Jim Bakker, the Michigan-born preacher who rose from traveling evangelist to leader of one of the most-watched religious broadcasting operations in American history, died Monday at the age of 86. His second wife, Lori Bakker, announced the death in a statement but did not immediately disclose a cause.
In her statement, Lori Bakker described her husband as a groundbreaking figure in religious media while emphasizing his personal role in her life. She called him a pioneer of Christian television and said he had been her husband, closest friend, and the man she was honored to stand beside through many seasons of life and ministry.
The death closes a life defined by extraordinary fame and equally extraordinary collapse. With his first wife, Tammy Faye, Bakker built an evangelical brand that reached millions of households each night at its mid-1980s peak, only for the couple to lose control of the ministry amid a sexual scandal and financial crimes. The story made the Bakkers fixtures of popular culture, mocked by late-night comedians throughout the 1980s and 1990s and parodied on "Saturday Night Live." A feature film about their lives, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," was released in September 2021.
Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and enrolled at North Central Bible College in Minneapolis, where he met Tammy Faye. The two married in 1961 and left college before finishing their studies to launch an independent traveling ministry. In those early years, he handled the preaching while she sang and played the accordion as the couple moved from church to church and tent revival to tent revival across the country.
Their road ministry caught the attention of televangelist Pat Robertson. In 1965 the Bakkers launched a children's program on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, and by 1966 Bakker had taken over as host of "The 700 Club," a Christian talk show that became a durable fixture of religious broadcasting. The CBN years gave the young preacher a national platform and taught him the mechanics of television ministry.
Bakker departed CBN in 1972 and, two years later, established the PTL Satellite Network. Its flagship program, "The PTL Club," took its name from the phrase "Praise the Lord" and became the ministry's signature broadcast. By the 1980s the show was drawing millions of viewers and pulling in substantial donations, making the Bakkers among the most recognizable religious figures in the country.
At its height in the middle of that decade, the ministry was far more than a television enterprise. "The PTL Club" attracted as many as 13 million nightly viewers, and the surrounding organization operated Heritage USA, a Christian-themed park and hotel in Fort Mill, South Carolina. The property, which included attractions such as a water park, turned the ministry into a destination for followers and a symbol of the ambition of American televangelism.
The scale of that operation also made its unraveling a national story. A sex scandal and financial crimes brought down the empire the Bakkers had assembled, transforming them from celebrated broadcasters into cautionary tales about the intersection of faith, celebrity, and money. The reversal cost them the ministry and reshaped public discussion of accountability in religious fundraising.
Even in the later decades, Bakker remained a figure in the public eye. He and Lori Bakker settled near Branson, Missouri, an entertainment town in the Ozarks, where they filmed "The Jim Bakker Show" beginning in 2003. The program kept him active in broadcasting long after the collapse of PTL, and it introduced him to a new generation of viewers who knew him less as a disgraced televangelist than as a host and commentator.
His health declined in later years. Bakker suffered a stroke in 2020, an event that limited his public appearances and underscored his advancing age. He was 86 at the time of his death.
The Bakkers' story carried particular weight because they were early and unusually effective practitioners of a format that blended worship, talk-show conversation, and direct appeals to viewers. Their success helped normalize religious broadcasting as a mass medium, and their fall prompted scrutiny of how such ministries handled the money entrusted to them by donors.
That cultural footprint outlasted the ministry itself. The parody and late-night jokes made the couple's names shorthand for the excesses of televangelism, while "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" gave their relationship and its unraveling a renewed audience in 2021. The film also drew attention back to Tammy Faye Bakker's own public life and the sympathy she attracted in later years.
Lori Bakker's statement focused on her husband's legacy in Christian television rather than the controversies that surrounded his career. She described him as a man she was honored to walk beside through many seasons, framing his life in terms of ministry and family.
Funeral arrangements and additional details about the circumstances of his death were not immediately released. The absence of a stated cause left questions that his family is expected to address in the coming days.
Bakker's death marks the passing of a figure whose career traced both the ascent and the limits of religious broadcasting in America. He helped build one of the largest televangelism operations the country had seen, watched it collapse under scandal and prosecution, and then returned to the airwaves in a smaller setting. That arc, from nightly audiences in the millions to a Branson studio and a stroke in 2020, remains one of the defining stories of the modern evangelical movement.
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