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Independent (England), June 15, 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/
The life of Jim Bakker, the world's most famous fallen tele-evangelist,
has always been about numbers, and we are not just talking hymns
and psalms. There was the $1.9m salary he paid himself in 1986,
the last full year that he led the Praise The Lord (PTL) Ministry
that he founded in 1972 with his thickly mascara'd wife, Tammy
Faye. At the time, he owned six luxury mansions, 47 bank accounts
and a single Rolls-Royce. He was accustomed to raising $1m from
his TV-goggling disciples across America every two days. Then
came 1989, when he was charged, and convicted, on 24 counts of
fraud and conspiracy for stealing $3.7m from his flock to fund
his fabulous lifestyle.
We could go on in this vein for ever. It was never exactly clear
how many sexual partners (allegedly both women and men) he enjoyed
in those crazy days before his reckoning with the law and crushing
humiliation. We do know he paid $265,000 in cash to buy the silence
of a church secretary he had been involved with in 1980.
The opulence of the Bakkers' lifestyle at the height of their
reign could not be measured in simple figures, however. They
enjoyed the American Dream, but a garishly inflated version of
it. They had an air-conditioned dog kennel and gold-plated bathrooms.
Theirs was the kind of money that bought everything except good
taste. Tammy Faye, who used glove puppets to help explain the
Word of the Lord on air, is still seen today as the gold standard
for eye shadow run amok. There is even a documentary film about
her simply called The Eyes of Tammy Faye Bakker. Jim had a monkey
face. His apple-shiny cheeks contrived to look at once bloated
and stretched.
The Bakkers flaunted their wealth and used it to raise more and
more of it. They offered a model of extravagant living that viewers
drank in, presumably not in a spirit of post-modern irony. At
its peak, the PTL broadcasts touched 13.5 million American households
every day. The Bakkers are still being pursued for $3m (£1.9m)
in unpaid income tax.
But there is one number, above all, that Jim Bakker, will never
forget. It is 07407-058. Put "Inmate" in front of it,
and you will see why. Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in federal
prison for his crimes, even though some of the counts against
him were later reversed and in 1994 he was released after only
five years behind bars. By then, Tammy Faye had divorced him
and Bakker, we all assumed, would fade into shamed obscurity.
One thing was for sure, he told one interviewer shortly afterwards
- he would never preach on television again.
He did write a book, however, simply called I Was Wrong. And
then, lo and behold, Bakker was wrong again. Not only is he preaching
once more, but he is doing it before the cameras. Second chances
are encouraged in Christian teaching and, for sure, they are
allowed in America. For proof, you need look no further than
a joint called the Studio City Café in Branson, Missouri,
a folksy tourist town that peddles God and country music to Middle
America in roughly equal measures.
Since January, Bakker, 63, and his new wife, Lori Graham Bakker,
have been turning up here each weekday morning to record an hour-long
show of music, pious chat and, of course, old-fashioned preaching.
The show is being carried by a growing roster of television stations
across America and, via satellite, around the world. Assisting
them are 20 Christian singers doubling as waitresses and cooks
and, on most days, a celebrity guest of questionable calibre.
Tony Orlando was on recently, and if you can't quite pin him
down, he is the man who sang "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round
the Ole Oak Tree" with Dawn. On hand every day to ensure
an atmosphere of wholesome devotion to Bakker, are the paying
customers of the 260-seat café, nearly all tourists visiting
Branson, cheering him on while shovelling down barbecued ribs
and eight-inch-high chocolate gateaux.
Bakker, in other words, has made a swift journey from shamed
to shameless. When the new Jim Bakker Show hit the airwaves in
January, it was 16 years to the day since his last PTL appearance.
Yet the sins that were subsequently unearthed were surely enough
to make any resurrection in the TV evangelising business an utter
impossibility. Chief among them was his success in persuading
countless viewers to donate sums of $1,000 or more to purchase
"lifetime partnerships" in a hotel complex at his glitzy
Christian theme park in North Carolina called Heritage USA.
The theme park, with a Main Street to rival Disney World's, certainly
existed - but the hotel never did. It was the biggest time-share
scam ever conceived, cloaked in the false respectability of the
name of God. Thousands of American souls, mostly retirees, found
they would be unable ever to get their money back. Bakker was
defrocked by his denomination, the Assemblies of God, for "conduct
unbecoming of a minister", and all of America, and his fellow
television evangelists, turned against him. Jerry Falwell publicly
declared Bakker a sexual deviant, an embezzler and a liar. After
taking over the PTL Club, as it was known, and taking it into
bankruptcy, Falwell called its founder "the greatest scab
and cancer on the face of Christianity in two thousand years
of church history". Few at the time disagreed.
