The Death and Afterlife of an American Con Man
Jim Bakker’s vision of the future came to pass. Just not in the way the disgraced televangelist imagined.The Death and Afterlife of an American Con Man
Jim Bakker’s vision of the future came to pass. Just not in the way the disgraced televangelist imagined.
“God wants you to be rich,” the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker wrote at the start of the 1980s. The sentence is like a doorway separating one version of the United States from the next. The TV preachers of the Reagan era were grifters to the roots of their voluminously blow-dried hair, but they helped establish a template that, refracted through YouTube, social media, and party politics, exerts a hypnotic control over American culture today. And Bakker, who died Monday at the age of 86, had one of those careers that seems to encapsulate all of the shifts and contradictions of its times. Along with his wife, Tammy Faye, the bearer of perhaps the most culturally significant eye makeup since Cleopatra, Bakker exploited the pseudo-intimacy of video to sell a parasocial connection to his audience. It proved more profitable than even he might have imagined.
He stoked his viewers with glimpses of the lavish lifestyle they funded. He soothed them with assurances that, by virtue of joining the community of which he was the center, they had seen through the lies of a society that was rigged against them. They were the chosen ones, he told them, and the truth he conveyed to them would change their lives—not (or not only) in some vague paradise deferred till after death but here, soon, on Earth. His truth would heal their sicknesses and fill their bank accounts. They’d never have to be lonely, because they were part of a family that loved them—one that would love them even more if they sent in another $100 check.
Bakker later confessed that he hadn’t read the Bible all the way through at the time he wrote his prosperity-gospel book (Eight Keys to Success, self-published in 1980). It didn’t matter: He was a prophet, though not the kind he pretended to be. Dressed up in different clothes for different audiences, the Jim and Tammy Faye format is now everywhere in our video-riddled lives, from MAHA moms to crypto bros to looksmaxxing incels. I’m your real friend, and I’m here to tell you the real truth. All you have to do is like and subscribe. Bakker himself, after the spectacular fall from grace that sent him to prison in the late ’80s—more on this in a bit—repackaged his racket into a more contemporary form. Following his release, he became an apocalyptic doomsday influencer, selling freeze-dried ground beef and hacker-resistant backpacks to an audience of Rapture-expectant survivalists. “God came to me in a dream last night,” he said, a few days after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, “and he was wearing camouflage, a hunting vest and had an AR-15 strapped to his back.” In the dream, God showed his support for Donald Trump.
James Orsen Bakker was born to a blue-collar family in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1940. His parents chose his middle name as an homage to Orson Welles, whose 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds had convinced some listeners that Earth was under Martian attack; before he could even speak, Bakker was already mixed up with hoaxes and mass media. His mother’s parents, who lived next door, were formative influences. His devoutly Christian grandmother Mildy spoiled him. Her husband, Emmett, nicknamed Kingfish, was a fast-talking wheeler-dealer with a slippery reputation; a local directory published the year of Jim’s birth listed Emmett’s occupation as “huckster.” After Bakker’s downfall in the late ’80s, The Charlotte Observer ran a long biographical profile of him, full of details about his childhood. It said that when Emmett wanted to get rid of a dilapidated rowboat, he dragged it out to the yard with a “for sale” sign and put a new coat of paint on the side that faced the street.
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In the early ’60s, Bakker went to Bible college in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. He worked in a restaurant; she worked in the clothing shop down the street. He was engaged to someone else at the time, but God moves in mysterious ways. Jim and Tammy Faye got married in 1961 and dropped out of college to become traveling evangelists. Before long, they were hired by Pat Robertson as talent for his new Christian Broadcasting Network, where they hosted a children’s variety show, doing skits with puppets. Robertson made Bakker the first host of his new nightly talk show, The 700 Club, which launched him into stardom.
