Part One: The Rise And Fall (And Rise) of Arch-Grifter Jim Bakker

Robert is joined by Vic Berger to discuss Televangelist, Jim Bakker.

FOOTNOTES:

1. PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire
2. Touching Empathy
3. The “Real” Reason Televangelist Jim Bakker Went to Jail
4. What happened to Tammy Faye Bakker after the PTL scandal?
5. Jim Bakker is Still Here
6. The Second Coming Of Televangelist Jim Bakker
7. Where Are They Now?: Jim Bakker
8. Jim Bakker's Christian amusement park is now a post-apocalyptic ghost town
9. Jim Bakker Freed From Jail To Stay in a Halfway House
10. 1987: Jim Bakker resigns from PTL; Jerry Falwell assumes leadership
11. Interview with Jessica Hahn
12. About Pastor Jim
13. The scandals that brought down the Bakkers, once among US's most famous televangelists
14. Televangelist Jim Bakker’s Road to Redemption
15. Apocalypse Chow: We Tried Televangelist Jim Bakker's 'Survival Food'

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M boy, that was That was not my best intro.
I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. We talk
about bad people, and my introductions run the gamut from
the sublimely brilliant to just going, and this was the latter,

(00:21):
and I apologize. My guest today is Mr vick Berger.
How you doing, Roberts? I'm doing good. How are you doing?
I'm all right? You know the best I can be?
Uh during a pandemic. I guess now, Vick, I don't
know how you describe what you do. I would describe
you as a a horror movie director who works exclusively

(00:43):
in the medium of things other people have filmed. Yeah,
I think so. I think that's a good way to
put it. I mean, I'm working with the most depressing
and h upsetting footage. But uh yeah, I definitely lean
into the horror as backed of it. But I try
to let people watch it and then leave with a

(01:04):
little bit of humor too it. Maybe maybe they'll be
able to laugh at it in a way. And you
you have among your your mini focuses. I came aware
of you from Twitter. You post your stuff on the
on the the YouTube's, as the kids call it, Um,
you have you have a real fascination with a fellow

(01:25):
named Jim Baker. If you were if you were gonna like,
if you were just gonna like summarize the what you
know of Jim Baker for our audience rolling into this,
How would you describe the man? Ah, he's a food salesman.
That's uh, that's that's what he does. And then he
uh now and then mentions a god or Trump stuff

(01:48):
like that. But first and foremost, I think he's a
he's a food salesman, a prepper. Um, that's what he
is today. But he is I guess he was pretty
groundbreaking in the fifties and sixties, is becoming one of
the first televangelists. Yeah, yeah, that's a good that's a
good short summary of the career of Jim Baker. But

(02:10):
there's a lot of details that I I think you
don't know. But before we get into this, because I'm
very excited for you to learn some of this, because
it's it's all horrifying. His whole life as a nightmare. Um,
what do you what is what stands out about Jim Baker?
Do you like? What is it that makes him such
a focus of your own work. Oh, he's you know,

(02:32):
he's pretty charismatic. And he always has a wife or
a yan with him who has like he has a type.
You know, he's a definite type. And usually that means
that she's highly medicated or you know, he's on something
dope to fucking back. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, but but

(02:54):
it seems like she, like the wife, worships him, you know,
his loves everything about him and wants to help him
out and you know, sell these buckets or get you
know whatever the grift is, selling hotel rooms or you know,
whatever it is along the way. Um, but he's uh,
he's just interesting and and um, I don't know, just
I'm just fascinated with with his entire life. Yeah, I too,

(03:19):
I'm fascinated by his life. And I guess vic we
should just we should just roll into the story because
there's a lot of there's a lot of Baker uh
to cover here. So James Orson Baker was born on
January second, nineteen forty. He was the youngest of four
children by Raleigh and Fernia Baker in Muskegon, a city

