Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: A Scandal of the Self

In the early days, Jim and Tammy Faye carried on a centuries-old tradition of religious enthusiasm that placed them beyond the boundary lines of respectable mainstream culture. They began their career together as itinerant Pentecostal healing evangelists, aspiring to their tradition’s extravagant belief in a God who answers prayers in dramatic and miraculous fashion. They became television superstars, broadcasting in 40 countries around the world, and then turned to a new dream of a theme park, and even a whole community, where good Christian families could find fun and respite from the secular world. They grew rich as they grew famous.

Then they broke apart. Jim was sent to prison for fraud after losing his ministry to a group of shrewd fundamentalist Baptists in the wake of a sex scandal. Tammy Faye divorced him during his incarceration and withdrew from the public eye. With their downfall, the Bakkers became symbols, their names a cultural shorthand for corruption and venality. They had embodied a poor person’s dream of wealth and were crushed by a public eager to see them made small again.

But in the Bakkers’ heyday, their voices were carried up into the atmosphere and sent back down to hundreds of affiliate stations, which beamed them into the homes of millions of devoted viewers. Their network was one of the very first to invest in a satellite uplink, which enabled them to broadcast their programming 24 hours a day to a global audience. “God loves you. He really does,” Jim Bakker would say at the close of each episode of The PTL Club, their signature program. Modeled on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the Bakkers’ show had dozens of guests from all corners of American culture in the ’70s and ’80s: Eldridge Cleaver, Pat Boone, Oral Roberts, Evelyn Carter Spencer, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Gary S. Paxton, Ronald Reagan, and Billy Graham, whose childhood home Bakker reconstructed, brick by brick, in his theme park. Their voices and the voices of their guests mingled in impromptu conversation in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms all over America.

University of Missouri historian of religion John Wigger’s PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire captures the thrill of the couple’s ascent and the scale of their eventual collapse. The book also provides an opportunity for reflection on the meaning of their moment in American cultural history. The PTL phenomenon is almost wholly unknown to those who were too young to watch the story unfold in the ’70s and ’80s, but it remains an important episode in the recent past, a signpost along a path to the cultural crises of the present. Although it is easy to imagine televangelism as a fad that arrived suddenly and disappeared quickly, the Bakkers represent the upswell of a strong undercurrent in the American spirit—one that still pulls powerfully on our social imagination.

To appreciate fully the Bakkers’ significance requires locating them in a spiritual lineage that extends back to early American history. A post-Reformation phenomenon in religious culture—referred to as “religious enthusiasm” in the combative literature of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe—came to have an enormous influence on American Christianity. For religious enthusiasts, the doctrines and traditions of Christianity are sometimes less important than individual intuition and personal experience. A grasp of the main themes of American religious enthusiasm as it developed historically will help to shed light on the particular appeal of the Bakkers—as well as the appeal of those who have come after them.

The American continent, wrote Monsignor Ronald Knox in 1950, “is the last refuge of the enthusiast.” Knox, a Catholic writer and friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, considered the 600-page study Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion his life’s work. The primary emphasis in religious enthusiasm, he wrote, “lies on a direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or of liturgical expression.”

In both Catholic and Protestant variations, enthusiasm knocked established Christianity off the rails. This personal spirituality was often accompanied, Knox wrote, by “a conviction that the Second Coming of our Lord is shortly to be expected” and “ecstasy, under which heading I include a mass of abnormal phenomena, the by-products, it would seem, of prophecy.” Then, too, there were the tremors and shakes, the falling into trances, and the glossolalia—outbreaks of “unintelligible utterance” believed by the utterers to be a private means of direct communication with the Lord.

Before the mid-18th century, such wild disorders were not widespread phenomena in the New World. Here Jonathan Edwards becomes a pivotal figure. Born in 1703, he was a dour and serious-minded young man, endlessly resolving to commit himself to more rigorous spiritual disciplines—until one day, as he read the Bible, his soul was stirred with “a sense of the glory of the divine being.” He later described this transformative moment: “I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapt up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.” Edwards’s study of Scripture took on a charge of delight and his pious reveries grew more intense. The experience of joy in his adult devotions would ripen into a fixation on what Edwards took to be the bedrock of God’s glory: his divine sovereignty over all things.

