Jim Bakker, a charismatic evangelical preacher who built a Christian television empire only to watch it collapse amid scandal, recriminations and prison, died Monday, his wife said. He is 86 years old.
“It is with a broken heart that I tell everyone that my beloved husband, Jim Barker, went home to be with the Lord tonight,” his second wife, Lori Barker, said on the Facebook page of Barker’s most recent television show, “The Jim Barker Show.” She did not disclose the cause of death.
Bakker’s son, Jay Bakker, who became a prominent evangelical preacher in his own right and had a much more liberal view of Christianity than his father’s, confirmed Bakker’s death in a Facebook post of his own.
“We had a very complicated relationship, he was also my father and grandfather, and I need to grieve in my own time,” he wrote.
Buck was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and his first wife, Tammy Fay, was born in International Falls, Minnesota, but they embraced the South when they performed a puppet show on Virginia television in the 1970s. It soon turned into a vibrant, Southern-flavored cable television talk show called “The PTL Club,” which featured some of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s telling their “rebirth” stories.
Buck launched the first Christian satellite network to carry his optimistic message—”God loves you. He really does love you”—to homes across the country and around the world.
Along the way, the Bucks became known in the secular world for their light-hearted tears, Jim Buck’s passionate but often strict messages, and Tammy Buck’s neon personality and makeup.
Their ministry quickly grew, and from their new base in Fort Mill, South Carolina, down the road, they built a multimillion-dollar empire that included one of the largest theme parks in the world, American Heritage Park, on the back of small donations from hundreds of thousands of believers, some of whom pledged their life savings to them.
But PTL – short for “Praise the Lord” or “One Who Loves” – collapsed in 1987 when The Charlotte Observer reported that PTL paid more than $250,000 to a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, with whom he had had a tryst years earlier. Barker confirmed the encounter to the Observer but said he was “evilly manipulated by treacherous former friends and later colleagues who persecuted me with the help of a female accomplice.”
Further reports revealed the Barkers’ lavish spending, including an air-conditioned dog house and gold-plated bathroom fixtures at their lakeside home. The Barkers resigned from PTL, and in 1989 Barker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years in prison; he served less than five years before being paroled.
Tammy Bakker firmly supported him for several years, but in 1992 she filed for divorce. She married a man who undertook much of the construction of American Heritage and provided much of Hahn’s financing, and slowly rebuilt her life as a Christian television personality who deliberately winked at her image before secular audiences. She died of cancer in 2007.
Jim Bakker returned to ministry after his release from prison and launched “The Jim Bakker Show” in 2003 with Lori Bakker, whom he married in 1998.
Buck’s message this time was very different – apocalyptic and dismissive of the prosperity gospel that made him famous. The show focused on a survivalist message, with Barker building a new business based on promoting unregulated supplements. In 2021, he and his church settled a Missouri lawsuit that accused him of falsely claiming that a health supplement called “Silver Solution” could cure COVID-19.
“He was a pioneer in Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend and someone I was honored to walk side by side with for so many seasons of life and ministry,” Lori Buck said Monday night in announcing his death.