Bakker has since contended that his years in prison were his
salvation. He re-read all the scriptures and crucially concluded
that the so-called "prosperity preaching" of his PTL
days - wherein he equated dollar-wealth with godliness - was
misguided. For a while, Bakker lived by his new creed that God
also attended to the poor. He moved to Los Angeles where he worked
for a ministry working in a city ghetto. It was there that he
met his new wife, with whom he is now raising seven Hispanic
foster children. Later the couple moved to Florida where they
founded a Christian camp for inner-city teens, called the New
Covenant Fellowship. And, as he did so, Bakker discovered that
he was not quite the pariah he imagined. When he addressed a
Christian leadership conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1995,
when he was barely out of prison, 10,000 clergymen cheered and
gave him a 15-minute standing ovation. "I thought people
would spit on me," he later recalled. "Instead they
received me with open arms."
Bakker recently commented that it was a "supernatural act
of God" that got him back in front of the cameras. He may
also have been inspired by his ex-wife, Tammy Faye. In 1994,
she married Roe Messner, a construction contractor who used to
be one of Jim's best friends and who helped build Heritage USA,
and now she too is exploiting her notoriety on the tube. With
a little-known actor, Jim J Bullock, she has a cable chat-show
featuring D-list Hollywood guests, entitled The Jim J and Tammy
Faye Show. She talks Tinseltown and glamour but leaves God well
out of it.
But, in fact, most of the credit for Jim's resurrection goes
to a Branson businessman called Jerry Crawford. Crawford's unbroken
admiration of Bakker stemmed from his memory of visiting Heritage
USA many years earlier, an experience, he has since claimed,
that saved his then crumbling marriage. Crawford owns the Studio
City Café in Branson and persuaded Bakker that it was
the perfect venue for a television comeback. Relying on the sweat
partly of volunteers and the broadcast talents of other devotees
of Bakker, the restaurant was hastily converted in time for January's
launch. It remains a shoe-string affair. Fabulous has made way
for folksy and Bakker cuts a self-consciously humble figure.
"Oh my, I never really planned to come back on television,"
commented Bakker himself. "I had been sick for two months
before the show started, and I think it was related to my losses
before, to the press, and what I've been through. I think it
was just my body saying, 'No! No! Don't put your head above the
crowd. You'll get tomatoes thrown at you again.'"
And the reception has been remarkable. "I've never been
welcomed so wonderfully anywhere in my life," Bakker said
of Branson and his new audiences. "I'm beyond excited, I'm
overwhelmed." His show airs daily on 30 Christian broadcast
television stations around the US, even though in some markets
the time-slot is in the small hours. It is taken by 200 cable
channels and, most recently, reaches homes worldwide via the
Christian Television Network's "Angel" satellite. "We
didn't really get any flak at all [for putting Bakker back on
the air]," commented CTN's president Bob D'Andrea. "We've
had a lot of favourable comments that people are glad to see
Jim back."
And among the folks packing the Studio City Café, you
will even find a few who donated to PTL and to the hotel scheme
and lost everything they gave. But, apparently, there is just
something about Bakker they cannot resist. And they forgive him.
"We lost money," Bill Armstrong, recently retired from
a metal casting company, told a reporter from the Springfield
News-Leader after visiting the café and watching Bakker
do his thing again. "He's forgiven." And people respond
to his new low-key tone. "We don't come as someone who has
all the answers," Bakker insisted. "We don't come as
examples. We come as a demonstration of God's restoration."
He may not want to be an example - prison is seldom something
the average viewer aspires to - but Bakker has not been able
to resist digging out some of the trappings of his old incarnation.
A few of the more valuable paintings that used to adorn the walls
of Heritage USA are once again on view in the café, including
four huge paintings of Jesus by Joseph Wallace King. And on a
small wall just next to the kitchen, fans can find a collection
of framed photographs, harking back to the days when Bakker hob-nobbed
with presidents and tycoons. Bakker can be seen posing with Jimmy
Carter, Richard Nixon and George Bush Sr. There is even a frame
exhibiting an engraved napkin ring and other mementoes from Air
Force One from the day in 1980 when President Carter invited
him on board to help him pray for the American hostages in Iran.
So, what about Bakker's old fetish with numbers? At what stage
in his show, you may be wondering, does he stare deep into the
lens of the television camera and implore his new-found flock
to send their dollars to Branson? Wouldn't it be nice to build
a Bakker motel adjacent to the café, at least? No, that
is not part of the script this time around and if it was, you
can be sure that Bakker would be scooped up by federal agents
faster than he can say "Praise be to Jesus!"
But we cannot let him off the hook completely. Someone has to
pay for the cost of the show. Programming is expensive nowadays.
So there it is, for those who make it all the way to the end
of the Jim Bakker hour - a gentle request to viewers to write
a cheque, large or small, to keep the show on the air. And donations,
believe it or not, are rolling in.
John Davies
References
http://www.christiannews.0catch.com/bakker.htm
http://www.strang.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/002728.html
http://www.wcie.net/danielstrader/
http://www.cephasministry.com/pentecostals_carpenters_church.html
http://www.christiannews.0catch.com/strader.htm
http://www.christiannews.0catch.com/hinn.htm
http://www.deceptioninthechurch.com/lewd.html
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/08/12/Floridian/Strength_in_numbers.shtml
http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/product902.html
http://www.christiannews.0catch.com/graham.htm
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