(03:40):
in Michigan that's apparently located on some big fancy lake.
If you can believe such a thing. I've never heard
of it before, but that's what they say big lakes
up in Michigan apparently. So uh. Jim was born premature,
and he spent the first days of his life on
an incubator at the hospital while his mom and dad
went home. His foot was burned by the device's heating element,

(04:01):
and so he wound up having to stay there significantly
longer than usual. So, yeah, he wasn't great at being born,
not the best at coming into the world. Yeah, um,
And and unfortunately his parents were also really bad at
nurturing um. In his nineteen seventy six autobiography Move That Mountain,

(04:23):
which is like the first of so many autobiographies, this
guy's written way more than a person should, Jim describes
how quote mom and dad considered me so fragile that
they didn't allow my brothers and sisters to even breathe
on me. As a result, during his childhood, he never
experienced the sensation of my family members touched. So that's yeah,

(04:43):
that's a huge Yeah, it kind of you. I'm not
getting that, like he didn't started to feel bad for
him already. Yeah, No, you're you're going to this kid's
childhood is fucking rough, So it was understandable that Baker's
pay ars would be extra worried for their little boy, um,
but they seem to have gone beyond mere concern. His

(05:05):
stern Dutch family, as he later described them, let caution
for their son's health lead to a complete lack of
physical contact, um and even emotional warmth. His father once
washed his mouth out with Paul Maulive soap for saying
gee whiz, so like he's no one touches him. And
there's i'll say, some unreasonable standards like ge whiz was

(05:27):
a curse word of the Baker home. Oh yeah, he
said the g W word. So his mom was also
a giant clean freak, and it was just it seems
like it. I mean, we're going to talk a lot
actually about his childhood. It all was terrible. So there's
echoes of this upbringing the modern Jim Baker. I'm not

(05:47):
going to get into a super long spiel about how
a lack of touch and infancy damages children. Now that
we're all quarantine, I think people probably probably more or
less get that, but I will say that, like if
you look at orphanage back in the day, like the
Dickensian ones where they were actually just like having kids
be alone in a giant room. Uh. The death rate
was thirty and modern researchers think that a huge amount

(06:10):
of that was not like disease or anything. It was
the fact that no one was touching these kids. There
was there was no like physical contact. Um, because they've observed. Yeah, exactly,
when you deprive infantsive touch, they stopped growing and they
can even die if they don't receive sufficient physical stimulation.
It's like an evolutionarything, right, Like, no sense in having

(06:31):
the baby exists if there's no mom or dad around
to take care of it. Um, So it's a bummer.
And uh, even when their nutritional needs are met, children
who are deprived of touching this way tend to grow
up unusually small, and they tend to score poorly on
tests and have massively elevated levels of stress hormones and
adult Jim Baker describes himself as as a child as slow, small,

(06:53):
and not particularly bright. Um Like, this is how he
describes himself and and whether or not, Yeah, it's a bumber.
He still does have the boyish qualities though you know
he is he is a tiny little guy and he's
got the got the kid face there, Yes, yes he does.
Um yeah, yeah, and whether or not, like I don't know,

(07:14):
some of that maybe him exaggerating in his own head.
But this is how he sees himself. Um, and that's important.
So making himself out to be the victim too, that's
kind of, you know, part of it. That is a
big part of it. But oh man, the part we're
getting to is such a bomber dude. Before we get
into that, his father, Raleigh, was machinist at a piston
ring plant, and um. Jim later wrote that his dad

(07:36):
quote made a decent living, but I thought we lived
in poverty. Uh. And this is like a factor in
his upbringing. Two is he was certain that he and
his family were dirt poor, and they really were not.
They were pretty comfortably middle class. But um, this like
longing for more money than he has, is a very
early thing for Jim Baker. Uh. Yeah. So there was

(07:57):
something weird with his mom and dad's relationship, but what
is not clear. A family friend described that despite many
visits to the house, she never heard Jim's moms say
more than ten words in all the years I knew them,
So something something's going on there. Yeahs happening, Yeah not
probably not great. Uh yeah. So it's it's interesting that

