Jim Bakker, Disgraced Televangelist Who Built the PTL Empire and Fell to Fraud, Dies at 86

He was called a pioneer of Christian television and a con man driven by greed; a man of God and a cautionary tale. Jim Bakker, the televangelist who built one of America's great religious broadcasting empires and then lost it to scandal, prison and divorce, has died at 86. His second wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death on Monday evening on the social media pages of his latest television ministry. "It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening," she wrote. No cause of death was given.

The pioneer who made religion must-see television

Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and believed as a young man that he was called to "make Jesus real" to the world, the New York Post reported. He attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye LaValley. The two married in 1961, dropped out of college, and took to the road as traveling evangelists — he preaching, she singing and playing the accordion at churches and tent revivals across the country.

Television changed everything. Bakker joined Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network in the 1960s and became the first host of "The 700 Club." He left CBN in 1972 and, two years later, formed the PTL Satellite Network with Tammy Faye. Its signature show, "The PTL Club" — PTL for "Praise The Lord" and "People That Love" — became one of the best-known Christian programmes of its era, co-hosted by the couple from 1974 to 1987, as PopCulture.com summarized. At its peak, it drew up to 13 million nightly viewers, the Associated Press reported, and the Bakkers became cultural icons — parodied on "Saturday Night Live" and skewered by late-night comedians, and later the subjects of the 2021 film "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."

The rise: Heritage USA and the opulence of PTL

The empire was not just a television show. The ministry employed some 2,000 people and built Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre Christian theme park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina, complete with a private jet, multiple homes and luxury cars for the man at the top. Donations poured in from viewers who believed they were funding a Christian community; detractors joked that PTL really stood for "pass the loot."

It was an American story in miniature: the tent-revival preacher who discovered the camera, the camera that discovered the money, and the money that discovered trouble. Reuters noted that his journey from the TV pulpit to a prison cell inspired comparisons to the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry — a comparison Bakker's life did little to discourage.

!Tammy Faye Messner Tammy Faye Messner, Bakker's first wife and co-host, who divorced him in 1992 and died in 2007. Photo: Darwin Bell, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The fall: the Hahn scandal and the fraud trial

The unraveling began with a secret. In 1987, revelations emerged of a 1980 sexual encounter between Bakker and church secretary Jessica Hahn — and of a $265,000 payoff, made with ministry funds, to keep it quiet. Bakker resigned from the PTL ministry that year, amid a financial and sex scandal that consumed the empire he had built.

Two years later came the legal reckoning. Convicted in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1989 on 24 counts of mail and wire fraud and conspiracy, Bakker was found to have defrauded his followers in a scheme involving vacations at the Heritage USA resort. Prosecutors painted him as a selfish con man driven by greed and lust for power, and the sentencing judge, Robert Potter, delivered a rebuke for the ages: "Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests."

Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison — a term later reduced — and served about four and a half years. Tammy Faye divorced him in 1992 while he was behind bars. The empire was gone: the theme park, the network, the nightly audience of millions, all of it scattered in the wreckage of one of the great American scandals of the 1980s.

Prison, repentance and a second act

Released in 1994, Bakker did what disgraced men in America have always done: he wrote a memoir — "I Was Wrong" — and tried to start over. He remarried in 1998, and in 2003 launched a new television ministry from near Branson, Missouri, the entertainment town where he and Lori Bakker would film "The Jim Bakker Show" from 2008. CNN reported that he told Larry King in 2000: "I wanted people to believe in my dream, and my dream became more important than the people. When the dream of Christian community becomes more important than the community, that's when it's a sin."

The second act never recaptured the scale of the first, but it endured. Where the PTL Club had been built on the marriage of faith and spectacle, the later ministry traded in prophecy and survivalism — a different flavour of the same showmanship.

The later years: politics and frailty

In his final decades, Bakker became a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, aligning his later ministry with the right-wing populism that had reshaped American evangelical politics. He suffered a stroke in 2020. His death was announced with the language of faith his wife had always used around him: "For 66 years, Jim gave his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a pioneer of Christian television," Lori Bakker wrote — asking for prayers and privacy as the family grieves.

A legacy of faith and infamy

Bakker's story sits in the long American tradition of the fallen preacher — a tradition that runs from Elmer Gantry to the jailed religious leaders of our own time, and the obituary pages have been busy lately, from Gloria Steinem to film producer Jeremy Thomas to singer Bonnie Tyler. He was, by any measure, a pioneer: he saw television's power before almost anyone in the pulpit did, and he built an institution that, at its height, touched millions of lives a night. He was also, by the verdict of a federal court, a fraud.

That duality is what will keep his name alive. The theme park is gone; the empire is gone; the 45-year sentence is a footnote now. What remains is the template he created — the televangelist as celebrity, the ministry as media business, the line between faith and commerce drawn in disappearing ink. Read more US news on Verity, and more about our newsroom.