Jim Bakker, the Michigan-born preacher who rose from tent revivals to lead one of the most recognizable Christian broadcasting operations in America before a sex scandal and financial crimes brought it down, has died. He was 86.
His second wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death in a statement, saying he died Monday. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
In her statement, Lori Bakker described her husband as a groundbreaking figure in religious broadcasting while emphasizing the personal loss. She called him a pioneer of Christian television and said he had been her husband, her closest friend, and a man she was honored to stand beside through many seasons of life and ministry.
For much of the 1980s, Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye, were among the most visible couples in American evangelical culture. Their signature program, "The PTL Club," drew an audience that at its height reached as many as 13 million viewers a night, according to the account of their ministry's peak in the mid-1980s. The letters PTL stood for "Praise the Lord."
The ministry's reach extended well beyond television. It included Heritage USA, a Christian-themed park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which became a destination for followers and a symbol of the empire's scale. Bakker was photographed at the complex in March 1987, standing in front of its water park.
Their prominence also made the couple a fixture of pop culture. Late-night comedians frequently mocked them in the 1980s and 1990s, and "Saturday Night Live" parodied them. Their lives later became the subject of a theatrical film, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," released in September 2021.
Bakker's path to national fame began far from the television studio. He was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. The two married in 1961 and left college to begin a traveling ministry, with him preaching and her singing and playing the accordion as they moved across the country, visiting churches and tent revivals.
That work brought them to the attention of televangelist Pat Robertson. In 1965, they launched a children's program on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. A year later, Bakker was hosting "The 700 Club," a Christian talk show that became a long-running fixture on the network.
He departed CBN in 1972. Two years later, he formed the PTL Satellite Network, and "The PTL Club" became its flagship program. The show's success turned the Bakkers into household names within evangelical Christianity and gave them a platform that reached millions of homes.
The empire eventually collapsed under the weight of scandal and legal trouble. Bakker lost the ministry he had built after a sex scandal and financial crimes, a downfall that became one of the most widely covered episodes in the history of American televangelism.
In later years, Bakker and Lori Bakker settled near Branson, Missouri, an entertainment town in the Ozarks. They began filming "The Jim Bakker Show" there after it launched in 2003, continuing a broadcasting career that had begun decades earlier.
His health declined in the years that followed. Bakker suffered a stroke in 2020, an event that marked another difficult chapter late in his life.
The arc of Bakker's career reflected both the enormous reach of religious broadcasting in the late 20th century and the fragility of the institutions built around charismatic leaders. At its peak, his ministry commanded a nightly audience in the millions, operated a theme park and hotel, and helped define how evangelical Christianity presented itself on television.
That same visibility made the eventual reckoning more dramatic. The combination of a sex scandal and financial crimes stripped him of the empire, and the story became a cautionary tale about the intersection of faith, fame, and money in American public life.
Even so, Bakker remained a recognizable figure, and his influence on Christian television endured long after the PTL era ended. The program he hosted in Missouri carried his name and kept him in front of audiences into the 21st century.
Bakker is survived by his second wife, Lori, and by a legacy that includes both the pioneering broadcast work his wife praised and the scandal that defined how many Americans remember him.
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