University of Virginia Library

Ch 1: Getting Saved from the Televangelists

He would combine in one association all the moral organizations of America perhaps later, the entire world. He would be the executive of the combination; he would be the super-president of the United States, and some day the dictator of the world.

--Sinclair Lewis,
Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry was as loathsome a character as has ever been born in the mind of an American writer. The hypocritical, slick-talking Gantry consumed great quantities of whiskey, seduced church secretaries, and removed the choir robes of countless virgins, all without the slightest qualm of conscience; he stole from little old ladies and lined his pockets with offerings from the collection plate. The tough-talking evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer, another Sinclair Lewis character, said Gantry was ". . . an ungrateful dog that bit the hand that took [him] out of the slimy gutter, . . . a liar, a ignoramus, a four-flusher, and a rotten preacher." [1]

A social critic whose satirical account of a simpler America won Lewis the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, the controversial novelist's special targets were those who, in the name of religion, preyed upon America's innocent and uneducated preachers of an old if dishonored American evangelical-fundamentalist tradition.

Like the contemporary American humorist Garrison Keillor, the creator and until mid-1987 host of the popular radio program "A Prairie

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Home Companion," Sinclair Lewis hailed from a small town in Minnesota. But, unlike Keillor, who romanticized and celebrated the people and folkways of backwoods and main streets of small-town America, Lewis rejected his midwestern roots in favor of the secular culture of sophisticated city life. Whatever the validity of Lewis's lessons and their relevance today, it is important not to lose sight of two critical facts:

First, Sinclair Lewis hated religion, and he hated the religious more than he hated folk lawyers, physicians, hypocrites, conformists, and all provincials. If anyone in America detested fundamentalist religion more in his time, it surely was newspaper editor H. L. Mencken, to whom Lewis dedicated Elmer Gantry. In his coverage of the Scopes "monkey" trial, Mencken portrayed prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan and his fanatical fundamentalist friends as poor, ignorant vestiges of an archaic people outside the mainstream of American life.

Lewis's Elmer Gantry told "mainstream" America about how these fundamentalist ignoramuses were victimized by vulturous vipers clad in holy vestments. The first sentences of Lewis's novel introduce the reader to both the character of his preacher and the mind of the creator: "Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk." [2] And in the closing scene of Lewis's pamphleteering attack upon evangelical preachers, Gantry extricates himself from yet another scrape this one another "inexcusable intimacy" with a church secretary. On his knees before a sanctuary packed with people shouting Hallelujah to assure the Reverend Doctor Gantry that they believe in his innocence, the hypocritical preacher turns heavenward and prays:

O Lord, thou hast stooped from thy mighty throne and rescued thy servant from the assault of the mercenaries of Satan! . . . Let me count this day, Lord, as the beginning of a new and more vigorous life, as the beginning of a crusade for complete morality and the domination of the Christian church through all the land. Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation! [3]

And the second fact about the Elmer Gantry character? It is all too easily forgotten in Lewis's seductive caricature that Elmer Gantry

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never existed. He is a fictional character drawn by a writer who hated evangelicalism.

Yet Lewis's stereotype survives just as certainly as do Mencken's frivolous fundamentalist fools. But today the evangelical's message also survives, albeit in television studios, instead of from hastily constructed wooden tabernacles; only the site of the heavenly hoax has changed.

The conniving and lecherous televangelists featured in many a contemporary television drama are fictional too. But everybody, especially those who know nothing about religious broadcasting, "knows" that these video vicars are but mirror images of those who appear on Christian networks.

Few evangelicals today have read Elmer Gantry, but Sinclair Lewis's sinister novel seems to be required reading for anyone who wants to produce a made-for-television movie or an episode of a soap opera or mini-series that features a TV preacher. An ABC television movie entitled "Pray TV" left viewers with little doubt that the message was about preying and not praying. Portrayals of televangelists in such series as "Murder, She Wrote," "Mike Hammer," and "Spencer for Hire," among others, are straight out of ElmerGantry.

