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Scamvangelist Jim Bakker, who spent decades of his life convincing gullible Christians to fork over their money, health, and critical thinking skills in order to make himself wealthy, is finally dead at 86. The cause of his death wasn’t given, though Bakker had a stroke in 2020. Despite all his promises, Jesus never showed back up during his lifetime.
He leaves behind a legacy of grift and, I’m assuming, giant unsold buckets of apocalyptic food.
The general public may know him best as the televangelist who was married to makeup-clad Tammy Faye and whose scandals were the subject of tabloids in the 1980s.
He allegedly sexually assaulted his secretary Jessica Hahn in 1980, a claim he later denied. In 1985, he gave her $265,000 from his Praise The Lord ministry to keep her quiet. When that became public knowledge anyway in 1987, he was shunned from the Assemblies of God denomination and became a pariah even among other well-known evangelists. As the New York Times notes in its obituary, Jerry Falwell called him “the greatest scab and a cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.”
Things got worse for Bakker in 1988 when he was indicted for fraud and mail conspiracy. The Bakkers had built a retreat in South Carolina called “Heritage USA” and sold “exclusive partnerships” for $1,000 that would allow donors to spent three nights there each year. Even though they could theoretically sell only 25,000 partnerships, they sold nearly 160,000—the money was rolling in even though the Bakkers knew they couldn’t uphold their end of the deal. Bakker was eventually sentenced to 45 years in prison… but, after the appeals process, that was reduced to about five years. (He later said this incident made him one of the first victims of “cancel culture.” He also blamed witches.)
That should have ended his career.
But he was a free man by 1994 and returned to television in 2003, this time with a new wife, Lori, and his headquarters in Branson, Missouri, to begin another act.
Despite writing a book (“I Was Wrong”) in 1996 in which he admitted Jesus had nothing good to say about getting rich, Bakker knew he was good at convincing Christians to buy into his bullshit. Which is why his focus soon shifted from telling non-believers about Jesus to telling believers the return of Jesus was imminent. To survive the Apocalypse, they needed to buy his products.
Like his giant buckets of food.
He urged people to buy those up because food would become scarce and cannibalism would become commonplace.
He also regularly told viewers they needed to support Republicans. After the 2016 election, he told his audience that a Hillary Clinton victory would have “sealed God’s judgment against us” and that earthquakes would befall cities that voted for her. There was also a segment in which Trump’s “spiritual adviser” Paula White told the audience that they would be rewarded by the “Department of Treasury in Heaven” if they made donations to Bakker’s ministry so he could build a new TV studio.
His claims became even more serious in 2020.
Before the public really understood how harmful and transmissible COVID was, Bakker began selling “Silver Solution” as a “cure” for coronavirus, saying the solution would kill off the virus in under 12 hours.
It wasn’t his only claim about the liquid’s powers. Bakker said the product could get rid of all venereal diseases and prevent SARS and HIV. He added that the silver is “almost like a miracle” and that “God created it in Heaven.”
Missouri’s then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt—long before he became an embarrassment of a senator who confused the Atlanta Hawks and Iowa Hawkeyes—went after Bakker for lying to his audience. So did New York Attorney General Letitia James. They eventually got him to stop hawking the fake product and won a $156,000 judgment against him.
Beyond all that, his guests were often a mix of fellow hucksters like Mike Lindell and right-wing propagandists. Even when he wasn’t selling bullshit in a can, Bakker spent years poisoning the minds of his viewers. It was lucrative enough that a new generation of grifters now knows exactly how to use Jesus and fear tactics to convince conservative Christians to open their wallets and shut off their brains. Bakker didn’t invent scamvangelism, but he was arguably the godfather of it.
He never truly apologized for a life of grifting. Whenever he repented, it was an intermission in between scams.
So what’s his legacy? Saying he was a Christian hypocrite would be too easy. He’s someone who realized early on that religion could be used to fleece people—and that television was an excellent way to get his message out to the most ignorant viewers in the country. By constantly scaring them, then offering his products as the only biblical way to respond, he became wealthy. And despite a relatively brief stint behind bars, he never truly faced consequences for the harm he caused. His ministry was never about saving souls. It was always about finding the most vulnerable people, highlighting their anxieties, turning that fear into cash, and claiming his critics were enemies of God.
That’s not just a Christian thing anymore. It’s the Republican Party in a nutshell. If Bakker wasn’t such a human punchline in his later years, you can easily imagine him fitting right in with the Trump administration.
It would be deeply dishonest to treat Bakker like a “pioneering televangelist” who merely experienced a “fall from grace.” That assumes he had any grace to begin with. He was a grifter from the get-go. A convicted fraudster who found the spotlight again and picked up right where he left off, exploiting Christians by convincing them the end was near.
By the way, in all the obituaries of Bakker I’ve seen today, none of them pay proper respect to Right Wing Watch, which has chronicled his bullshit so thoroughly, especially over the past two decades. I doubt people would understand just how harmful Bakker has been in the years since he returned to television if not for the constant clipping they’ve done. While Bakker’s biggest scandals were national news stories in the 1980s, he’s spent the past two decades effectively operating in a Christian bubble that hasn’t always spilled over into public view. When it does, it’s because of sites like RWW. Support them if you can.
Everyone dies. Not everyone is mourned. Or deserves to be. Some people's deaths make the world a better place. This is one.
Say something good about the dead.
He's dead. Good.