Jim Bakker defrauded the viewers who trusted him, went to federal prison for it, and returned to Christian television in 2020 to sell those same people a cure for COVID-19 that did not exist. He died Monday at 86; his second wife, Lori Bakker, said the cause of death was not immediately clear.
Lori Bakker said her husband “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.” The couple had broadcast “The Jim Bakker Show” from near Branson, Missouri, since 2003. He suffered a stroke in 2020.
The documented record runs as follows. Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. They married in 1961, dropped out of college, and began a traveling ministry — he preached, she sang and played the accordion, and the two crossed the country visiting churches and tent revivals. Televangelist Pat Robertson brought them to his Christian Broadcasting Network; in 1965 they launched a children’s show on CBN, and by 1966 Bakker was hosting “The 700 Club.” He left CBN in 1972 and in 1974 formed the PTL Satellite Network, with “The PTL Club” — “PTL” standing for “Praise the Lord” — as its signature program, taped at the Bakkers’ complex just south of Charlotte, North Carolina. The ministry expanded to include Heritage USA, a Christian theme park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina. At its mid-1980s peak the program drew up to 13 million nightly viewers and brought in millions of dollars annually from followers. The couple was so famous they were parodied across television in the 1980s and 1990s, and their lives were dramatized in the 2021 film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Main Street Independent covered the death of Daystar Television Network founder Joni Lamb in May; Bakker’s record, however, is his own, and it is a matter of public documentation rather than cultural commentary.
That documentation turns on what the ministry did with the money, not what the ministry called it. In March 1987, Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church clerk Jessica Hahn and was forced to resign from PTL, turning over operations to pastor and broadcaster Jerry Falwell. In 1988 he was indicted after an investigation of PTL’s finances and was convicted of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy — charges brought under 18 U.S.C. § 1341 (mail fraud), 18 U.S.C. § 1343 (wire fraud), and 18 U.S.C. § 371 (conspiracy). He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison, later reduced to eight. At a news conference after the verdict, Tammy Faye stood before the microphones and sang “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand.” Their marriage did not survive it: she divorced Bakker in 1992, just short of their 31st anniversary, while he was still in prison. She later married Roe Messner, a building contractor whose projects included Heritage USA; Messner was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and served about two years. Tammy Faye died of colon cancer in 2007. Bakker and Tammy Faye had two children; he and Lori adopted five more in 2002.
Now the part of the record that is not history. Bakker was released on parole in 1994, married Lori in 1998, and launched “The Jim Bakker Show” on the PTL Satellite Network in 2003, broadcasting from Branson for the next two decades. Then, in February and March 2020 — the first, most uncertain weeks of a pandemic — Bakker and a guest claimed on 11 episodes that Silver Solution, a health supplement sold by his Morningside Church Productions Inc., could cure COVID-19. In June 2021 the company settled a lawsuit over those claims, providing $156,000 in refunds to people who had paid for the product or contributed to obtain it.
I want to be precise about what that conduct is, because precision is what the record supports and precision is what this voice owes. A claim that an unapproved ingestible product can cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent a disease is the exact category the Federal Trade Commission Act § 5 bars as an unfair or deceptive act or practice, the exact category over which the Food and Drug Administration holds jurisdiction through its authority over disease claims for unapproved products, and the exact category state consumer-protection statutes reach through their own deception and fraud provisions. Those are not interpretive positions. They are the regulatory framework that existed in March 2020, that Bakker’s counsel would have known existed, and that the settlement resolved by refund rather than by contest.
And the population that paid is not “the frightened,” a phrase too soft for what the record shows. The people who funded PTL were the ministry’s long-term donors — the ordinary viewers who had given for years, a demographic that across this genre skews old and, in a plague year, sick. The people who paid for Silver Solution in the spring of 2020 were, by definition, people worried they were infected or would be: chronically ill donors reaching for something, elderly viewers whose pastor had spent a lifetime telling them God provides through the channel on their television, and early-pandemic purchasers who had no supply lines of their own and a trusted face on the screen telling them a bottle of silver was protection. That is who was in the room when the claim was made. That is who wrote the checks.
I was raised inside the tradition that produced this format, and I sat through enough of the appeal to know how it is built — the warmth, the testimony, the moment when the pitch arrives dressed as a prayer. I did not come out of that tradition because of one man’s conviction. I came out of it because the tradition’s own texts, read plainly, condemn what the tradition’s apparatus did for decades in front of the cameras.
Read them plainly. Matthew 23:14 — numbered differently across translations, absent as a separate verse in the NIV’s numbering but carried in the ESV and NRSV — pronounces the woe this whole story lives inside: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses and for a show make long prayers. Therefore you will receive the greater condemnation.” The plain-language reading is not subtle. Religious professionals who take the property of vulnerable people while performing piety are the named target, and the performance is not incidental to the wrong — it is the mechanism of it. The legalist reading that made Bakker’s career possible inverts this completely: giving to ministry is reframed as “seed faith,” the preacher’s visible wealth is reframed as evidence of God’s blessing on the channel, and the person writing the check is reframed as an instrument through whom God is blessing herself. Under that reading, devouring widows’ houses is not the offense. It is the ministry. The chasm between those two readings is not a matter of translation or temperament. It is the distance between a text that names the taking and an apparatus that built a national business on the taking while quoting the text aloud.
Two further anchors belong on the record, stated rather than expounded. Paul warns the Thessalonian church that his appeal did not spring from error or from “a pretext for greed — God is witness” (1 Thessalonians 2:5). James writes that “the wages of the workers who have reaped your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out” (James 5:4). Neither verse is exotic. Both are in the book any preacher on this network could open on camera.
None of this indicts the people who gave. Believers targeted by a solicitation format engineered over decades are not dupes, and I will not write them as though they were. The indictment attaches to the operators: to the man who took the money, who was convicted of taking it fraudulently, who served eight years for it, and who returned to the same profession in the worst weeks of a plague to sell an unproven cure to people who had no reason to doubt him.
Jim Bakker is dead at 86. The record he leaves does not require a metaphor and does not soften in the retelling: millions of dollars solicited annually from followers; a federal conviction under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, and 371; eight years in federal prison; and, in 2020, a marketing campaign that put a fake cure in front of sick and frightened people who trusted him, resolved in 2021 by a settlement providing $156,000 in refunds. That is the record. It is the whole of the accountability claim, and it is enough.