This Gantryesque imagery in today's fictionalized televangelism centers on money and power to stagger the imagination; to protect their turf and hide their lecherous lifestyles, the characters portrayed have no qualms about living on the edge, even outside of the law. Lying is not a defensive measure to save one's hide. It is, along with sweetness and slick talk, a means to whatever ends are desired. And, it is assumed, every high-rolling TV preacher must have a carefully concealed Swiss bank account as insurance against the possible future discovery of his fraudulent religious racketeering.

Exaggerated stereotypes portrayed to America through the mass media carry the day outside the Bible Belt. And, like all significant stereotypes, part of the success of the image rests on the viewer's unfamiliarity with the person or group being portrayed. The negative stereotype so fits "mainstream' America s preconceptions that a large proportion of those who have never switched the dial to a religious program are convinced that the caricature is literally true to life.

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For more than 200 years, America's great evangelists have been colorful and controversial. And a few of them have been rascals. But most have been honest men and women, doing the best they could by the means available to them to preach the gospel. Still, the Gantry caricature obtains, and the worst characteristics of the "bad apples" are lumped together and applied indiscriminately to all televangelists.

At least this is the way it seemed to the knowledgeable few studying the video vicars who bring religion into the comfort of our living rooms.

But then came the stormy month of March 1987, which seemed to confirm that Sinclair Lewis was right after all. It began with God's promise that this would be Oral Roberts's last month on earth if Oral's followers did not produce $8 million in "ransom money." While Islamic Jihad routinely holds hostages in the name of Allah, this was a first: God Almighty, in Christian guise, had become involved in holding a hostage for ransom.

The media were having so much fun with the Roberts story that they almost missed the announcement that Tammy Faye Bakker, star of the PTL (Praise The Lord or People That Love) Network's live daytime drama, "The Jim and Tammy Show," had entered the Betty Ford Center for drug rehabilitation.

Then, just as reporters were descending upon Tulsa, Oklahoma, to report on the countdown to see whether Oral would raise enough money to buy more time, a sex scandal involving Tammy Faye's husband, Jim Bakker, began unfolding at their headquarters in Heritage USA, the Christian retreat-cum-theme park at Fort Mill, South Carolina just south of Charlotte, North Carolina).

Poor Oral. For years this Pentecostal preacher, who began his ministry in a tent on the sawdust trail of revivalism, had described his wrestlings with the Devil in lurid detail. With his vast modern communications machinery, Oral was having a devil of a time persuading his followers that God was holding him hostage; he looked straight into the television cameras and told his viewers that God was not fooling around. Roberts sent out millions of direct-mail letters to advise people of the gravity of the situation your money or my life.

But the bucks were not coming in fast enough to meet God's ultimatum. So Oral took a calculated risk. He reasoned that if he could get the attention of the secular media in America, they would write about his plight. He believed that many of his followers who had

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strayed would, upon learning how serious the situation was, respond to his clarion call for help.

His strategy worked splendidly. Oral and son Richard Roberts, who has his own television program, complained that they didn't appreciate the cynical spin the secular press was putting on the story. But privately they knew that the secular media's coverage would get the attention of backsliders from their ministry. After all, publicity is the money game's name; it wouldn't be long before the postman started delivering bags and bags of money.

All fund-raising campaigns lead toward a crescendo. Like a giant fireworks display, everything builds toward the grand finale. Managed properly, the final thrust can push a fund-raising campaign well over its stated objectives.

Just as Oral was moving toward his triumphant grand finale, the scandal broke at Heritage USA. Before Oral could utter, "Something good is going to happen to you," something horrible happened to his fund-raising campaign. The media abandoned him. A hundred reporters grabbed their notebooks and tape recorders and cameras and headed for the Tulsa airport to catch the next flight to Charlotte.

Oral's fund- raising scam was a Sunday school picnic compared to what would unfold at Heritage USA. For the next several months, the press experienced a jubilee of unceasing morsels of unholy conduct that produced spellbinding print and broadcast copy.

