page_title: Jim Bakker
section_title: PTL
hierarchical_section_title: Jim Bakker / Career / PTL
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance sign at the former Heritage USA complex
context_page_description: James Orsen Bakker is an American televangelist, entrepreneur, and convicted fraudster. He hosted the television program The PTL Club with his then-wife, Tammy Faye, from 1974 to 1989. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
  In the late 1980s, Bakker resigned from the ministry over a cover-up of hush money to church secretary Jessica Hahn for an alleged rape. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about felony charges, conviction, imprisonment, and divorce. Bakker later remarried and returned to televangelism, founding Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri. He hosts The Jim Bakker Show, which focuses on the end times and the Second Coming of Christ while promoting emergency survival products. He has written several books, including I Was Wrong and Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead.
context_section_description: From 1974 to 1987, the Bakkers hosted The PTL Club, which functioned like a late-night talk show. Guests ranged from religious figures such as Billy Graham and Oral Roberts to entertainers such as Mr. T and Mickey Rooney. Bakker founded the PTL Satellite Network in 1974, which aired The PTL Club and other religious television programs.
  Throughout the 1970s, Bakker built a headquarters for their ministry in the Carolinas called Heritage Village. Over time, the Bakkers expanded the ministry to include the Heritage USA amusement park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Heritage USA became the third-most-successful theme park in the US at the time. Viewer contributions were estimated to exceed $1 million a week, with proceeds to expand the theme park and The PTL Club's mission. Bakker responded to inquiries about his use of mass media by saying: "I believe that if Jesus were alive today, he would be on TV".
  The Bakkers had a lavish lifestyle. In a 1990 New Yorker article, Frances FitzGerald quoted Dave Barry: "They personified the most characteristic excesses of the 1980s—the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness—which in their case were so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence." Two scandals brought down the ministry in 1987; Bakker was accused of sexual misconduct by church secretary Jessica Hahn, which led to his resignation, and illegal misuse of ministry funds eventually led to his imprisonment. Bakker was dismissed as an Assemblies of God minister on May 6, 1987. In 1990, the biographic television movie, Fall from Grace starring Kevin Spacey and Bernadette Peters depicted his rise and fall within the religious televangelist arena. On January 18, 2019, ABC's 20/20 aired a two-hour special, entitled Unfaithfully Yours, about the rise and downfall of the Bakkers.
caption: Heritage USA sign in 2007. The site is now mostly demolished.[14]
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