Jim Bakker (1940-2026): Televangelist who turned misfortune into bestseller

By Theophilus Abbah

On October 24, 1989, Hurricane Hugo stormed North Carolina and devastated Charlotte, the city where Jim Bakker, a American televangelist who became famous from preaching prosperity, lived.

His flourishing ministry, Heritage USA, was an enigma, with a fairytale success that became the envy of his contemporaries in both charismatic and conservative Christian denominations. Hurricane Hugo was on record as the most destructive in history, claiming as many as 107 lives, and the wind knock out about 85 per cent of power supply to homes and businesses in Charlotte.

The season was inclement, but a different kind of hurricane was going to overwhelm Jim Bakker that afternoon.

Judge Robert Potter of the US District Court in Charlotte, renowned for handing down maximum sentence for anyone convicted in his court, was going to hit Jim Bakker with a devastating sentence for “fraud”.

Because I had promoted it on television, I was charged with fraud.

An ingenious strategy to spread the gospel through Praise the Lord (PTL) Club, had landed the charismatic preacher in trouble that sounds very ironic and overwhelming.

The PTL Club ran a television channel that broadcast diverse gospel programmes across America and beyond. To sustain the project, Jim Bakker solicited prayer and financial supports from persons recognized as PTL Partners. From Jim Bakker’s amazing goodwill and the power of God on him, his PTL Club became successful beyond the borders of his imaginations. Funds gushed into the Club like a flood; Jim Bakker began to live ostentatious lifestyle, flying on the wing of wealth from one end of the sky to another.

A foolish strategy designed to win back the love of his wife, led to a casual sexual encounter with Jessica Hann that lasted for between 15 and 20 minutes. That was in 1981. The little misstep incubated for seven years and gave birth to a monster that knocked Jim Bakker down for success to misery, in the manner that Hurricane Hugo caused destructions in North Carolina in 1989.

The hurricane that blew him from fame into the dungeon arrived in a whirlwind. First, it came in the garb of an innocuous strategy by sympathetic ministers of the gospel who claimed to have devised a soft-landing scheme for him.

Though his intuition opposed the unsolicited help, the wrong side of his senses took a better part of him, as he continued to yield and agree to devious ploy, like a zombie, as he would later admit to himself.

Looking on like one hypnotized by some forces, Jim Bakker signed off his chairmanship of a multimillion dollar PTL television ministry and the huge asset that had he and his partners had built over the years.

As a measure to take the sail off the Charlotte Chronicle’s expose of his sexual indiscretion, Jim Bakker was made to resign from the towering ministry he had built. Couched as a temporary measure, for between three to six months, to diffuse the fury of the nation against his immorality, his resignation was supposed to be a masterstroke.

That was until the schemers and lawyers and his trusted directors and members of the board of directors and other preachers in the charismatic fold, stabbed him in the back, never for him to return to the gigantic institution that God had helped him to build.

Large sums were diverted to cover PTL’s operating losses and to fund the Bakkers’ lavish lifestyle.

The mischievous take-over of PTL Club and Heritage USA was the beginning of a big fall. In 1989, probably tip-off by the characters that took over the affairs of PTL Club when Jim Bakker began to resist their mischief, the US Postal Inspection Service, claimed to have detected the flurry of payments from across the country into the PTL account for the Heritage Lifetime Partnership project.

The inspectorate, claimed that it was sensing fraud, and constituted a team made up of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), conducted a joint scrutiny into the payments into PTL by the Lifetime Partners.

The focus of the investigation was to examine whether Bakker and his associates misused funds, failed to report income properly, or committed tax-related fraud in addition to mail and wire fraud. The panel claimed to have discovered that instead of using the funds donated by partners to build and maintain facilities, large sums were diverted to cover PTL’s operating losses and to fund the Bakkers’ lavish lifestyle (mansions, luxury cars, private jet).

The investigators further faulted his years of continuous appeal for more PTL Partners to donate to his project beyond the capacity of the Heritage Hotel, where partners could stay for a year at a huge rebate.

As he would later write in his memoir, I Was Wrong, Jim Bakker said, “The government purported that I had knowingly ‘overbooked’ the lodging space at the Heritage USA by continuing to encourage people to become Lifetime Partners beyond the point at which we were able to accommodate them. The government maintained that we were trying to dupe some of our loyal financial supporters out of their money. Because I had promoted it on television, I was charged with fraud.”

Jim Bakker’s prosecutors generated as many as twenty-eight count charges from the above error. Judge Potter’s gavel hit the table, pouring misery into the preacher’s life, as the no-nonsense judge announced that Jim Bakker must be locked in prison for forty-five years! The judgement day was like a nightmare, a bad dream for Jim Bakker.

I Was Wrong.

In few sentences from a mortal man like him, his world had collapsed into debris, its dust blowing away in the cloud, washing away all the good works he had accomplished in America and even beyond the shores of the great nation.