"An irresistible spectacle," Newsweek called it on June 8, in their second cover story of the scandal in as many months. [4] "The thrill of watching a Jim and Tammy Show," claimed Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, "is something comparable to the thrill of a Judy Garland show late in Garland's career, when some members of the audience showed up just to see if she'd make it through the night." [5]

Cartoonists and satirists had a field day. Doug Mirletts's cartoon strip "Kudzu" featured an iconoclastic character named The Reverend Will B. Dunn. Will's TV ministry was ruined when he got entangled with Tammy Faye in the "Mascarascam." "Church Lady," a regular on the "Saturday Night Live" TV program, asked a stammering actor portraying Reverend Bakker about his infamous encounter with the church secretary in a Florida hotel, "Were her naughty parts engorged and tingling?" [6]

But the commentary wasn't all in fun: ". . . [B]eneath the little- girl

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sweetness and outrageous wigs and false eyelashes," wrote Jean Seligmann, "Tammy Faye Bakker is as shrewd as Imelda Marcos and probably just as unrepentant about her excesses."

From the beginning, it was live soap opera, unlike anything that had ever happened in the history of broadcasting. The sex, the hypocrisy, the pillaged coffers of PTL, the unholy name- calling among some of the biggest stars of televangelism; investigations of PTL by the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service, the South Carolina Tax Commission, Congress, and others all were sordid elements of a seemingly endless, sleazy, real-life soap opera. And, unlike most religious donnybrooks in American history, this story developed its own momentum and just wouldn't go away.

For sheer entertainment, this was better, juicier, than any episode of "Dallas" or "Dynasty," and it was a story that would never have made it past the network censors. Because it was "news," tens of millions of Americans were able to watch it on prime time and read about it in USA Today. Detroit Free Press cartoonist Bill Day portrayed a family in front of the TV as the announcer warns, "Before we do the religious news, we urge all children to leave the room." [7]

By any standard of soap sleaze, it was a spectacular first-class drama. This was not Burt Lancaster portraying Elmer Gantry; it was life imitating art. Elmer Gantry was alive and well.

Some accused the mass media of perpetuating a circuslike spectacular, and there is some evidence that they did. By June of 1987 ABC's "Nightline," for example, had devoted eleven full programs to the scandal. The ratings soared. Almost from the beginning of the story, USA Today and the Washington Post assigned at least two reporters full-time to cover it. Yet the media didn't create the characters or write the script; they merely provided the set for the action.

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, once the stars of the PTL Network's "Jim and Tammy Show," with no more than a million viewers, were suddenly propelled into superstardom. The story emerged principally from the Bakkers' antics what they did before the scandal broke, as well as their unrepentant obsession with picking up the fantasy where it had left off before their "exile" to their plush desert residence in Palm Springs, California.

The Bakkers seemed unaware of or unconcerned about the havoc they were bringing down upon the entire enterprise known as religious

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broadcasting. They were too self-centered to care. From the very moment of their departure from PTL, Jim Bakker's sweet words were accompanied by bitterness, defiance, and a determination to blame others for their downfall. In his televised statement of resignation on March 19, 1987, Bakker decried the Charlotte Observer for twelve years of incessant attacks and a new "campaign to defame and vilify me." And of his sexual encounter with the former church secretary in 1980, he said he was "wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends . . . who victimized me with the aid of a female confederate." [8]

When the Bakkers made their first public appearance after resigning, Jim expressed concern for the well-being of Heritage USA and the PTL Network, forgave all their enemies for what they had done, and said he and Tammy Faye didn't want to be part of a circus. These seemingly selfless expressions were again sandwiched between selfrighteousness and preoccupation with their own well-being. Shades of Elmer Gantry:

Jim Bakker acted as if everything could be washed clean by saying, "We forgive them who have accused us." Convicted felons and others serving time in prison understand this type of theology, but it is unlikely that the federal authorities investigating illegal aspects of the Bakkers' high-rolling wheeling and dealing are likely to consider this a satisfactory recompense.

And as for their sincere concern for the fate of Heritage USA and PTL, Bakker told reporters, "We hope they will give us our royalties. We have $8 million or $9 million out there we have never received."

Jim Bakker repeatedly pleaded that he and Tammy did not want to be part of a circus, yet their antics were the main event in the center ring. When Jerry Falwell entered the picture, the Bakkers pursued guerrilla warfare tactics to make Falwell's task of putting PTL and Heritage USA back on a stable course almost impossible.

