SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Jim Bakker had a classic rags-to-riches rise. He went from tent revivals to the top of televangelism.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PTL CLUB")
HENRY HARRISON: The PTL Television Network presents Jim and Tammy.
UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR: (Singing) Praise the Lord.
PFEIFFER: Bakker was the star of his homegrown television ministry, along with his wife, Tammy Faye.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIM BAKKER: This is a town that's not ashamed to praise the Lord, to worship God, to pray in the street. So if you want one of those memberships, be sure to call it today. For a thousand-dollar gift to the ministry, you can stay for four days.
PFEIFFER: And they did prosper. They had huge salaries, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, their own theme park, but all of that eventually soured. A scandal rocked their entire enterprise and brought both Bakkers to literal tears. It also landed Jim Bakker in prison. Jim Bakker died yesterday at the age of 86, so we've called Randall Balmer to talk about Bakker's legacy. Balmer is a professor of religion at Dartmouth College, and he's written several books about American evangelicalism. Thanks for coming on the program.
RANDALL BALMER: My pleasure.
PFEIFFER: Jim and Tammy Faye met when they were in Bible college. They got married, I think, after a third date. They dropped out of college and became itinerant evangelists. Explain how they went from that kind of start to this empire they built.
BALMER: Well, they started out doing things like puppet ministry, where they had these little kind of morality plays that they would tease out for these various audiences, and then they began to go up to radio and then finally into television. And they prospered.
PFEIFFER: We heard in that clip a reference to PTL, an acronym. Explain what that is.
BALMER: PTL stood for Praise The Lord. Critics said it stood for Pass The Loot. But it was a huge media empire. He had his own satellite, which obviously expanded his reach really across the globe.
PFEIFFER: It was both kind of a big ministry as well as a massive fundraising vehicle, is that right?
BALMER: Money was a big part of it. There's no question about that. He preached something called the prosperity gospel or prosperity theology, and this is the notion that if the believers gave their money to God, they would receive showers of blessing from Heaven back to the believer himself, although it had to cycle first through the rain barrel of the televangelists.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter) Where they took some of the water as it trickled through, it sounds like.
BALMER: They sure did.
PFEIFFER: Some people hear that fundraising call, and they just roll their eyes. But what did people love about them, and why did that message resonate?
BALMER: I think Jim and Tammy Faye were very sympathetic creatures in many ways. Jim himself was this kind of boyish, seems like kind of a fun-loving guy, didn't take himself too seriously. And I think, in a way, Tammy Faye was a very sympathetic character. She came off as being very vulnerable, and I think she was, actually. But there was something very likable about both of them.
PFEIFFER: Was there actually a message of the gospel of God, of the ministry amid all the fundraising?
BALMER: Well, I think theologians will probably be debating that for a long time. I think that many serious-minded people who study the Bible think that this prosperity theology or prosperity gospel is really a perversion of the words of Jesus. But there is a whole niche within evangelicalism that has grabbed onto that, really since the 19th century, and the cynical ones use it to enrich themselves. But a lot of people are attracted to that sort of message because they think it's a way to become upwardly mobile themselves.
PFEIFFER: As we said, this eventually all came crashing down. There was a secretary who accused Bakker of rape. He was then accused of paying her hush money. Not long after that, he was indicted for fraud and conspiracy connected to the finances of his operation. How did those scandals affect his influence?
BALMER: Well, initially, it had a devastating effect not only on PTL and Jim Bakker because the audience went down, but also the other televangelists were swept up in that tide. And this in the late 1980s was a time of televangelist scandals more generally.
PFEIFFER: Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts.
BALMER: Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart - all of them were kind of tripped up by themselves, really. They brought it on themselves. And so it had an effect on the Bakkers, certainly, but much more broadly on the other televangelists, notably Pat Robertson who, at the time, was running for the Republican nomination for president. And so he was tarred with that televangelist label, which he tried to shrug off, but he really couldn't do that.
PFEIFFER: You teach religion, as we've said, and you have famously - maybe infamously - said that you felt perverse satisfaction at Bakker's downfall and the downfall of others like him. Why did you feel that?
BALMER: (Laughter) I don't remember saying that, but I guess I (inaudible).
PFEIFFER: You wrote it. I read it in something you wrote.
(LAUGHTER)
BALMER: I said it some of the time. Well, I think anybody who takes the faith seriously, as I certainly tried to do both as a scholar and as an individual, saw in the Bakkers a perversion of Christianity. Jesus called on his followers to care for the least of these, to welcome the stranger, to visit the prisoner. And there were elements in Jim Bakker's ministry where he at least tried to do that or at least sent money in that direction. But the overall message, I think, was quite contrary to the message of the gospel.
PFEIFFER: I was reading obituaries of him today, and he's largely made out to be this laughable, colorful character. But the reader comments were much harsher. People called him a fraud, a con man, you know, greedy, conniving. They say that he helped bring some of the worst aspects of modern politics out in the open. How harshly do you think we should judge him?
BALMER: Well, I think those criticisms are fair, and I think in many ways, the excesses of the televangelist because of this flood of money coming into them was, in many ways, a prefiguration of the excesses and the corruptions we see in the political culture today. And in many ways, I think Jim Bakker was largely responsible for that.
BALMER: Really? You would pin that on him.
BALMER: Well, I think the political dimension, I think, is probably more of a leap than many people would want to make. But to me, the parallels are striking. That is, you have an industry, whether it's politics or broadcasting, flooded with money, far more than anyone can really imagine, and it brings corruption. And in the case of Jim Bakker, as well as the other televangelists, there was no real accountability, just as there is no accountability now in politics.
PFEIFFER: Do you think that ultimately Jim Bakker did more good or more damage to the Christian evangelical community?
BALMER: I would probably come down on the side of damage. I think he distorted the teachings of Jesus. He brought shame, scandal on the church and on believers themselves. That said, I have to acknowledge this because I've talked to some of these folks who say that Jim Bakker helped them. His teachings helped them out of some sort of depression or some sort of, you know, spiritual crisis. And they want to give him that credit, and I have to acknowledge that.
PFEIFFER: That is Randall Balmer. He's a religion professor at Dartmouth College. His most recent book is "America's Best Idea: The Separation Of Church And State." He's been talking with us about the death of televangelist Jim Bakker. Thank you very much.
BALMER: Thank you, Sacha.
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