The Bakkers left CBN in the early ’70s and launched their own satellite network, PTL Ministries. (Praise the Lord, obviously.) PTL’s sets looked like furniture showrooms at a store catering solely to great-aunts. The singing was nightmarish. The congregation seemed to have wandered in from the overflow room at a Kiwanis club bingo night. They got 12 million paying subscribers and were soon taking in donations to the tune of $1 million a week.
The figure of the evangelical showman-swindler wasn’t invented in the 1980s. Oral Roberts was peddling his own prosperity-gospel shtick on the radio as early as 1947, and flamboyant revivalists were dipping a hand into the collection basket way back in the 19th century. But the ’80s were when the form came into its own. Pearly, powdered, and polyester-clad men—Robertson, yes, but also Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and their brethren—were suddenly everywhere, clutching a mic and lifting a Bible to the sky. The act needed TV’s distinctive combination of bigness and smallness, its ability to arouse the sensation of intimacy at scale while circumventing the risk of in-person shame. All these men pledged to do good with your money; all these men drove extremely expensive cars. In January 1987, Roberts told his congregation that God would “call him home” if he didn’t raise $8 million by the end of March. Millions feared he’d die, possibly even kill himself, if he failed to complete the sacred task. He raised $9.1 million and told his staff to airbrush the diamond rings out of his publicity photos.
It was an outrageous milieu, in other words, of both hypocrisy and sheer tawdriness; The Righteous Gemstones, HBO’s great comedy series about a family of TV preachers, arguably underplayed the degree of gleeful corruption on display. And the Bakkers were at the forefront. Jim wasn’t terribly charismatic in the pulpit, not in the way that some of his peers were, but he had a strange sort of boyish unctuousness that played well with elderly viewers. He was smooth—I mean physically smooth, like a tapioca pearl—and slightly shrill; preaching, he conveyed the impression of a large, amoral, freshly bathed 10-year-old who knew how to kiss up to old ladies, which is essentially what he was.
The money kept pouring in. The Bakkers started a theme park, Heritage USA. By the mid-’80s, it was the third-largest amusement park in the country, trailing only Disney World and Disneyland. Being a church meant not having to pay taxes, but it didn’t keep the government from prying into PTL’s business. There were investigations for fraud—something the government used to care about—as early as the late ’70s. Employees testified that Bakker used money earmarked for missionary work to buy Corvettes and mink coats. Weeks after he’d claimed on the air to have given his own life savings to PTL, he used PTL money to buy a houseboat. The Reagan administration was disinclined to prosecute those who commanded massive audiences, especially when the audiences were overwhelmingly made up of Republican voters, so the investigations tended to fizzle. Bakker must have felt like a divine shield was protecting him from the feds during these years. God will let you know if He wants you to have a houseboat.
Then things got dark. I mean, things were always dark; there’s no innocent way to con lonely and vulnerable people out of their rent, which was the Bakkers’ entire business model until they opened Heritage USA. (After that it was conning lonely and vulnerable people out of their rent and persuading them to ride roller coasters.) But things got even darker. In 1987, The Charlotte Observer started investigating PTL’s finances. The paper uncovered a $265,000 payment Bakker had made to a woman named Jessica Hahn. Hahn, when pressed for comment, said Bakker had raped her in 1980, when she was a 21-year-old church secretary. She said he and another minister had drugged her, confined her in a hotel room, and assaulted her; during the act, she said, Bakker had kept repeating the sentence “By helping the shepherd, you’re helping the sheep.” The $265,000 payment had been intended to keep her quiet. Bakker denied raping Hahn—he said he had sex with her but stated it was consensual—and Tammy Faye initially supported him. Nevertheless, Bakker was forced to resign from PTL.
Today, Jim Bakker's heirs are legion. Like their predecessor, they understand that the game doesn't have to be subtle to work. In fact, it's better if it's not.