The Bakkers' return to their home in South Carolina on the eve of the new PTL board's filing for "Chapter 11" (bankruptcy) was a cynical, even pathetic act of defiance and duplicity. Instead of slipping in

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quietly to recover their personal possessions, the Bakkers returned to create another media event. Cameras were present when Tammy Faye dropped to her knees to kiss the pavement in front of their home. And loyalists obviously had been tipped off that they would make a brief appearance at the Heritage Grand Hotel.

Art Harris and Michael Isikoff, Washington Post reporters who covered the story from the beginning, described the scene:

Bakker also used the occasion of their return as an opportunity to announce that he and Tammy Faye would be back on television within thirty days. But no specific details. Just stay tuned for the next episode. All good television soaps have multiple plots and story lines that interlock. Details of one subplot are played out for a while, and then, before the audience tires, the story shifts to another theme. That's the way it happened with the new "Jim and Tarnmy Show."

There were many significant underlying themes to give the PTL scandal a cheap theatrical appeal guaranteed to keep it in the news for months. The 1987 unholy wars of televangelism brought together most of the leading figures in syndicated religious programming. Even Robert Schuller, whose theology is light years and Crystal Cathedral a continent away from the Bakker action, became involved early on when PTL counselor Norman Roy Grutman commented that people who live in glass houses should not cast stones seemingly implicating Schuller as a culprit in the alleged "hostile takeover."

The first and grandest theme tying all the other subplots together

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was the fairy-tale life of the central characters themselves. The main scene for most of the action was a fantasy world called Heritage USA, which Jim and Tammy Faye created from the dimes and dollars of those who sent their savings and Social Security checks. The sad part of the Bakker fairy tale began on March 19 when a tearful Jim told his television audience how a very mean man was about to usurp Jim and Tammy's kingdom. The ammunition possessed by this mean man (who was shortly to be identified as televangelist Jimmy Swaggart) was information about an itty-bitty affair Jim Bakker had had with a church secretary years before.

Details of the takeover plot unfolded gradually; Swaggart was about to blow the whistle on Bakker to the church elders of the Assemblies of God Church. This would lead to an investigation that would result in Bakker's being stripped of his ordination. The shame brought by all of this was not deserved, of course (God and Tammy had both forgiven Jim years before). A little-known clause in the Heritage USA charter bequeaths the entire kingdom to the Assemblies of God in the event that Jim and Tammy are not able to reign. Swaggart, being the most powerful preacher in the Assemblies of God alliance, thus would be the one to move in and take over.

A white knight named Jerry Falwell agreed to take the kingdom into custody to protect it from Swaggart's evil intentions. Two months later, when Bakker advised Falwell that he was ready to return home, Jerry replied, "Not now nor ever." Jim and Tammy brushed back the tears and told "Nightline's" Ted Koppel and 23 million Americans who had stayed up late to see this dramatic episode how they had been tricked by Falwell.

Bakker now claimed that Falwell, the man from Liberty Mountain, had become a thief in the night rather than a white knight. It was Falwell all along, they said, not the honky-tonk preacher from the Louisiana bayou, Jimmy Swaggart, who was the real villain. Falwell, with his slick-talking New York lawyer, had tricked Jim and Tammy Faye into believing that the only way they could save their kingdom was to relinquish it to Jerry temporarily.

Exhausted and bewildered, Jim and Tammy Bakker had tearfully given up their magic kingdom with its Rolls-Royces and furs and goldfixtured dressing rooms and presidential suite and credit cards and daily starring roles in their own "Wheel of Fortune."

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Ted Koppel had warned Jim and Tammy at the beginning of the "Nightline" program "not to wrap themselves in the Bible." By the end of the program, it was Koppel who had been wrapped in the mesmerizing melodramatic tragicomic fantasy the couple had spun.

Playing to Koppel and the huge television audience with words that sounded ever so sweet and loving, Jim Bakker now declared war against Falwell. They just wanted to come home to Heritage USA, but if Jerry Falwell wouldn't let them, they might start a new Shangri-La in the California desert near their Palm Springs hideaway.