Edwards is remembered for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and high school history teachers paint him with the black, white, and dirty linen colors of the buttoned-up Puritans—terrified that “somewhere, someone might be happy,” as Mencken put it. But Edwards had a rich emotional life, experiencing highs during his contemplations that seem nearly inhuman, and at other times weeping over his sins with such violence “that I have often been forced to shut myself up.” Edwards’s great achievement was not his famously terrifying sermon, one of many to have elicited cries of spiritual agony during the widespread 1730s revival movement that became known as the First Great Awakening. Rather, it was his magisterial treatise arguing against human free will, still excerpted in philosophy sourcebooks today.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) [Wikimedia]

“When we ask what it is that Edwards chiefly worshiped in God,” the critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in The Stammering Century (1928),

What would become of Edwards’s ideas if we were to remove God from them? There would still be left, Seldes writes, “a powerful impulse to self-development, to exercise of the Will.” This is exactly the course that many of Edwards’s innovative spiritual descendants would take.

Edwards also believed in the power of the individual Christian’s personal connection with God. Too humble to credit this dynamic in his own experience, perhaps, he saw something trustworthy in the life and devotion of the woman he married when she was 17, Sarah Pierpont. “They say,” he wrote—can you imagine him blushing?—that God “comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on him.” The raptures inspired by direct communion with the divine, the love-interest as a partner in seeking God—these, too, would become major themes in American religious life.

John Wesley, an Englishman just a few months older than Edwards, was walking alone in 1738 while reading Edwards’s accounts of conversions and revival in New England. “Surely,” Wesley wrote in his journal, quoting the psalmist, “this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.” Greater things were still to come. Seldes writes: “Three months after Wesley had read Edwards’ account of the work of God in Northampton, physical manifestations first occurred in his own revivals.”

Wesley was the founder of Methodism, a believer in the free will that Edwards denied, and, furthermore, a believer in the prospect of moral perfection for the redeemed. He is the exemplary enthusiast in Knox’s study, and the Catholic writer lays at Wesley’s feet a large share of responsibility for wresting English religion away from doctrine and tradition and surrendering it instead to the experience, “real or supposed,” of the individual.

John Wesley (1703-1791) [Wikimedia]

It is impossible not to marvel at Wesley’s vitality: His biographers all note that from the age of 36, he traveled some 225,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons, some of them to crowds of tens of thousands of people. Knox depicts Wesley as an incessant “experimentalist” who was “forever taking the lid off to see how his gospel was working.” Across the decades of his long life, Wesley formed societies intended to pass along “methods” for faithful Church of Englanders to grow in piety, and these societies were part of a larger scheme, Knox writes, to create “not merely a church within the Church but a nation within the nation; a sort of enclave, not only in piety but in daily life.”

In America, Methodist preachers delivered their sermons and prayers extemporaneously. This practice not only helped preserve Wesley’s “experimentalism” but also made for more lively and exciting worship services. Pastors and preachers of other denominations started to follow suit. And in the years after the revolution, as the young country expanded west into the forests and frontiers, the preachers went along. It was in back-country Kentucky in 1800 that the first American “camp meeting” commenced, inaugurating a form of worship responsible for embedding Wesleyan enthusiasm deep in the American psyche. Revivalism spread rapidly. Within two decades of that first camp meeting, most of New England would be “burnt over” by revivalism—so completely consumed by spiritual mania that a traveling preacher could hardly find a soul to save for hundreds of miles.

Camp-meeting preachers shouted and gesticulated; they preached with their fists. Internally, they measured the response of the crowd and adjusted. Their noteless orations gave confidence to their listeners that the words were true; they seemed authentic, and the message they offered was preciously consoling. When an itinerant preacher would speak about Christ to an audience, “he put an end to the terror of their loneliness,” Seldes writes, “and promised them a communion, an intercession, a friend, in their friendless lives.” In this way they “smashed for a moment the systematic impoverishment of the American spirit.”

So: From Edwards and Wesley, we receive a fixation on the will, a desire to create enclaves of piety, and a belief in the possibility of the individual’s direct experience of God. In the work of their successors, such as Charles Grandison Finney, we find latent belief in the sinlessness of the true self and an approach to revival characterized by the appearance of improvisation and spontaneity. These preachers cultivated the spirits of the multitude through results-focused experimentalism in the context of camp meetings around the country, sowing in the American character the seeds of enthusiasm that would yield strange harvests in every decade thereafter. The later 19th century saw the development of quasi- and post-Christian reform movements, fads, and pop-philosophies that would call individuals to embrace their higher selves—such as “New Thought,” which centered the will in a larger project of spiritual self-advancement through the unleashing of “the creative power of constructive thinking.”

