Jim Bakker, Who Built 'The PTL Club' Empire, Has Died at 86
NPR reports that Jim Bakker, who with his first wife Tammy Faye built an evangelical empire around the hugely successful "The PTL Club" television show, has died at 86.
The rise and fall fit inside one sentence: an empire built around a show, lost over a sex scandal and financial crimes. What keeps the PTL story from being pure spectacle is the mechanism underneath it. A televangelism empire is financed by viewers who trust the person on screen, which means the credibility that raises the money is also the thing a scandal destroys. The ministry isn't collateral damage in that model; it is the asset being written down.
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The durable part of the PTL story is the funding mechanism: a broadcast ministry paid for by people who believed in the man delivering it.
Which makes the collapse closer to a solvency event than a moral one. The scandal didn't damage a side business; it impaired the thing the business ran on.