Koppel advised them that this might be difficult in light of reports from Heritage USA that the mail was running overwhelmingly in support of Falwell's measures to save the spiritual Disneyland. "If the people don't want us back, if they want Jerry Falwell, then they should support Jerry Falwell," said an emotional Bakker. ". . . But if they don't, they should support Jim and Tammy Bakker." [11] The Bakkers seemed genuinely unable to grasp the reality of the tragedy that had befallen them, to say nothing of its impact on others.

A second significant subplot in this unholy religious soap involved evidence of personal misconduct, mismanagement, and pillaging of the PTL treasury. Thus, there were two dimensions to the scandal: the Bakkers' personal "moral" lives, and their mismanagement and misuse of Heritage USA resources. And just when it seemed that all the sordid details had oozed out, new disclosures and allegations of offenses emerged.

In the beginning, there was only the sexual indiscretion, when Jim Bakker, in a moment of mental exhaustion and loneliness, succumbed to the advances of a young seductress. The way Bakker told the story to Jerry Falwell, he was so ashamed that he became impotent and was unable to consummate the liaison. The hush money he paid to the woman, a church secretary, was for the sake of the PTL ministry, Bakker said.

Within hours, newspaper reporters were in hot pursuit of tips about other alleged incidents of personal misconduct. Lots of people were talking, but nobody wanted to speak on the record.

Then, on the eve of a meeting of the newly constituted PTL board headed by Jerry Falwell at Heritage USA, rumors suggested that Jim and Tammy Faye might return to retake possession of their fiefdom, and this prospect led the Reverend John Ankerberg, host of a debate

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format TV show broadcast from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to tell what he knew.

Ankerberg used first "The Larry King Show," then "Nightline," to talk generally about the sexual escapades, the mismanagement of PTL resources, and the exorbitant salaries and bonuses paid to the Bakkers and their closest cronies. Ankerberg was not explicit, but he told enough to intrigue the media. After six weeks of intensive investigative reporting, the alleged details out-Gantryed Elmer Gantry: infidelity, homosexuality, prostitution, alcoholism, even wife-swapping among top managers at PTL.

While confessing that all have sinned and come short of the glory of the kingdom of God, the Bakkers were not about to answer the litany of allegations. "Ninety-nine percent of what they [the media] have printed or said about Jim and Tammy Bakker bears no truth whatsoever," Tammy told a gathering of reporters in April outside their Palm Springs retreat. [12]

The Bakkers declined to meet their accusers. Jerry Falwell offered them that opportunity; so did the elders of the Assemblies of God, which conducted their own inquiry. When Bakker declined to appear before his district presbytery to face charges, the Assemblies of God dismissed him for "conduct unbecoming to a minister." Reverend G. Raymond Carlson, general superintendent of the church, said the "alleged misconduct involving bisexual activity" weighed heavily in the decision to unfrock Bakker. [13] Carlson noted further that the word alleged was used because Bakker did not wish to defend himself.

For many people, allegations of misappropriating PTL resources for their own personal use and the payment of huge salaries and bonuses were far more serious charges than the allegations of sexual misconduct.

The Bakkers had appointed a rubber-stamp board of directors to oversee their management practices. In return for acquiescing to Jim and Tammy's whims, several of these board members received tens of thousands of dollars in fees, bonuses, and contributions to their own projects. [14]

In 1986 the Bakkers were paid $1.9 million; since 1984, a total of $4.8 million had been paid to them. In addition, PTL monies were used for expensive homes, a palatial suite at the Heritage Grand Hotel, automobiles, lavish wardrobes, vacations, and parties. The Bakkers'

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closest associates were privy to their high living at the expense of PTL partners. They, too, were well paid. Reverend Richard Dortch, the Assemblies of God minister who many thought had brought some order and organization to the rapidly growing Heritage USA operations, was paid $240,000 in 1985 and $350,000 in 1986. He received approximately $270,000 during the first three months of 1987 before Falwell sacked him. David Taggart, a twenty-nine-year-old "personal aide" to Bakker, received $36O,000 in 1986; Jim Bakker's personal secretary received $160,000.

