Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were a husband-and-wife televangelist team who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s before their ministry was brought down by scandal, trickery, and bankruptcy. They lived extravagant lives in front of the camera, inviting viewers into their beautiful homes for holidays and vacations. While most children in this era grew up on television, the Bakkers’ kids grew up on television.
In the early days, Jim and Tammy Faye carried on a centuries-old tradition of religious enthusiasm that placed them beyond the boundary lines of respectable mainstream culture. They began their career together as itinerant Pentecostal healing evangelists, aspiring to their tradition’s extravagant belief in a God who answers prayers in dramatic and miraculous fashion. They became television superstars, broadcasting in 40 countries around the world, and then turned to a new dream of a theme park, and even a whole community, where good Christian families could find fun and respite from the secular world. They grew rich as they grew famous.
Then they broke apart. Jim was sent to prison for fraud after losing his ministry to a group of shrewd fundamentalist Baptists in the wake of a sex scandal. Tammy Faye divorced him during his incarceration and withdrew from the public eye. With their downfall, the Bakkers became symbols, their names a cultural shorthand for corruption and venality. They had embodied a poor person’s dream of wealth and were crushed by a public eager to see them made small again.
But in the Bakkers’ heyday, their voices were carried up into the atmosphere and sent back down to hundreds of affiliate stations, which beamed them into the homes of millions of devoted viewers. Their network was one of the very first to invest in a satellite uplink, which enabled them to broadcast their programming 24 hours a day to a global audience. “God loves you. He really does,” Jim Bakker would say at the close of each episode of The PTL Club, their signature program. Modeled on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the Bakkers’ show had dozens of guests from all corners of American culture in the ’70s and ’80s: Eldridge Cleaver, Pat Boone, Oral Roberts, Evelyn Carter Spencer, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Gary S. Paxton, Ronald Reagan, and Billy Graham, whose childhood home Bakker reconstructed, brick by brick, in his theme park. Their voices and the voices of their guests mingled in impromptu conversation in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms all over America.
University of Missouri historian of religion John Wigger’s PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire captures the thrill of the couple’s ascent and the scale of their eventual collapse. The book also provides an opportunity for reflection on the meaning of their moment in American cultural history. The PTL phenomenon is almost wholly unknown to those who were too young to watch the story unfold in the ’70s and ’80s, but it remains an important episode in the recent past, a signpost along a path to the cultural crises of the present. Although it is easy to imagine televangelism as a fad that arrived suddenly and disappeared quickly, the Bakkers represent the upswell of a strong undercurrent in the American spirit—one that still pulls powerfully on our social imagination.