(08:17):
Jim describes himself as feeling as if he was impoverished
as a kid. All of the evidence suggests that his
family were full beneficiaries of the post war US economy,
in which a family of four could wind up owning
a house by accident. Raleigh Baker worked at the same
company for forty two and a half years. Um he
bought used Cadillacs and used televisions, but the family never
really wanted. When Jim was fifteen, they moved into an

(08:38):
actual mansion with a grand piano in the living room.
Because it was just really fucking easy to make a
life for yourself in nineteen fifty you were a white guy. Yeah, yeah,
not a hard time. So uh yeah. His first home, though,
the home of his childhood, was a boxy cement block

(08:59):
house that was painted a hit the shade of orange,
and Jim would later recall that he felt a deep
seated feeling of inferiority as a result of the fact
that he had an ugly house. So interesting, Yeah, we're
seeing some things come together. Yeah, yeah, planting the seeds.
So the Baker family were Pentecostal Christians. Jim's grandfather, Joe,
helped to found the Central Assembly of God, a very

(09:21):
hardcore Pentecostal church. We're gonna talk a little bit more
about Pentecostals later, about four of Americans today or Pentecostal.
And I don't think most foreigners are, like city folks
really know a whole lot about the Pentecostal church. But
the short description I would give is that whenever you
hear something weird about American Christians, like getting bitten by

(09:42):
snakes to prove their faith or whatever, those are Pentecostals.
There's a joke in the early Simpsons where Moe is
like talking about his religion. He's something like, I've I've
been a snake handler since the day I was born
or something like that. Um, and that's that's what the
it is, snake handlers. Yeah, um yeah. Yeah. So one

(10:05):
of my sources for this episode was the exhaustively written
book PTL, The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy
Faye Baker's Evangelical Empire by John Wigger. Um, his last
name is Wigger. Yes, it's distracting, but it's a good book,
and it notes of Jim's religious upbringing quote the church
often failed to provide the comfort that Baker lacked at home.
As a child. He was terrified by a three ft

(10:27):
tall picture of a human eye that hung on the
wall of his Sunday school room, as he and the
other children saying, his eye is watching you. You you,
Oh my god. He said that he left him with
the impression that the Big I was always looking and
he would get you if you were ever bad. Oh

(10:50):
my god. Not only did Pentecostals not go to the movies,
they were not supposed to dance, bowl, play cards, shoot pool,
or listen to rock and roll. Um. Another trill touchstone
for Pentecostals is the movie with Kevin Bacon about the
town that doesn't dance. That's Pentecostals. Yeah, oh, John lit

(11:11):
movie with Kevin Bacon where he doesn't dance. You know,
he dances, but the town doesn't until they dance. Yeah,
it's not the Footles movie. No, it is. Oh god,
I've got to cut Loose. Impressed with Robert actually knowing

(11:33):
something that is. Oh, no movie, you gotta watch Footloose.
It is a great movie. I mean you gotta cut loose. Sorry.
One of the two Kevin Bacon movies that are necessary
pieces of culture. What's the second one, obviously, Yeah, yeah,

(11:59):
So the word pecostal comes from an event recorded in
the Book of Acts, which is one of the you know,
lambor books of the Bible. After Christ's resurrection, he came
back to his followers as a zombie and was all like,
the Holy Ghost is gonna roll up on you, and
he's gonna fill you with lots of power. And then
later as the disciples were gathered for a feast in Jerusalem, quote,
suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing,

(12:20):
mighty wind, and it filled all in the house where
they were sitting, and there appeared unto them cloven tongues,
like as a fire, and it sat upon each of them,
and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and
began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave
them utterance. So that's in every Christian's Bible, and most
of them it's just like, yeah, it's just the thing
that happened in the Bible, right, Like there's a bunch
of moments in the Bible where like there's some dudes

