Old Time Televangelism & Scandal

Trump spiritual advisor Paula White, a Florida preacher, recently appeared on Jim Bakker’s television program, saying:

It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.

Of course, such theology, if meant literally, would seemingly command unquestioning obedience to any ruler. Fortunately, historic church teaching, and 1000 years of Anglo-American political tradition, argue against such blind fidelity.

More interesting, at least to me, was that White appeared on Bakker’s program. He still has a program???!!! Nobody under age 40, and few under age 50, will much recall the scandals that exploded the media and financial empire of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, with much of 1980s televangelism, in 1987, now unbelievably 30 years ago.

The Bakkers hosted a daily Christian television talk show, with its own network of millions of viewers, called PTL Club, standing for people-that-love and praise-the-Lord, part of a financial empire that included a Christian theme park called Heritage USA, a hotel and residential housing, sustained by thousands of donors endlessly solicited on air and by direct mail.

PTL was over-the-top garish, with folksy chatter and Gospel music punctuated by plaintive, often tearful appeals by Jim and Tammy Faye, whose dripping mascara became iconic. They both flaunted their high-end consumption backed by prosperity theology. The great mystery was who exactly watched them non-ironically much less mailed them checks. One of the last episodes I recall watching, out of prurient fascination, was Jim announcing plans to reconstruct at their South Carolina theme park a version of Queen Victoria’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Tammy Faye oohed and ahhed as Jim described this impending glass cathedral costing millions.

Alas, there would be no Crystal Palace, after former church secretary Jessica Hahn alleged she had been drugged and raped seven years earlier by Bakker and fellow preacher John Wesley Fletcher, after which the two appeared on PTL boasting about their relaxing afternoon. Bakker, who’d been paying hush money for years from PTL coffers, claimed the encounter was consensual and asked Moral Majority founder Rev. Jerry Falwell temporarily to take over the PTL conglomerate until Bakker could recover from the scandal.

Falwell did so, initially offering Bakker’s version of the scandal to the public, until discovering that the Bakkers’ empire was an elaborate labyrinth of fraud, deception and bankruptcy, also including extensive sexual misconduct by Bakker, allegedly both heterosexual and homosexual. He went to prison for five years. Falwell called him “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.” Tammy Faye was spared prison but did divorce Jim, later remarrying, then dying of cancer. Jim once out of prison partly resurrected professionally, remarried, and for 14 years has broadcast his program from Branson, Missouri, touting the end-times, while predictably marketing survivalist wares to anxious viewers hoping to endure them.

There were multiple subplots to the Bakker/PTL scandals and implosion, which I remember so well. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, like Bakker, was ordained in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, but, unlike Bakker, was an exponent of old time Pentecostal revivalism. He was critical of PTL prosperity theology along with various therapeutic fads he saw threatening Pentecostalism. God raises up evangelists, not talk show hosts, he declared, in an obvious swipe at PTL, among other Christian programs.

As the PTL scandal broke, televangelist Oral Roberts announced on his program that the Lord would “take him home” if viewers didn’t donate $4.5 million by the deadline, then he retreated into his Oklahoma prayer tower to await his fate. Swaggart pronounced that televangelism had become a disgrace, with Bakker facing prison, while another “dear brother” was claiming “God is going to kill him” unless the needed ransom was produced.

As a young man I often watched Swaggart, even attending one of his revivals at the Capital Center outside Washington, DC, and I recall he claimed a special mission to clean up the church. He could be unsparing in his critiques of Catholicism, Calvinism, infant baptism, doubts about supernatural gifts, erring fellow Pentecostals, and any form of liberalism, which he pronounced “first cousin to communism.” His dramatic sermons, while strutting and even dancing across the stage of a stadium, focused on salvation, heaven and hell.

No less than Dan Rather reputedly called Swaggart America’s best orator. He was also a magnificent musician, singer, and piano player, as first cousin to rock and roll founder Jerry Lee Lewis, also known as “the killer,” and country music star Mickey Gilley. Swaggart’s talents at least briefly got him a global audience larger than even Cousin Jerry, as his program broadcast to millions in scores of countries including parts of the Communist Bloc, which Swaggart followers saw as itself a sign of the end times. On a crusade to Chile Swaggart met with dictator Augusto Pinochet, who appreciated support from his country’s growing Pentecostal population.

Not typically very political, Swaggart was enmeshed in the 1988 presidential campaign, initially opposing fellow televangelist Pat Robertson’s run for the presidency, believing preachers shouldn’t leave their spiritual calling to pursue politics. But Robertson, realizing Swaggart’s influence, flew on his private plane to Louisiana to persuade him, successfully. Swaggart disavowed any objection, judging Robertson to be more business executive than pastor.

Within a year of Bakker’s scandal Swaggart himself would fall, blackmailed and then exposed by a fellow evangelist whom Swaggart had denounced for adultery, and who caught Swaggart at a motel with a prostitute. Swaggart at his megachurch delivered his famously televised, tearful “I have sinned” speech. The Assemblies of God at first suspended and then withdrew his ordination, as it already had from Bakker. Much of Swaggart’s own empire collapsed, especially after he was caught three years later with another prostitute. Like Bakker, he somewhat recovered and returned to television, if never at the previous heights.

The 1980s era of televangelistic empires and influence seemed to collapse in 1987-1988. Pat Robertson made an initial but brief splash in the Republican primaries. The scandals tarnished flashy tv preachers but did not long if at all impair conservative evangelical political influence. Robertson, though defeated, would afterwards found the Christian Coalition.

Paula White, herself reputedly a prosperity gospel exponent, made dubious remarks on Jim Bakker’s program. But his survival and resilience showcase that in America religious entrepreneurship, both laudable and questionable, almost always has a market, with both spiritual and political implications.