist scandals.) Richard Dortch said that pride, arrogance, and secrets led to the scandals. While most people never face temptations on the same scale, he said, the ingredients are the same as in seemingly smaller failures. Dortch said the men in PTL's leadership felt they were above accountability, that they felt specially called by God and accountable only to Him. He said they didn't plan the scandal, but that it was the natural result of living for oneself rather than for God.

Defending Bakker, one of his attorneys said: "If a man raises over $150 million for a business that competed with Disney and the major networks and kept $3 million for himself, he may be guilty of mismanagement, naïveté, even stupidity, but should it be a crime? Do you think Falwell lives in a five-room house?" The defense's argument failed. While mismanagement is legal, PTL was a non-profit organization, therefore Bakker had committed fraud, which is illegal.

According to Jim Bakker's book I Was Wrong, the royalties from the books that he and Tammy wrote and the recordings that Tammy sold added up to $8,000,000. These royalties were given to PTL, though the Bakkers could have legitimately kept these for themselves. The board of PTL, independent of Jim and Tammy, awarded the Bakkers the 3+ million dollar bonus over a period of five years. They also determined Jim Bakker's salary of $200,000 per year.

In early 1991, a federal appeals court upheld Bakker's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, but voided Bakker's 45-year sentence, as well as the $500,000 fine, and ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held. At that hearing, Bakker was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

After prison

In 1993, after serving almost five years of his sentence, Bakker was granted parole for good behavior. Upon his release, the Grahams paid for a house for him and gave him a car. At that point, many Christians found themselves able to forgive or at least accept him. In 1995, he addressed a Christian leadership conference where 10,000 clergymen cheered and gave him a 15-minute standing ovation. "I thought people would spit on me," he later recalled. "Instead, they received me with open arms."

On July 22, 1996, shortly after Jim Bakker had completed the writing of "I Was Wrong", a Federal Jury ruled that PTL was not selling securities by offering Lifetime Partnerships at Heritage USA. The ruling affirmed what Bakker had contended since he was indicted, and throughout his book.

On July 23 1996, a North Carolina jury threw out a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 160,000 onetime believers who contributed as much as $7,000 each to Bakker's coffers in the 1980s.

The Charlotte Observer reported that the Internal Revenue Service still holds Bakker and Roe Messner, Tammy Faye's husband since 1993, liable for personal income taxes owed from the 1980s when they were building the PTL empire, taxes assessed after the IRS revoked the PTL ministry's nonprofit status. Tammy Faye Messner's new husband said Bakker and his former wife didn't want to talk about the tax issues: "We don't want to stir the pot." He also said that the original tax amount was about $500,000, with penalties and interest accounting for the rest. The notices reinstating the liens list "James O. and Tamara F. Bakker" as owing $3,000,000, on which liens the Bakkers still pay.

In 1998, Bakker released another book, Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse, and, in 2000, he published The Refuge: The Joy of Christian Community in a Torn-Apart World.

In January 2003, Bakker began broadcasting the New Jim Bakker Show at Studio City Cafe in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife, Lori Graham Bakker, whom he married in 1998. He denounces his past teachings on prosperity, saying they were wrong. In I Was Wrong, he reveals that the first time he read the Bible all the way through was in prison, and that it made him realize he had taken certain passages out of context--passages which he had used as "proof texts" to back up his prosperity theology teachings.

Jim Bakker in popular culture

• During "Act of God", a fifth-season episode of Law and Order, Mike Logan says "Yeah, well, Jim Bakker swore on a stack he didn't know where the money was coming from."
• The rock group Metallica alluded to the Bakker scandals at a concert before they played "Leper Messiah," a song about the TV evangelist scandals in the 1980s.
• The Rock Group Anthrax recorded a song titled "Make Me Laugh", about televangelist scandals like the Bakker scandal. The lyrics "God says planes and boats and cars. God says have an amusement park..." allude to the water slides built by Bakker with the "Lord's money".
• In 1990, Suicidal Tendencies released a song called "Send Me Your Money", featuring the lyrics "Who's gonna be the new king of the fakers? Who's gonna take the place of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker?"
• In the late 1980s, Phil Hartman portrayed Jim Bakker in sketches on Saturday Night Live.
• Stephen King cites Jim and Tammy Bakker's exploits as the inspiration for his novel Needful Things [1].
• Both Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were parodied in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with fictional VCPR radio guest Pastor Richards (David Green).
• On his 1988 album titled Guitar, Frank Zappa included a solo titled "Jim & Tammy's Upper Room", an allusion to either how Jim and his wife Tammy Faye Bakker used their money to keep themselves "above the riffraff" (i.e. an Ivory Tower or a penthouse apartment), or sexual relations between the both of them (i.e., "what goes on within the Upper Room"). The same solo can be heard in its original context on the album You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 in the song Advance Romance.
• In the original treatment of the 1989 James Bond film Licence to Kill (at that time titled "Licence Revoked"), the characters of Joe and Deedie Butcher were modeled on Jim and Tammy Bakker. In the final script, this was limited to just the Jim Bakker caricature of Joe Butcher (played by Wayne Newton).
• In their 1990 music video for their song The King and Queen of America, Eurythmics members Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart briefly (and subtly) spoof the Bakkers, among other American cultural icons. Stewart brandishes a Bank of America checkbook instead of a Bible in his pulpit and attempts to heal Lennox when her excessive weeping causes her mascara to run.
• Games Magazine, in a 1987 issue had a Choose Your Own Adventure style article (but with a more adult orientation) where Horace Bean, a newspaper reporter is sent to investigate extraterrestrial sightings which is later revealed to be aliens wishing to study the religions of Earth by impersonating such notabilities as Sun Myung Moon, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and such. One part had the reporter meeting a young woman who takes him to an amusement park run by "Jim and Tammy Faker" and was being told he would "love them to death".
• One of his cellmates during his incarceration was political pundit and perennial Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. In I Was Wrong, Bakker devoted a chapter to LaRouche, praising LaRouche's sense of humor and his vast knowledge of the Bible and world politics.
• His son, Jay Bakker ministers to Revolution Church in New York, a church he co-founded in 1994
• In 1987 his image was used by the punk band NOFX for the album, The P.M.R.C. Can Suck on This!
• An amusing story on staying at Heritage USA is included in PJ O'Rourke's book "Holidays in Hell". The book is a collection of travel writings of O'Rourke's for Rolling Stone magazine.

External links

• Jim Bakker Show