And then there were "consultants." James Taggart, interior decorator and David Taggart's brother, was paid $10,000 a month, but, according to the new PTL management, he had performed no services "for months."' Peter B. Teeley, press secretary to George Bush until 1984, was paid $120,000 for eighteen months to serve as a Washington "liaison"; apparently there were no written records of any services performed. [15]

When the Bakkers departed, the financial records of the organization were in shambles as they probably had been for years. No fewer than forty-seven separate checking accounts were found in the first days of the Falwell takeover. "The books are a mess," proclaimed Harry Hargrave, the Dallas-based consultant Falwell hired to become PTL's new chief executive officer [16]

Noted Jerry Nims (Falwell's CEO for the "Old Time Gospel Hour" in Lynchburg), who came in to help dig out, "This was a business organization that was totally out of control. [17] Added Nims, "For these folks, there were no rules. You're not talking about people nudging over the line. There was absolutely no line.... It was fiscal sin." [18]

Early on, it appeared that $92 million was missing. As the financial records of Heritage USA were consolidated and audited, much of this money was accounted for, but then evidence of unpaid bills began to grow. By early June, outstanding debts were estimated at $70 million owed to 1,400 creditors, and $23 million of this debt was delinquent.

Independent of the struggle between Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell was the unsightly scene of other members of the Protestant cloth taking sides and launching verbal missiles at one another. In addition to the principals of the electronic church, there emerged a large cast of walkon characters seeking a moment of glory in front of the camera.

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One subplot involved Swaggart, who had been accused of complicity in the "diabolical plot" to take over the Bakker ministry. A member of the Assemblies of God, Swaggart stepped forward and said that he had initiated a church inquiry into Bakker's personal conduct, but that it was "absurd and ridiculous" to suggest that he wanted to take over PTL.

Expressing distress about the state of affairs in religious broadcasting, he countered:

In another interview on "The Larry King Show," Swaggart claimed that Bakker's downfall represented a "very glad day, because this cancer has been excised that I feel has caused the body of Christ untold reproach. [20]

These comments aroused Oral Roberts's ire, and he blasted Swaggart while defending Bakker. The backbiting among major evangelical figures flared intermittently for months.

David R. Gergen, editor of U.S. News and World Report, commented:

Amidst all the squabbling [among] television evangelists, one man distinguished himself: The Rev. Billy Graham. He kept quiet. [21]

As weeks became months, Gergen's accolades to Graham seemed increasingly appropriate.

While Graham stood aloof in Olympian silence, few seemed ready to express appreciation to Jerry Falwell, who had committed himself to taking the muck of the Bakker scandal in both hands and doing what he could to salvage an electronic ministry in which a large national audience once held almost absolute faith. His attempt to stabilize a situation riddled with sleaze and lurid revelations, to cool tempers of colleagues inflicting injury upon themselves, their ministries, and the God they claim to serve, would receive little positive recognition.

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Falwell is no fool. He recognized immediately the ramifications of the Bakker scandal for all religious broadcasters. In this sense, he acted out of self-interest. In taking on the challenge, he knew he would risk his own reputation and endanger his "Old Time Gospel Hour" TV program and his rapidly growing Liberty University. His fundamentalist allies blamed him for fraternizing with apostates, while the Pentecostal movement charged him with interference. Meanwhile, the media, in pursuit of the hottest, juiciest religious scandal of the twentieth century, scrutinized his personal life and his ministry.

Until the scandal broke, most Americans knew Jerry Falwell as the loudmouthed, slick-talking, troublemaking Baptist preacher who helped to create the right-wing Moral Majority organization. The image of Falwell as troubleshooter and peacemaker was both ironic and incongruous.

Cynics believed that Falwell stood to profit from taking over the PTL, that he would become the giant of the God-biz industry by consolidating two major ministries. They ignored indeed, were unaware of the long history of intramural hostility between fundamentalists and Pentecostals.

Of course, Falwell received criticism both from his own fundamentalist camp and from Bakker's Pentecostal allies. The organization of a PTL Partners Association represented only a remnant of the once loyal Bakker supporters, but their presence at Heritage USA won them repeated media exposure.

When Bakker charged that Falwell tricked and double-crossed him into relinquishing his ministry, the story was treated as yet another morbid sequence in the ongoing drama. For all the information that had been uncovered regarding the Bakkers' misdeeds, press coverage gave little hint that the Bakkers' accusation might have any less credibility than Falwell's.

