Jim Bakker, Television Preacher Felled by Sex and Financial Scandals, Dies at 86

Jim Bakker, a television evangelist who lost his popular and prosperous ministry in a 1980s sex scandal and then lost his freedom for five years, imprisoned for having violated federal laws with his conflation of God and mammon, died on Monday. He was 86.

His wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death in a post on Bakker’s official Instagram account. She did not cite a cause or say where he died. Bakker had what was described as a mild stroke in 2020.

In the 1970s and ’80s, 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, South Carolina, 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.

Bakker 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.”

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, California. The spending was so lavish, and the appeal for contributions so insistent, that some critics recast PTL as standing for Pass the Loot.

The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped. Bakker denied the accusation. Nonetheless, he tried to buy her silence in 1985 by tapping the PTL treasury to make a $265,000 payoff, (equivalent to roughly $825,000 in 2026 dollars).

The transgression led to his banishment from the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. Other evangelists turned on him. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over the PTL ministry, strongly suggested that Bakker’s sins, despite his denials, included homosexual relations. With characteristic hyperbole, Falwell dismissed Bakker as “the greatest scab and a cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”

Worse lay ahead for the televangelist couple. After persistent reporting on their behavior by the Charlotte Observer and a 16-month inquiry by a federal grand jury, Bakker was indicted in 1988 on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. During a six-week trial the following year, federal prosecutors described him as a “most brazen, accomplished con man” who had bilked the PTL faithful out of $158 million with offers of lifetime vacations at Heritage USA that could not possibly have been provided. The government said that $3.7 million had also been siphoned off to support the Bakkers’ grand living.

At one point during the trial, Bakker, who in 1969 had what was described as a nervous breakdown, landed in a mental institution for observation. He was found in his lawyer’s office hallucinating and cowering in a fetal position under a couch. But the proceedings soon resumed, and he was found guilty on all counts. The judge imposed a 45-year prison sentence, which came to be whittled down. After five years, Bakker was freed in 1994.

Tammy Bakker, who was never charged, did not stand by her man. Long before the trial, the marriage had been shaky, and in 1992 she divorced him. A year later she married Roe Messner, who had been a Bakker business associate and who in 1996 would be sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud. Tammy Bakker died of cancer in 2007 at 65.

Jim Bakker tended to quote the Bible to justify his behavior and to discredit his accusers. Interviewed, for instance, on ABC’s “Nightline” in 1987, he invoked Psalms 38:12: “Those who want to kill me set their traps, those who would harm me talk of my ruin; all day long they scheme and lie.” Psalms 37:4 was a go-to favorite, dovetailing with his prosperity gospel: “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Over time, he came to acknowledge that his grasp of Scripture had been tenuous. In a 1996 book, “I Was Wrong,” he wrote that his studies in prison had led him to understand that Jesus “did not have one good thing to say about money.” He added, “When I came to the awareness that I had actually been contradicting Christ, I was horrified.”

James Orsen Bakker was born in the Pentecostal faith on Jan. 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan. The middle name was his parents’ misspelled tribute to Orson Welles, whose radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” had been a national sensation 14 months earlier.

James was the youngest of four children of Raleigh Bakker, a machinist in a piston-ring factory, and Furnia (Irwin) Bakker, a housewife. His paternal grandfather handed out Bible readings on street corners, and his father claimed to have seen two angels while on a trip to Florida. For his part, James said he had gotten religion in his teens after he accidentally ran over a boy while driving. Upon learning that the boy would live, he said, he decided to put himself in God’s hands.

After schooling in Muskegon, he attended North Central Bible College, now North Central University, in Minneapolis. There he met Tamara Faye LaValley, a fellow student, and married her in 1961 after only their third date.

The newlyweds dropped out of college and set off as itinerant evangelists. In 1966, they signed on with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network in Portsmouth, Virginia, hosting a children’s variety show. They were so successful that Robertson put Jim Bakker in charge of a new prime-time program, “The 700 Club,” whose name was derived from its goal of raising $700 a month by way of 70 people each contributing $10.

The Bakkers and Robertson had a falling-out, and the couple turned elsewhere. In 1976, having moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, they began their PTL ministry, which came to be known also as “The Jim and Tammy Show.”

Post-prison, in 2003, Bakker reemerged with yet another television program, “The Jim Bakker Show,” broadcast out of a cafe in Branson, Missouri, and carried by several dozen Christian-themed stations. His partner this time was his second wife, Lori Beth Graham, who had a troubled past of her own and whom he married in 1998 seven weeks after they met at an urban ministry in Los Angeles.

Bakker is survived by his wife; two children from his first marriage, Tammy Sue Chapman and Jamie Bakker; and five children whom he and Graham adopted in 2002: Maricella, Lori, Clarissa, Marie and Ricky Bakker.

The new ministry was low-key compared with that of the Bakkers’ high-flying PTL days. Its focus was different, too. The end of days was nigh, Bakker now preached, and he offered viewers what he said they would need to ride out the Apocalypse: long-lasting food, 10 buckets of it for $600 plus shipping costs. His message had a bluntly conservative political cast. “God has called” Donald Trump, he said. Barack Obama “sounded like the representative for Antichrist,” he said in 2016, and Hillary Clinton was “a bride of Satan.”

Yet, once again, he ran afoul of officialdom by marketing a colloidal silver supplement that he had billed as a cure for assorted physical woes, including COVID-19. Authorities in Missouri and New York ordered him in 2020 and 2021 to cease making such claims and to return $156,000 to followers who had bought his silver solution.

Through it all, Bakker presented himself as an avatar of redemption. “I’m not back for the perfect people, the people who have it all together,” he said of his ministry in 2007. “I’m here for the broken and the bruised and the hurt. I’m here to say we have a God of second and third chances.”