He was not just a preacher; he was anointed with the healing power; a prosperity minister; and an important personality in the United States. Falling from such a pinnacle in church and in society to being locked up in prison was unexpected, unbelievable and very uncommon, even in the American society.

In his tell-tale book, I Was Wrong, Jim Bakker, frankly writes the emotional, relationship and theological predicaments that railroaded him into the American prison. In spite of his public outlook as a preacher, his marriage hit the rock over value differences between him as Tammy Faye, his first wife.

Bakker described himself as a workaholic, a preacher who was focused on the spread of the ministry and the success of the PTL project, especially that Heritage USA, that guaranteed partners who contributed $1,000 a stay in the hotel for one year. On the other hand, Tammy was a fun-loving woman and a singer who would rather Bakker remained at home with her than travel all over the world in pursuit of success. The woman would fall in love with her music instructor, and later quit the marriage.

What makes the book a page-turner from the initial paragraphs to the end of the 466-page book consists of the shocks that the reader experiences at every turn of events, which create multiple suspense. The characters that appeared as doves who came to assist Jim Bakker to ward-off the shame that accompanied the exposure of his secret sin, turned out to be ravening wolfs.

I thought God had abandoned me. But in the darkness I discovered His mercy.

They effectively dispossessed him of the ministry he had built. And he continued to slide into deeper trouble and loneliness so where the layers of betrayals unfold, revealing deceit and falsehood by trusted friends and legal luminaries. Merciless Judge Potter sentenced him to 45 years in prison, a judicial pronouncement that was akin to sealing Jim Bakker’s grave.

When Jerry Falwell took over the PTL ministry in 1987, he made many leadership and administrative changes that brought the work of the ministry of a halt. Not a charismatic preacher, and an avowed antagonist of Pentecostal faith, Falwell, did away with all the structure that Jim Bakker had put in place to lubricate the work of the ministry and keep it alive.

By 1989, things had practically fallen apart; PTL owed tens of millions of dollars, and donations had dried up, as the public lost confidence in the ministry. Heritage USA, once a bustling Christian theme park that drew millions of visitors annually, quickly emptied out. Attendance plummeted, facilities fell into disrepair, and the grand vision of a Christian resort city collapsed under the weight of financial mismanagement and legal battles. Bankruptcy proceedings stripped PTL of its assets, and the sprawling property was sold off in pieces to other ministries and private developers.

What had once symbolized Jim Bakker’s ambition became a ghost town, with abandoned hotels, shuttered attractions, and empty streets serving as stark reminders of the empire’s fall. Falwell’s leadership saw to the collapse of it all; PTL’s collapse became one of the most infamous examples of excess and downfall in American religious history. By the time Jim Bakker was released from prison in 1994, the PTL empire he had built was gone, leaving only ruins and memories of its former glory.

Jim Bakker’s long winding memoir on his road to prison in 1989 reveals the treacherous nature of men and the human mind. The majority of his associates abandoned him to his fate. He had lost everything – houses, family, empire, ministry, but he saw his fate as part of the plan of God to renew his spiritual life. Bakker would later admit that he had preached that houses, cars, and boats were signs of God’s rewards, but prison forced him to confront that this was false.

At those moments of spiritual reflections, he realized that God’s love was not tied to material wealth, and many people wrongly believe God abandoned them when they suffer. According to Bakker, at the beginning of his travails, he thought God had abandoned him, but later he realized God’s presence remained even in devastation, as he would have a vision of Christ telling him to “see through His eyes”. He interpreted that to mean that Jesus wanted Bakker to study his words critically to properly understand what Christianity really emphasized.

He said, “I thought God had abandoned me. But in the darkness I discovered His mercy. I began to see through His eyes, and everything changed.” As an evidence that God intervened in his travails, in 1991, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Potter’s sentencing of Jim Bakker to 45 years, in a decision of the appellate court that faulted Potter for making judicial bias statements about Bakker.

The case was returned to the federal court, which reduced his jail term to eight years. After a cumulative five years in prison, Jim Bakker was released on parole in 1994.

When his memoir, I Was Wrong, was published in 1997, it occupied the bestseller chart of the New York Times for six weeks. Over that period, over 160,000 copies were sold. Readers sought to know the full story of the fall of Jim Bakker from decades stardom to instant obscurity. The frankness with which Jim Bakker tells his story, copiously repeating the expression ‘I was wrong,’ at each turn of event where he took a misstep, clearly demonstrates his humility.

Not that his antagonists were right. No, Jim Bakker’s simplicity and fear of staining the name of God was exploited by other preachers to ruin his ministry and bring him to disrepute. Though the book cannot be considered as a religious text, its content is an eye-opener to Christians on how a sinful mistake could ruin the life, ministry and credibility of an individual.

It also teaches Christians that no matter how much the devil brings one low, God would not abandon His own – even in prison, God was still there for Jim Bakker. Jim Bakker died on October 5, 2026, in Branson, Missouri, at age 86, while in hospice care.

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