The 20th century inherited from these enthusiastic forebears an epochal optimism. Even in times of anxiety and despair, there is a hopefulness in the American self, and this hopefulness is built upon that self’s utter reality in a world of mere appearances; though circumstances change, the self remains a firm foundation. The literary critic Harold Bloom captured something of the strangeness of this in his provocative and infuriating book The American Religion. “The soul stands apart,” he writes, “and something deeper than the soul, the Real Me or self or spark, thus is made free to be utterly alone with a God who is also quite separate and solitary, that is, a free God or God of freedom.” In essence, Bloom describes a post-Protestant Gnostic cult of the self: “The American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.”

Bloom’s analysis hinges on a metaphysical intuition: that the self is uncreated, and it knows, rather than believes in, its own innocence and divinity. “Awareness, centered on the self, is faith for the American religion,” Bloom wrote, and this religion of the self “consistently leads to a denial of communal concern.” Christ is internalized to a point of blurred identity with the “real me.” Such are the fruits of what Bloom calls the “doctrine of experience”—an outgrowth from the taproot of religious enthusiasm. Christianity, Bloom suggests, was too cramped for the young, unbounded nation. Abandoning doctrinal encumbrances such as belief in original sin (or sometimes, belief in sin at all), an intuitive and endlessly innovative spirituality grew to meet this need.

Wild spirits prepared the way for the coming of the Bakkers. Distinct from mainline, fundamentalist, and evangelical varieties of Protestantism—but eventually influential in all three—Pentecostalism grew out of late-19th-century Methodist holiness movements, dramatically emerging through a revival in Los Angeles that began in 1906 and lasted for a decade. With a mandate to seek out the signs and wonders attributed to Christ’s apostles in the book of Acts, Pentecostals trembled, shouted, spoke in tongues, and did much else to startle and shock the sensibilities of average Americans. Promises of dramatic spiritual and physical healing found great purchase among those in poverty, and the new enthusiasm became disreputable both for its excesses and its hard-up—and racially diverse—demographics.

The Bakkers both came up in Pentecostal churches. James Orsen Bakker and Tamara Faye LaValley grew up in the north—Jim, born in 1940, in a paper-mill town in Michigan; Tammy Faye, born in 1942, in a poor neighborhood in Minnesota. When young, both underwent the “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” an experience of true intimacy with God made manifest in the “gift” of glossolalia. For several years leading up to high school, Jim was abused by an older man in his family’s church.

Jim and Tammy Faye met at an Assemblies of God Bible school, from which they dropped out after their 1961 wedding. Not long into their marriage, John Wigger reports, the Bakkers were swindled by a traveling evangelist who spoke of plans to buy a yacht that Errol Flynn once owned in order to “cruise up and down the Amazon River preaching to the natives.” Unable to join the jungle preacher on account of his having disappeared, the Bakkers became itinerant healing evangelists. They traveled a circuit across the Bible Belt, developing a puppet show for children who attended their events. They were once “paid with a live chicken, which Tammy turned into a pet.”

The Bakkers were discovered in 1965 by Pat Robertson, who invited them to put their puppet show on the air on the Christian Broadcasting Network he was then creating in Virginia. “The show made the Bakkers local celebrities,” Wigger writes. Jim Bakker soon also proved himself a very skilled fundraiser for the network, and he helped launch—and was the original host of—The 700 Club, CBN’s long-running talk show. After breaking with Robertson and CBN, the Bakkers spent much of 1973 in California helping Jan and Paul Crouch start another TV project, the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But the Bakkers split with the Crouches, too. Jim and Tammy Faye began planning their own TV venture and expected to run it from California. But a January 1974 telethon Jim Bakker conducted in Charlotte, North Carolina, ignited into a full-blown revival, replete with signs, wonders, and healings. The Bakkers soon decamped to Charlotte for good. They moved into an old furniture store, set up a makeshift studio, and took to the air with zeal.