(12:42):
that are friends of Jesus, are a prophet, and God
comes in and he does some ship. Uh, it's just
a thing that happened. But for the Pentecostals, that is
like the core of some really critical theological doings UM.
Starting in Los Angeles in nineteen o six, that's where
Pentecostal Isn't began. In UM, members of the church came

(13:03):
to the belief that they could seek out this Holy
Fire and basically they believe that the Holy Spirit could
fill them up in this way at any time. So
there's that bit in the Bible where talks about like
they started speaking in other tongues, as that the Spirit
gave them utterance. That's speaking in tongues. Like when you
see Christians like going a static and jumping around and
like shrieking in in fake nonsense language, that's speaking in tongues.

(13:24):
This is where that comes from, UM, and it's a
big part of the Pentecostal faith. And it's really it's
really neat because they've actually done some scientific studies on
people speaking in tongues. The claim is that you're basically
talking in holy language that God throws into your head. UM.
They find that when because there's there's Pentecostals all around
the world. Now, who you know, are non native English

(13:46):
speakers or what? They all have different you know, Pentecostals
who whose native language is different. Um, Whenever people speak
in tongues, they find that the things that they're saying
in tongues abide by the basic speech patterns of their
native language, which suggests that yeah, every they're making it
it's Jewish. Yeah. Did you see the when there's this

(14:08):
I don't know what the name of the preacher is,
but he was speaking tongues and then as he's speaking tongues,
he just starts checking his phone and scrolling through his
Facebook feed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then it's just yeah,
just like you know, like like you know, I love
ship like that. I had a really fun I was
at the I was at this fucking big old celebration
for uh Shiva. And when I was in India and

(14:31):
somewhere like rural Rajasthan and we're at like this big
fucking festival. There's this like thirty foot statue of the
god and everything, and there's this monk sitting in front
of the statue of the God like reading, Um, I
don't know it's a chance or hymns or whatever from
like a big book. But in the middle of the
book he has his phone and as he's chanting, he's
like scrolling through his text messages and stuff, and like, yeah,

(14:52):
I love like that. Uh so um yeah, yeah. So
that's that's what pinecole Stallism is. Um. And I think
that when your church hates fun as much as the
Pentecostal church does, you kind of need something like speaking
in tongues. You don't have a whole lot else. So um. Thankfully,
for Jim, his dad was not as strict um as

(15:15):
they were supposed to be. He let the family watch
television and he took them to the movies. Jim's favorite
show as a boy was I Love Lucy. As an adolescent,
he took an even more casual attitude towards his faith restrictions.
At his church, children were seated far away and out
of sight from their parents, so Jim and his friends
would sneak out during the service and hang out at
the local soda fountain. There, they would listen to forbidden

(15:36):
music before sneaking back to retake their seats. Fats Domino
was a favorite of theirs, which doesn't really have any
bearing on anything, but I love the name Fats Domino.
It's just unbelievably good name him. Yeah. So, when Jim
was eleven, he met a yeah, sorry, this is I
shouldn't this is a bummer. When Jim was eleven, he

(15:57):
met a young man from his church and adult in
his twenties of thirties who introduced himself as Russell. Russell
approached Jim on Saturday after service and asked if he
wanted to have a hamburger at a nearby driving Now
today if a stranger walks up to a kid and says,
you want to leave your parents behind and go get
a hamburger, like, that's a it's a red flag. You know,
I'm not great at raising kids, but that that that's

(16:20):
a that's a that's a red flag. But this is
the early nineteen fifties. People trusted each other, and his
parents were like, sure, go off with the strange of
all I it's fine, and and he did. Uh so again,
and this is gonna seem really weird that fucking eleven
year old boy would go off with this guy in
his twenties or thirties to get a hamburger. But Jim
was again starved for attention. He later wrote that he

