JIM BAKKER
On December 1, 1994, federal prison inmate
#07407-058 was released from serving what was originally a forty-five year
sentence. His crimes included mail and
wire fraud, raping a woman who worked for his company, and using company funds
to purchase her silence. His wife
divorced him while he was in prison. He
lost all that he had accumulated in his lifetime. The IRS claimed that he owed around
$6,000,000.00 in back taxes.
His original sentence had been reduced
to eight years of which he ended up serving about five years.[i] He was 72 years old at the time of his
release.
James Orson Bakker, better known as
Jim Bakker, rose to national prominences as a televangelist preaching the
gospel of prosperity. Along with his
wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, he developed a successful Christian retreat and theme
park in South Carolina and hosted a nationally broadcast television show.
At his sentencing hearing, the
presiding judge noted that Jim Bakker, "had no thought whatever about his
victims and those of us who do have a religion are ridiculed as being saps from
money-grubbing preachers or priests."[ii] After
his release from prison Jim Bakker admitted that his prosperity theology was
not biblical.[iii]
Jim Bakker was indeed a
“money-grubbing preacher”. It is one
thing when a businessman or woman, motivated by greed, labors mightily to part
us from our money but it is something entirely different when one of our own, a
preacher for example, is found to have defrauded us. It hurts worse.
We have come to expect financial fraud
from some segments of society. Financial
advisors are a good example of that expectation. But, Christian men and women are supposed to
be above that. So, it hurts worse when
someone like Jim Bakker is found to have been a fraud.
What began as an allegation of rape by
former staff member, Jessica Hahn, quickly morphed into an accounting fraud
case. Bakker was forced to resign and
Jerry Falwell succeeded him. Falwell
called Bakker “a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and ‘the greatest scab
and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history.’”[iv]
The egregiousness of Bakker’s actions
is recorded in Judge Wilkinson’s opinion for the United States Court of Appeals
for the Fourth Circuit.
Bakker promised television
viewers that he would limit the sale of partnerships to ensure that each
partner would be able to use the facilities annually. Appellant, however,
oversold the partnerships. He promised, for instance, to limit the sale of
Grand Hotel partnerships to 25,000 but actually sold 66,683. In addition,
Bakker used relatively few of the funds solicited from the partners to
construct promised facilities. In fact, of the proposed Heritage Village
facilities, only the Grand Hotel and one bunkhouse were actually completed.
Instead, Bakker used partnership funds to pay operating expenses of the PTL and
to support a lavish lifestyle. This extravagant living included gold-plated
fixtures and a $570 shower curtain in his bathroom, transportation in private
jets and limousines, an air-conditioned treehouse for his children and an
air-conditioned doghouse for his pets. This combination of overselling
partnerships and diverting partnership proceeds meant that the overwhelming
majority of the partners never received the lodging benefits Bakker promised
them.[v]
According to Time magazine,
Bakker sold more “lifetime memberships” entitling each purchaser to a one week
stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA than the hotel could accommodate while
diverting $3.4 million in bonuses for himself.[vi] Consequently, he was charged with “24 counts
of fraud and conspiracy.”[vii]
Upon his release, Bakker remarried and
returned to evangelism.
In his biography I Was Wrong, Bakker wrote, “The more I studied the Bible, however,
I had to admit that the prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of
Scripture. My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I
was appalled that I could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that
God had not struck me dead as a false prophet!”[viii]
[i] Bakker appealed both his conviction and his
sentence. On appeal, the court found no
evidence of reversible error but it found “Regrettably,
we are left with the apprehension that the imposition of a lengthy prison term
here may have reflected the fact that the court's own sense of religious
propriety had somehow been betrayed.” United States v. Bakker, 925 F.2d 728 (1991), section 52.
[ii] United States v. Bakker, 925 F.2d 728 (4th
Circuit, 1991), section 49.
[iii] Jim Bakker with Ken
Abraham. I Was Wrong, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1996).
[v] United
States v. Bakker, 925 F. 2d 728
(1991).
[vi] Richard Osting, “Jim Bakker’s Crumbling
World”, December 19, 1988, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956551,00.html, accessed on
July 15, 2014.
[vii] Osting, “ Crumbling World”, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956551,00.html, accessed on
July 15, 2014.
[viii] Jim Bakker with Ken Abraham. I Was
Wrong, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1996).