Suspicion that the preacher from Liberty Mountain might have sinister motives surfaced anew as his "natural" adversaries engaged in another round of Falwell-bashing. One commentator claimed, relying on credible sources, that Jim Bakker had "gained possession of a tape recording of a meeting in which Mr. Falwell and his closest associates . . . planned and plotted how they would topple Jim Bakker. " [22]

In the fallout from the scandal, there are two central issues that

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could have profound, lasting importance for American culture and the future of evangelism in America.

The first is the outcome of the criminal inquiries. On June 1, 1987, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would coordinate a multiagency inquiry into the alleged wrongdoings at Heritage USA. [23] Mail fraud, tax evasion, conspiracy to defraud, and the tax-exempt status of PTL and Heritage USA were among the announced subjects of inquiry. In late September of 1987 a federal grand jury began the long and arduous task of hearing testimony on the multifaceted allegations of misdeeds. And in October the House Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight, headed by Congressman J. J. Pickle (a Democrat from Texas), launched an inquiry into the financial accountability of religious organizations and the role of the IRS in overseeing them.

The real significance of these inquiries was not the consequences for Jim and Tammy Bakker or the empire they created, but the First Amendment and the fragile line between church and state. Public indignation over the PTL abuses was likely to provide a forum in which government agencies would gain a relatively free hand in probing any religious organization. At issue in the inquiries is not only the tax-exempt status of PTL and Heritage USA, but, ultimately, the taxexempt status of all religious organizations.

Further, efforts to guard against future abuses by religious broadcasters could result in regulations that would restrict all broadcasters. Liberal churches and secular organizations that oppose evangelical religious broadcasting could be given the power to restrict religious broadcasting.

The dilemma for the liberal churches is that whereas they would like to check the evangelical monopoly of the airwaves, they stand in opposition to government interference in religious matters.

The struggle between those who would regulate religion and the religious organizations that are poised to ward off government regulation could touch off one of the major constitutional battles for the balance of this century. If this happens, we are likely to see a realignment to bring most religious traditions in America into a single coalition.

The first evidence of this possible coalition was manifest in the mid1980s, when the Justice Department indicted and subsequently convicted the Reverend Sun Myung Moon for tax evasion and conspiracy.

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While not supporting Reverend Moon's unique blending of Christianity with eastern religious traditions, various religious groups of nearly every ideological and theological persuasion filed amicus curiae briefs, arguing that the Justice Department had arbitrarily encroached on domains protected by the First Amendment.

The second significant issue is the impact of the scandals on all religious broadcasting. So serious are the scandals that they have shaken this powerful enterprise to its very foundations. There can be no question that the scandals have damaged all television ministries, as public opinion polls make abundantly clear. A national poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times in July 1986, and then repeated after the scandals erupted, found that every television preacher lost ground in terms of public approval. [24] A March 1987 New York Times poll found that 65 percent of the American public had an unfavorable opinion of most television evangelists. Among nonviewers, 73 percent had an unfavorable opinion, 6 percent had a favorable opinion, and 21 percent had no opinion. [25] of those nonviewers who had an opinion, 92 percent are unfavorable.

A USA Today poll found 90 percent of Americans disapproving of the fund-raising techniques of TV preachers. Of those expressing an opinion, 98 percent said they didn't believe God gave Oral Roberts a deadline to raise $8 million. And 71 percent said TV evangelists in general are out to enrich themselves. [26]

This negative image of televangelists did not emerge overnight. The Los Angeles Times poll demonstrates solid negative sentiment before the scandals broke. But certainly the scandals damaged the credibility of contemporary religious broadcasters, and, stereotypes to one side, the negative sentiment was by no means limited to nonviewers. In the New York Times poll, of those who reported having contributed to TV evangelists, 35 percent expressed generally unfavorable views about TV evangelists. The USA Today poll found about one-quarter (26 percent) who had previously contributed would not be likely to contribute again.

The ministries themselves subsequently reported sharp declines in contributions. Three months after the scandals broke, Oral Roberts, whose "Donate or call me home" campaign kicked off the tumultuous month of March 1987, claimed his ministry's revenues were off $1.5 million per month. Jerry Falwell reported income losses of $2 million

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monthly, while Jimmy Swaggart reported a monthly decline of $2.5 million.