(16:42):
was quote odd that this adult would want me. He
gave me all his undivided attention. I felt wonderfully special.
Um so yeah, after Burgers, Russell drove off with Jim
down a deserted dirt road and stopped. He and zipped
Jim's jeans and started to fondle him. Um while he
was being molested. Jim felt quote almost proud that Russell

(17:04):
would give me so much attention. I thought, So, this
must be what having a buddy is all about. This
must be what big guys do. Yeah. Yeah, this uh
a little darker than I thought it would be at
this point. Yeah, this is not a good It's not good. Yeah,
it really is so and it's like heartbreaking, lee, like

(17:25):
you could it all completely scans, like, oh yeah, this
kid is just so desperate for attention. Yeah. Um. So.
Jim didn't realize anything was really wrong at first, and
Russell became a frequent figure in his life, hanging out
with the family occasionally and then taking Jim off to
isolated construction sites or other places where he could park
the car, um hiring him to MOA's lawns so that

(17:46):
he could like grab him in the middle of chores
and molest him. And Jim never like fought this, like
he at the time, he went along with it, and
he later wrote, quote, I allowed Russell to do whatever
he wanted to do to me, and I tried to
comply with all his requests because he lavished attention and
caring touches on me. Um. Yeah, he's what fifteen sixteen,

(18:07):
he said, No, he's eleven when, oh god, this goes
on for a few years. Yeah, he's he's very Uh,
he is the victim of a lot of abuse in
this period, um. And it is the kind of abuse
where at the time it's probably the most positive relationship
in his life, which is further of a head fuck.

(18:30):
It's a lot to deal with as an eleven year old. Yeah,
eventually Russell abandoned him, presumably because he got too old
and Russell was, you know, a pedophile. Um, and the
whole situation was just a huge mind fuck for young Jim.
As you can imagine, he never told anyone about it. Um.
You know, obviously he did later, but like as a kid,
he didn't tell anybody. Um. And yeah, like he just

(18:53):
didn't talk about it for decades. His parents had raised
a child that wasn't emotionally connected enough with himself to
ask for a hug, let alone confess to years of
sexual abuse. Uh quote, I could keep up appearances. I
could maintain a public persona even when I was falling
apart internally. Jim began to nurse complicated in confusing homosexual feelings,
which he still has never come to terms with, but

(19:15):
which he always found deeply shameful. Uh. He wasn't short
a boy who was done very wrong by the adults
in his life and by the society around him. Um
so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a real bummer. Yeah yeah, yeah,
that's That's one of the rougher childhoods I've come across
in all this. Yeah yeah, So Jim's youth wasn't all

(19:41):
trauma though. When he was fifteen, the family moved to
a much nicer house in neighborhood, and Jim did bloom somewhat.
In high school. He had an English teacher who really
saw promise in him despite his middling grades, and encouraged
Jim's creativity. And it turned out that Jim Baker had
some incredible instinctive talent for showmanship. Given the opportunity to
DJ at a photography club dance, he developed a love
for spinning records. And I don't know what it meant

(20:03):
to be DJ in the mid fifties. I would that, Yeah,
I desperately want to listen to fucking fifteen year old
Jiff Baker. Yeah, yeah, man, But he was apparently good
at it. This is kind of what he was. He
was kind of a loner. But then he starts djaying
for parties and he starts getting invited places, and it

(20:24):
kind of like it makes him into a kind of
popular kid. So this is yeah, yeah, he's cool. Now
he's a d J. Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty sweet. Um.
In nineteen fifties six, he developed his first show. It
was a fifteen act vaudeville style reality show meant as
a fundraiser for the school newspaper. UH. The show featured

(20:44):
actual professional performances from a Miss Elvis Presley, which I'm
guessing as some sort of celebrity impersonator. And this this
person had been on The Steve Allen Show, which was
a popular TV show at the time. There was a
Mombo trial, there were Charleston dancers, the whole nine yards.
It was like a big It wasn't just like he
wasn't just like throwing together like a little skit before
a thing. This was like a huge production. UM. And