The forceful extemporaneity of early revival preachers found a new form in Jim Bakker’s unscripted shows. From the beginning, he was a consummate improvisational performer and described his method as an ongoing response to the Spirit of God in each moment. American audiences—and soon, audiences in countries around the world—responded to the sense of authenticity that the Bakkers’ ad-libbed programs conveyed.

The Bakkers came to call their TV network PTL, for Praise the Lord or People That Love, and their main program The PTL Club. They consistently refused to stick to prepared scripts for their shows, giving the operation a precarious, even slapstick, feel. Tammy Faye recorded an entire episode on a merry-go-round, which caused a cast member to vomit inside his dog costume. Jim was almost pathologically spontaneous in all parts of his life; even in the network’s early days, he would often invent projects on the air without consulting anyone. “The various departments all had televisions so the staff could watch the show and find out what they were doing next,” Wigger writes.

Early guests on the show gave the broadcasts a unique edge. Wild men like Little Richard and Larry Flynt could be featured one day and Colonel Sanders and Chuck Colson the next. Tammy Faye, ebullient and charming, would sing gospel ballads and her own music between conversations with guests; her struggles with addiction to prescription medication occasionally gave her an electric, unpredictable air, and her intense feelings were never far from being broadcast across her heavily made-up face. Jim’s warm and disarming mien—he remained boy-faced well into his 50s—endeared him to visitors and viewers alike. Wigger writes that many of them came to feel as though they were part of Jim and Tammy Faye’s extended family.

Tammy Faye Bakker [Jason Seiler]

Jim and Tammy Faye embraced the charismatic culture that had kept Pentecostals on the far margins for most of the 20th century—and anyway, by the ’70s, charismatic experiences were frequent enough to feel less unfamiliar even to worshipers in mainline denominations. (Writing in 1976, Tom Wolfe would describe “charismatic faith” as an important sign of a “Third Great Awakening”—the embrace of the self during the “ ‘me’ decade.”) The Bakkers remained charismatics even as their organization bureaucratized the operations of the spirit: Phone counselors during telethons used pink “praise reports” to record healings and answers to prayer that occurred during broadcasts in response to needs that were catalogued using blue “prayer forms.”

But God’s math was a bit funny from the beginning. “Remember, facts don’t count when you have God’s word on the subject,” Bakker said of his ministry’s finances. Wigger writes that Jim Bakker copied fellow charismatic televangelist Oral Roberts’s idea of “seed faith,” which argues that those who give money in faith will be materially blessed in turn; those who don’t give to the ministry may be holding back a greater material blessing for themselves by their lack of faith. Bakker combined this abundant life message with the self-help pop-philosophy of Norman Vincent Peale, the preacher whose self-improvement mega-seller The Power of Positive Thinking directly reprised the “constructive thinking” principles of New Thought. Jim Bakker was finely attuned to the desires of his audience and helped to bless—even to sacralize—those desires with his calm, affirming message of prosperity and well-being.

As the ’70s bled into the ’80s, Bakker became obsessed with the work of building out the grounds of his broadcast center into a Christian theme park. Heritage USA was meant to offer visiting families a camp meeting experience in community with other Christians. At a building nicknamed the Big Barn Auditorium, PTL launched a new evening variety program called Camp Meeting USA, and visitors to Heritage USA could join the studio audience during broadcasts. In 1986, Wigger writes, Heritage USA was the third-most-visited theme park in America after Disneyland and Disney World. There were plans to build an enormous church—the world’s largest—as well as a fanciful lodging and ministry center called Old Jerusalem Village. Bakker hoped to eventually see the whole complex grow to house 30,000 permanent residents.

The ministry’s light and heat attracted the attention of critics and the scrutiny of authorities. When news broke in 1979 that the Federal Communications Commission was investigating PTL for misusing money, Jim Bakker went on the offensive, denouncing the agency. “Much of Bakker’s defiance toward the FCC and the press,” Wigger writes, “was designed to motivate his supporters to give more, to convince them that nothing short of heroic action could save Christian television, maybe the nation itself.” He even ordered a supposed “counter-investigation” that became the basis of a PTL documentary depicting the FCC as a wanton persecutor. When the Charlotte Observer followed up on the FCC investigation in 1986, PTL kicked off a full-dress PR campaign against the newspaper, complete with its own theme song (“Enough Is Enough!”). The government and the press could not dent Jim Bakker’s belief in his own righteousness.