The rival televangelist Jimmy Swaggart—who, like Bakker, belonged to the Assemblies of God denomination—launched a church investigation against him. Swaggart called Bakker “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Swaggart himself was defrocked by the church after his own sex scandal a couple of years later; maybe he saw himself as the second greatest.
The televangelists were massive celebrities, and Bakker’s fall led to a media feeding frenzy. Tammy Faye, it transpired, was addicted to pills. She was so out of it that at one point, in the middle of a flight a few weeks before the Hahn story broke, she’d tried to open a door to walk off the plane. A disastrous joint Nightline interview in March 1987 led to a barrage of parodies, including a church lady skit on Saturday Night Live that seemed a lot funnier to me as a kid than it does today.
When the Bakkers became political pariahs, the government suddenly remembered those dropped fraud investigations. In 1989, Bakker was convicted on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy. He’d bilked his viewers out of $158 million. He’d sold tens of thousands of “lifetime memberships” to Heritage USA for a thousand bucks a pop, promising an annual hotel stay to everyone who ponied up; then he didn’t build most of the hotel rooms and kept millions for himself. His initial 45-year prison sentence was reduced on appeal, but he spent nearly five years behind bars—including a spell as the cellmate of the right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche. In 1992, while he was still locked up, Tammy Faye divorced him.
“There are no second acts in American lives” is probably the most catastrophically inaccurate line in all of American literature, as famous as it is. After prison, Bakker wrote, or at least published, a book called I Was Wrong. He read, or at least talked about reading, the whole Bible. He repudiated his old prosperity-gospel line and embraced the end of the world. Once again, he’d seen where the market was moving and shifted his tactics to follow it. Then he reran the same shell game on a smaller scale, with a different wife (Lori Beth) and a different set of merchandise (MyPillow products). He fulminated about a looming civil war. He sold bags of seeds with which the faithful could grow vegetables after civilization’s fall. During the height of the 2020 pandemic, he sold colloidal silver supplements that he claimed could cure all illnesses, including COVID-19. The main thing the supplements actually did was permanently discolor the skin of people who took them. The state of Missouri sued him; he was defended by one of its former governors. The case was settled out of court in 2021.
That was one sort of second act—replacement-level end-times profiteer—but I think he’s had a bigger one. In the 1980s, the Bakkers were celebrities, but they were also outliers. They were beloved by the people they conned, but they were mostly seen as a freak show by mainstream society. These days, though? The Bakkers’ playbook is how mainstream society operates. All of us, more or less, are either paying for or profiting from parasocial relationships. Many of them revolve around shared delusions: Elon Musk is a genius, vaccines cause autism, a secret ring of powerful pedophiles is operating out of a pizza-shop basement, society is biased against white men, AI will usher in utopia. The grifts tend to be more profitable the more delusional they get.
Today, Jim Bakker’s heirs are legion. They’re out here selling you watches, headphones, and vacuum cleaners through affiliate links on YouTube while they convince your grandparents that Antarctica is a socialist hoax. Like their predecessor, they understand that the game doesn’t have to be subtle to work. In fact, it’s better if it’s not. The whole point is to give the marks something to look at while you tell them what they want to hear. My six-minute routine can reverse aging. Women are monsters if they won’t date you. This one weird trick can make you millions on Kalshi. Democrats are aliens. God wants you to be rich.
If all this sounds exaggerated, please consider: The president of the United States is a celebrity who rose to fame in the ’80s. He’s been convicted of falsifying business records to hide hush-money payments connected to a sex scandal. He has been found liable for sexual assault. He makes millions soliciting donations, then uses the money for personal expenses. He sells shoddy products to people who want to feel close to him. He presents himself as God’s chosen representative on Earth.
Jim Bakker may never have regained the fame and fortune he craved. He may have died a slippery paranoiac, selling freeze-dried meat to end-times radicals. But he helped convert the soul of the nation, albeit not to the creed he claimed to profess. His vision of life—opportunistic, false, pandering, exploitative, utterly without shame—is all around us. He won.