On June 5, M. G. Pat Robertson announced on "The 700 Club" program that the Christian Broadcasting Network was laying off 470 employees, 200 of them permanent, full-time workers. Since news of the Bakker and Roberts scandals had broken in March, Robertson told his viewers, CBN's revenues were down $12 million, and they were forecasting revenue losses of $28 million by year's end. These losses were over and above revenue declines CBN had expected to occur as a result of Robertson's reduced schedule on "The 700 Club."

Robertson stated, "In the history of American Christianity we have never seen anything like this. The scandal has hit the evangelical world like a bombshell." [27] Before the scandals broke, he was making headway in his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Now Pat Robertson's presidential aspirations were whiplashed by his televangelist colleagues. The Los Angeles Times poll, for example, showed a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who reported that they would be disinclined to vote for Robertson if he were a presidential candidate. [28] In July 1986, about half had said they were not likely to vote for Robertson; that rose to 70 percent in late March of 1987. The USA Today poll in mid-1987 found 52 percent saying that the controversy had hindered Robertson's presidential aspirations, whereas only 3 percent thought the scandal would help. [29]

But presidential campaigns have a long history of taking unexpected twists and turns. Witness the swift demise of Democratic front-runner Gary Hart in the spring of 1987. It happened so quickly that it almost appeared as misdirected pious indignation intended for the wayward shepherds of televangelism.

Or witness the dramatic and quick discovery of the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, after his unexpected showing in the Iowa caucuses.

An important outcome of the prolonged public attention devoted to Oral Roberts's "donate-or-I-die" campaign and the Heritage USA scandal is that many Americans who previously lumped all conservative Christians together under the label of fundamentalists came to understand that these people, as with other groups, are a complex and diverse lot. Anyone who watched a befuddled Ted Koppel on ABC's "Nightline" try to grapple with the distinctions among funda

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mentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell, Pentecostal Jimmy Swaggart, and the more mainline Robert Schuller could see that an important educational process was at work. The more that Americans learn about the diverse styles and beliefs of the televangelists, the more they will begin to discriminate among them. Such sophistication, however modest, can only benefit Robertson's presidential aspirations. If Robertson is to have a shot at the GOP presidential nomination, he must break out of the negative mold into which all televangelists have been cast. The irony is that the religious television scandals may have provided Robertson with the opportunity to separate himself from all the others.

On October 1, 1987, Pat Robertson officially entered the presidential race. The announcement came just two weeks after Robertson beat both George Bush and Robert Dole in a much publicized Republican straw poll in Iowa. And four days later, Robertson's operatives in Michigan successfully beat back a Bush effort to change the rules for the selection of that state's delegates to the Republican National Convention. Barring some extraordinary development that would seriously erode Robertson's strength, this seemed to assure him control of forty-four of the seventy-seven Michigan delegates to the Convention.

Between Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson, America is in for the wildest primary season of the twentieth century, perhaps ever. The two preachers will dominate their respective parties, either as serious candidates or as power brokers.

Another bizarre chapter in the melodramatic soap opera starring Jim and Tammy Bakker? No. Not at all. It is a logical culmination of a process that has been unfolding for years. The growth of evangelical political strength in America is not well understood because few people have been paying attention.

Although evangelical Christians are splintered in dozens of directions theologically, common political objectives are creating a powerful new ecumenical force among them. That force stands ready and waiting to be transformed into power in American politics.

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker have lived a fantasy life that, in the spring of 1987, became theater for our amusement and entertainment. It was a great sideshow, but the main event is yet to come.

As the 1988 presidential primary process gets underway in earnest, Pat Robertson's candidacy stands to be a far more spectacular story than the PTL scandals. And it won't be a fantasy. It will be a race to

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decide who runs America and who determines the shape of American politics through the balance of this century.

Whether or not Pat Robertson wins the Republican nomination for the presidency, the process of politicizing conservative Christians will continue. And remember, these people vote. By the end of this century just twelve years away they seem destined to become the single most powerful political force in the United States.

Notes