But then it all fell apart. In March 1987, the Observer reported that Jim Bakker was resigning from the leadership of PTL because of a sex-and-money scandal. A church secretary named Jessica Hahn claimed that Bakker had forced himself on her in 1980. (In her recent interviews with Wigger, Hahn shies away from describing the encounter as rape.) John Wesley Fletcher, a healing revivalist and frequent guest on Bakker’s shows, had set up the encounter and may have drugged Hahn before he left her alone with Bakker; Fletcher himself then allegedly raped Hahn after returning to her hotel room later in the day. The day the story of the Hahn incident—and the $265,000 in hush money PTL paid her in 1985—came out, Bakker’s fall made all the national evening news shows. For weeks thereafter, the scandal was splashed on newspaper front pages and nattered about on radio and TV talk shows.

The Hahn story is far from the only incident of infidelity and sexual impropriety in Wigger’s account. Fletcher would later claim in a Penthouse interview that he also had three different homosexual experiences with Bakker. (Fletcher would later end his own life.) And he was apparently not the only man in Bakker’s orbit or employ to be sexually intimate with him. Wigger relays a story told by Austin Miles—a professional clown who was a show regular at PTL—in his 1989 memoir: Miles opened the door to a sauna near the PTL studio one day in the late ’70s to find Bakker and three male staffers “frolicking about in the nude . . . absorbed in playing with and massaging each other.” Incredulous and shaken, Miles says he left, heard footsteps, and hid around a corner; Tammy Faye came “storming across the room. . . . She banged her fist on the steam room door,” shouting for Jim to open it. An eyelash came free, triggering a meltdown; Miles writes that Tammy slumped against the locked sauna door, weeping—but Jim did not open it. Later, in his post-prison memoir, I Was Wrong, the defrocked Assemblies of God minister wondered whether his sexual proclivities might be linked to the abuse he experienced as a teen.

As Wigger describes, Tammy Faye had felt herself growing apart from Jim during the early ’80s. The young enthusiasts who had joined the Bakkers on their great adventure in starting PTL had gradually been replaced with fixers and yes-men who created a hard, dark shell around Jim through which Tammy Faye couldn’t see. PTL’s massive building projects left her cold. She just wanted to be on television. Utterly guileless, she was frank with viewers about her problems with prescription drugs; afraid of flying, she had to take tranquilizers to board a plane. Nancy Isenberg writes in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America that Tammy Faye claimed to derive her signature style from Lucille Ball and Minnie Mouse, and Isenberg quotes Roger Ebert as judging Tammy to have spent more of her life on TV than any other living person. Isenberg identifies Tammy’s persona as distant from both the understated dignity of aspiring upper-middle-class women and the earthy frankness of a true “rustic”; rather, she was the calculating-yet-spontaneous product of the medium she adored—her “authentic” persona curiously recalling that of the revival preachers of the 19th-century Kentucky backwoods.

“Why do you love the camera?” a producer asks her in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a 2000 documentary. Tammy Faye answers, “Because it’s not a camera; it’s people. It’s someone to talk to.” We see her make pitches for a comeback show that never happens and watch as she waits in the California desert with “dolls, dogs, and her faith” for the return from prison of her second husband, Roe Messner. (Messner was the builder behind Bakker’s Heritage USA project and the man who put up the hush money for Jessica Hahn in 1985; he was imprisoned in the late ’90s for bankruptcy fraud.) Irrepressibly “herself,” Tammy Faye can’t help but spontaneously reveal her feelings. “I like real. I’m an old farm girl; I like real,” she says in the documentary—but her fake eyelashes are, like her relationship with Christ, “just who I am.” She was one of the first Christian public figures to embrace the gay community during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and gained a cult following. The drag queen RuPaul, who narrates the documentary, was a longtime friend of Tammy Faye’s and described her in an interview as “an ascended master”—someone who “understood the complexities of life” and “made a conscious decision to focus on the light.” Tammy Faye died of cancer in 2007, and to this day, she is regarded as an icon of camp.

As for Jim Bakker, even after the Hahn encounter became public, even after his trial and conviction in 1989 on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit fraud, he continued to claim that he had no real knowledge of PTL’s shadier dealings and ran his ministry with nothing but good intentions. Wigger reports that Bakker had refused to sign checks and that he had required his security detail to keep cash on hand for him at all times—without his knowing where the money came from. Bakker’s sense of his own essential rightness seems unshaken.

