Jim Bakker, founder of the PTL empire, dies at 86

Jim Bakker died on Monday evening, 5 October. He was 86. His wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death on the Jim Bakker Show's Facebook page. She gave no cause and no place. "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. "For 66 years, Jim gave his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry."

The statement asked for prayers and privacy. It said that even in his final days his concern was the continuation of the broadcast ministry. Bakker's death closes a public life that ran from the early days of religious television, through the collapse of one of the largest evangelical businesses in the United States, through federal prison, and back onto a smaller screen in Missouri.

PTL, Heritage USA, and the 1987 fall

Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1940. He met Tammy Faye LaValley at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis. They left before graduating and joined the Christian Broadcasting Network, where Bakker worked for Pat Robertson and helped develop the talk format that became The 700 Club. In the 1970s the couple built their own network, Praise the Lord, or PTL, based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and later in the Charlotte suburbs. The associated theme park, Heritage USA, drew millions of visitors a year at its peak and was, for a time, among the most visited parks in the country.

The business ran on viewer donations, lifetime partnerships and time-share style lodging. In 1987 Bakker resigned after a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn became public. Hahn said the encounter in a Florida hotel in 1980 was coerced. Bakker's camp described it as consensual and said hush money had been paid. Tammy Faye Bakker, later Tammy Faye Messner, stood with him on air during the first days of the scandal and then watched the ministry pass to other hands. Jerry Falwell briefly took control of PTL before it entered bankruptcy.

In 1989 a federal jury in Charlotte convicted Bakker of fraud and conspiracy. Prosecutors said he had oversold lodging partnerships at Heritage USA and diverted donor money to personal use. Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years and a large fine. The sentence was later cut. Bakker served about five years and was released in 1994. He was also ordered to repay millions. Tammy Faye divorced him in 1992 and died in 2007. Andrew Garfield played Bakker in the 2021 film The Eyes of Tammy Faye, opposite Jessica Chastain.

The second broadcast life

After prison Bakker remarried. With Lori Graham Bakker he restarted a daily programme from Blue Eye, Missouri, selling food buckets, books and survival goods to a smaller audience than PTL had reached. The show stayed on satellite and, later, online. During the early months of Covid-19 he promoted a colloidal silver product as a treatment. The US Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission sent a warning letter, and the state of Missouri obtained a restraining order. That episode sat on top of the older fraud conviction and kept his name in court files three decades after Charlotte.

Lori Bakker's announcement did not say whether The Jim Bakker Show will continue under her name. The ministry's partners were the funding base of both his careers. What remains, on the public record, is a television form he helped invent, a park that went bankrupt, a prison term for overselling lodging to donors, and a second act that never regained the scale of the first.