Jim Bakker, the televangelist who rose to national fame alongside his first wife, Tammy Faye, by building a sprawling Christian broadcasting and entertainment empire around "The PTL Club," has died at the age of 86.
His death was announced Monday by his second wife, Lori Bakker, who described him in a statement as a pioneer of Christian television. She said he had been her husband, her best friend, and the man she was honored to walk beside through many seasons of life and ministry. No cause of death was immediately disclosed.
Bakker's life traced an arc that seemed almost designed for the television medium he mastered: a traveling preacher who became a household name, then a symbol of both the remarkable reach and the ruinous excesses of the 1980s televangelism boom. At his peak, he was reaching as many as 13 million viewers a night, a figure that placed him among the most-watched religious broadcasters in the country.
Born in Muskegon, Michigan, Bakker attended North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. The two married in 1961 and soon abandoned their formal education to launch an itinerant ministry. He preached while she sang and played the accordion, and together they crisscrossed the country, appearing at churches and tent revivals in an era when American evangelicalism was beginning its migration from revival tents to television studios.
Their travels brought them to the attention of Pat Robertson, one of the architects of the emerging Christian broadcasting movement. In 1965, the Bakkers launched a children's program on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, and within a year Jim Bakker was hosting "The 700 Club," a Christian talk show that would become a lasting fixture of the network.
He departed CBN in 1972 and, two years later, established the PTL Satellite Network. Its flagship program, "The PTL Club" — the initials stood for "Praise the Lord" — became the engine of an operation that eventually extended far beyond television.
By the mid-1980s, the Bakkers' ministry had grown into a multifaceted enterprise. Alongside the nightly broadcast, it included Heritage USA, a Christian-themed park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina, that drew visitors who wanted to combine vacation with worship. The scale of the operation made the Bakkers cultural icons, referenced and mocked by late-night comedians and parodied on "Saturday Night Live."
That visibility cut both ways. The couple's extravagant lifestyle and emotional on-air appeals became a staple of comedy, and their story proved compelling enough to inspire "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a theatrical film released in September 2021 that revisited their rise and fall.
The fall, when it came, was swift and total. A sex scandal and financial crimes stripped the Bakkers of the empire they had constructed, transforming Jim Bakker from a symbol of religious broadcasting's potential into a cautionary tale about its vulnerabilities. The collapse became one of the defining scandals of the era, reshaping public perceptions of televangelism and prompting broader scrutiny of how religious nonprofits handled the money entrusted to them by devoted followers.
In the years that followed, Bakker rebuilt a quieter version of his ministry. He and Lori Bakker settled near Branson, Missouri, an entertainment town in the Ozarks, and in 2003 launched "The Jim Bakker Show," which they filmed there. The program allowed him to return to the format that had first brought him fame, though on a far smaller stage than the PTL network had once commanded.
His later years were marked by health struggles. Bakker suffered a stroke in 2020, an event that limited his public appearances and slowed the pace of his broadcasting work.
For observers of American religion and media, Bakker's career remains a case study in the power of television to build institutions and personalities — and in the fragility of those creations when they rest on the charisma and financial appeals of a single figure. His story also illustrated how thoroughly the boundaries between ministry, entertainment, and commerce could blur when a broadcaster's reach grew large enough.
Tammy Faye Bakker, who remained a pop-culture figure long after the PTL empire dissolved, died in 2007. Jim Bakker is survived by Lori Bakker, who said in her statement that he would be remembered first as a pioneer of Christian television, and by the many viewers who followed his ministry across more than six decades.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
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