A shocking passage in Bakker’s post-prison autobiography recalls Harold Bloom’s analysis. Bakker admits to an affair with Hahn, but claims it was consensual. He writes that two days after the 1980 encounter with Hahn, he visited a Christian psychologist. The doctor “knew that the only way I would find emotional health and spiritual freedom was by seeking forgiveness from God, forgiveness from Jessica Hahn, and forgiveness from myself.” So Bakker lay down on the floor of the office, “prostrate before God,” and his doctor pronounced him “forgiven of God.” The psychologist then counseled Bakker not to tell Tammy Faye about the affair.

Bakker was restored to his sense of rightness, of “emotional health” rooted in the knowledge of his essential self’s innocence, two days after he allegedly raped a 21-year-old fan of his ministry—and he went back to work. He would not tell Tammy Faye of the incident with Hahn for more than six years.

John Wigger’s book straightforwardly traces the PTL ministry’s wild arc; he gives the complicated story elegance, understated humor, and surprising emotional punch. Jim and Tammy Faye appear in its pages as deeply human and sympathetic figures. The scale of their eventual operations and their personalities alike bring their dark comedy to the cusp of tragedy; the early successes on the revival circuit seemed to presage a different ultimate outcome. Wigger expertly maps the omnidirectional money trails that perplexed investigators for years as the Bakker cohort pushed PTL into ruin. Often Bakker raised money for new projects to pay off old ones, a trend that continued until the dissolution of the ministry under Chapter 11 protection. And Wigger’s description of the cloak-and-dagger dramas of 1986, which found fellow televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell seeking in different ways to take down Bakker, provides a fascinating look at all three men—feuding captains of a burgeoning spiritual industry.

Jim Bakker today [Jason Seiler]

Following Bakker’s conviction, Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Potter sentenced him to 45 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. The sentence was reduced on appeal, and he was released on parole in 1994, having served about five years behind bars. During his sentence, Bakker has said, he spent a great deal of time trying to find his “real” self.

He remarried after he was released and found his way back into television in 2003. Based in Blue Eye, Missouri, his current ministry is called Morningside. Bakker hosts a talk show in an indoor complex that resembles Heritage USA; recently, Trump supporter and charismatic televangelist Paula White was on the show with her husband, Jonathan Cain, the keyboardist from Journey.

Bakker repudiated his prosperity preaching after he got out of prison, where he claims to have read the Bible in full for the first time. In its thornier passages, he has found a new theme for his ministry: the imminent apocalypse. Wigger visited tapings of Bakker’s new show and describes an episode in which the second half of the two-hour broadcast was dedicated to selling giant buckets of freeze-dried survival food. A journalist for the Daily Mail who also visited the ministry reported that a year’s supply of pancake mix with a 30-year shelf life costs $550. As Ronald Knox wrote in 1950, “enthusiasm is not yet dead in countries where they understand salesmanship.”

Old-school prophecies are delivered between sales pitches for apocalypse-prep, and Bakker’s wife Lori will occasionally speak in tongues during their broadcasts. According to the Daily Mail reporter, Bakker is developing the 700-acre Morningside property into “a Christian community, complete with its own water tower.”

Bakker still understands the nature of his country’s collective desires. The “me”-focused ’70s, the “greed is good” ’80s—all of that is behind us. Our nation’s new outlook is grim. The great tide of prosperity that came in after 1945 and lifted up every social class has receded; the millennial generation is projected to be the first that will earn less than their parents. In dark times, our nation’s intuitive spirituality, its doctrineless faith, offers solace: Against the threats of an outer world, it offers an inward intimacy with a God of love. Against those who claim our society rests on unjust foundations, it calls its faithful to recollection of their own essential innocence.

What Bakker, prophet of that religion, now promises is a survivable cataclysm. Bunkering down with the Lord, we will emerge to find ourselves free again of the society that restricts our freedom. Prepare, prepare, Bakker says. Listen to me. Send checks. The apocalypse is coming and most of humankind will be destroyed, but you can make it. Try the macaroni, and remember: God loves you. He really does.

Martyn Wendell Jones is an American writer living in Toronto.