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Yesterday the world learned that Jim Bakker, the televangelist who founded and starred in the popular television program The PTL Club, had died at age 86.
Four decades ago, he and his wife Tammy Faye were riding high as Christian celebrities.
They reigned over Heritage USA, a 2,500-acre religious vacation center in South Carolina that at its peak was America’s third most visited theme park – a Disneyland of sorts for evangelical Christians that featured water slides, skating rinks, Bible studies, and prayer.
Bakker was accountable to no one. Wealth and privileges were taken for granted.
He personally made every financial decision at Heritage and apparently kept two sets of books. He rewarded himself with $3.7 million in bonuses. “Excess and success are close together,” he claimed. “Anyone who is successful has got to be excessive.”
Psalm 37:4 was a regular preaching point: “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Jim and Tammy Faye’s desires apparently included Rolls-Royces, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, multiple homes, a 55-foot houseboat, and an air-conditioned dog kennel.
During one broadcast, Jim declared, “Yes, I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” whereupon he threw his arm around Tammy Faye and announced, “And this is Blueberry here!”
Their marriage, however, was on the rocks. So was the financial stability of Heritage USA and The PTL Club. Breaking news stories of infidelity and fiscal mismanagement fostered a months-long national scandal.
Johnny Carson declared that PTL stood for Pass the Loot.
Bakker resigned his ministry in 1987. During a six-week trial the following year, federal prosecutors described him as a “most brazen, accomplished con man.” He was found guilty on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy.
The presiding judge sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison. Bakker ended up serving just five. Fellow TV preacher Jerry Falwell labeled him, “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”
And that’s saying something.
In short order, Jim Bakker lost his empire, his marriage, his reputation, and his freedom.
One day in prison, he was cleaning the toilets when a guard told him that he had a visitor. Bakker wondered if he should bother seeing who it was. Probably another reporter wanting a fresh quote from the most humiliated man in America.
He looked at himself. Here he was, scrubbing prison toilets. He was a mess. He concluded, “This is who I really am. This is how I shall go.”
He walked to the visitation area. The guest who had come to extend a hand of friendship was Billy Graham.
Two men who had no need to “be somebody important” warmly embraced.
In his 1996 book I Was Wrong, Bakker admits that prison was the first time he actually read through the Bible. He says he discovered that Jesus “did not have one good thing to say about money,” and acknowledged, “When I came to the awareness that I had actually been contradicting Christ, I was horrified.”
On the other side of prison, Bakker remarried and launched a second ministry. It proved to be considerably less flamboyant, although he did attract the attention of federal investigators for peddling an unproven “cure” for Covid-19.
In the end, however, he asserted that his newfound ministry was targeting a different audience.
“I’m not back for the perfect people, the people who have it all together,” he said in 2007. “I’m here for the broken and the bruised and the hurt. I’m here to say we have a God of second and third chances.”
Humility may come to us by means of disastrous circumstances. Or it may be a condition of the heart that we cultivate as a way of life.
Either way, its essence is the same: We look away from ourselves. And we refuse to look down on others.
Instead, we look up at the wonder and grace of the God who meets all of us at the same place – the place where it genuinely dawns on us that he is God…so we don’t have to be.