Jim Bakker’s death last week at the age of 86 brings to a close one of the sorriest chapters in the history of American evangelicalism.
The televangelist scandals captured the nation’s attention in the late 1980s. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s lavish lifestyle came to light along with hush money paid to (you can’t make this up!) a church secretary from Long Island following a sexual tryst with Jim Bakker.
The construction of the Bakkers’ Heritage USA theme park, once the third-largest tourist attraction in America after Disneyland and Disney World, required massive infusions of cash. Jim Bakker’s reckless promotion ultimately led to a criminal conviction and the ministry’s demise.
Other televangelists also stumbled in the late 1980s. Oral Roberts declared the Almighty had in effect taken him hostage and would usher the televangelist into eternity unless God’s people ponied up something like $8 million. And Jimmy Swaggart, who had criticized Jim Bakker as a “pretty boy preacher,” was caught in voyeuristic liaisons with prostitutes in Louisiana motel rooms.
What these televangelists all had in common was that they purveyed some version of the so-called prosperity gospel, the notion that God was prepared to lavish material goods on the faithful.
It worked something like this: The believer would send money to the Almighty through the televangelists (of course!), and then showers of blessing would return to the believer—but only after those blessings cycled through the televangelists’ own rain barrel.
Prosperity theology had been around for a long time, with E. W. Kenyon being an early advocate. But it’s no coincidence that it became popular during the 1980s, the era of “trickle-down Reaganomics.” The televangelists were peddling a kind of spiritualized Reaganism.
And just as trickle-down economics worked only for those at the top of the stream, so too did prosperity theology enrich the televangelists. Story after story emerged in the 1980s of proverbial little old ladies sending rent money to the televangelists in the forlorn hope that they would reap material blessings. Viewership for the televangelists plummeted in the wake of the scandals and for good reason.
And one of the televangelists caught in the trap was Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of the 700 Club. Robertson had plenty of shady dealings, but most were financial and none as salacious as Swaggart or the Bakkers.
As he pursued the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, Robertson was routinely labeled a “televangelist.” He tried to rebrand himself as a “broadcast executive,” but no one was buying it. (He finished second in the Iowa precinct caucuses, then flamed out after the New Hampshire primary.)
Trickle-down economics was exposed as a scam years ago, of course, as was prosperity theology. While in prison, Jim Bakker briefly repudiated it, but once released, like an addict, he returned to the spiel that God would bless the faithful if they sent him money.
I didn’t follow him closely, but when I saw snippets on cable television, Bakker struck me as a tragic, almost sympathetic figure, out there in some forlorn studio peddling survivalist gear and snake-oil treatments for COVID. It was, to say the least, a far cry from the salad days of satellite television, gold-plated bathroom fixtures and air-conditioned dog houses. But sympathy goes only so far.
Thousands of credulous believers lost large sums of money to Bakker’s flimflammery. Even more damaging was the harm Bakker and other televangelists did to the name of Jesus.
I don’t claim to be a theologian. Still, I’ve attended enough Sunday school, Bible camp, Sunday evening services and Wednesday night prayer meetings to know that prosperity theology lies somewhere out there in the same area code as heresy. It belongs in the same dustbin of history as trickle-down economics.
Jim Bakker is even now, I suspect, being held accountable.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.