The daughter of the late televangelist Jim Bakker is apologizing to anyone she says her “family’s ministry” has harmed and is urging people to donate to LGBT groups, as she reflects on her father’s death last week.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker Redefined Faith-based Fraud
Perhaps the most famous religious fraud of the 20th century was the Jim and Tammy Bakker/PTL scandal.
Tammy Sue Bakker apologizes to those hurt by her father
The daughter of Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye Bakker has broken years of silence and issued a public apology “to anyone who has been hurt by the church or my family’s ministry over the last 60 years.” Unlike her brother,…
How Jim Bakker became the Johnny Carson of Christian TV
When I was researching my 2017 book, “PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire,” I interviewed dozens of former staffers and supporters of PTL, the ministry, television and theme park empire that the Bakkers…
Jim Bakker, who transformed televangelism, dies at 86
James Orsen Bakker, who transformed Christian evangelism via television, died Oct. 5 at age 86. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, were hosts of the daily TV show The PTL Club and built a Christian vacation village in…
How God used Jay Bakker to teach me about race and loving all people
I remember it almost like yesterday when the new kid walked into the large youth group I attended at First Baptist Church of Orlando. As the new kid walked in, he stood out not just to me but to others…
How slavery still shapes the world of white evangelical Christians
Without meaning to do so, Henry Louis Gates’ two-part series on “The Black Church” dramatically exposed the gaping chasm that divides the way Black Christians and privileged white Christians — especially white evangelicals — understand God, protest and politics. For…
Q&A with Leslie Dorrough Smith on American attitudes about sex scandals
Sex scandals are nothing new to American politics and yet have an uncanny ability to rouse the American public. Religious studies scholar Leslie Dorrough Smith’s recent work, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity, argues that this phenomenon is…