(21:06):
it turned out popular enough that it became a regular
event at the school, and Jim would manage it and
organize it for the next couple of years while he
was in high school. UM. The nineteen fifty seven show
was even bigger, with twenty five acts. It was also popular.
Jim claims that four hundred of his classmates showed up
at his house for a party. UM. And Jim later
recalled something about this period of time that when I

(21:28):
read it, I can only hear it in Nathan Fielder's voice. Um.
I was in the limelight, completely the center of attention.
I was obsessed with popularity and would do almost anything
to get it. Yeah. Yeah, all of this is just
just scans so disastrously. Yeah. So his teacher, William Harrison,

(21:50):
backs up this image of high school era Jim quote,
Jim love the limelight. I have often thought, had I
been a promoter, I could have turned that boy into
a rock star. UM. And it is kind of sound
like he had that sort of potential or at least
the ability he could have been, like, you know, if
this kid, um, if this kid embraces the kind of
complicated emotional and and uh sexual feelings and stuff that

(22:15):
he's he's uh struggling with, and embraces the artistic side
of himself, he could have rolled to New York and
had a great career in the theater or something like.
Monologues are like very theatrical. That's like, you know, they
build and they yeah, they he he He definitely could
have succeeded in like Hollywood or something like the fact

(22:36):
that he's he's been so successful in this career for
like sixty years now is all the proof you need
of that. But he doesn't take that path at all, um.
And the reason why he doesn't take that path at least,
he will say that the reason why he didn't take
that path is because he hit a kid with his car.
Oh man, did you know that he hit a kid

(22:57):
with his car? Did not? The kids? Just yeah? Probably yeah, yeah, yeah,
here we're well. I always love talking about when people
hit kids with their cars. Usually it turns out better
than it did for George Bush's wife, Uh yeah, which
is look that one up, kids she killed a kid. UM,

(23:21):
probably on purpose. I mean, that's just that's just a
a blatant accusation with no no evidence behind it. But
it's always I love talking about that. W W his wife,
His wife, she killed her ex boyfriend with a car
when she was a teenager. People don't talk about that

(23:44):
into circulation. But you know who doesn't hit children with
their cars? Often? No, the products and services that support
this podcast, yeah, very very rarely, I will say, Yeah,
that's if they do, they apologize exactly. This is all
you're reading. That's almost word for word what's written on

(24:06):
the ad document. Yeah, so listen to these products that
almost certainly won't hit children with their cars. We're back.
Oh my gosh, what a what a product. Okay, so
let's talk about the time that Jim Baker hit a

(24:27):
kid with his car. So I'm gonna quote again from
the book PTL, which has a good description of this um.
The turning point in his religious life, as Baker later remembered,
it was when he ran over three year old Jimmy Summerfield.
Baker had just dropped off Sandy Tires, who was the
girl he was dating, at her home, and was pulling
up to church. On a snowy Sunday night. Sandy, Sandy Tires.
I think so, Yeah, that's a cool name. That is

(24:48):
a cool name. Yeah, Sandy Tires. Yeah. I was pulling
up to church in a snowy Sunday night. He was
driving his father's fifty two Cadillac with his cousin George
in the seat next to him, when he felt a bump.
The boy had slid down a snow bank in front
of the car. The front tire rolled over his chest,
crushing his collar bone and puncturing a lung. At first,
Baker despaired that the boy might die, but miraculously he
survived with that debilitating injuries. The miracle of Summerfield's recovery,

(25:12):
Baker would later say, convinced him to attend Bible College. Now,
this is a story that Jim would go on to
tell repeatedly for the rest of his life, and it
definitely happened. He totally hit that kid with a car.
But Jim also would go on to lie about it
repeatedly and in a very specific way. Um So, in
his first autobiography, published in nineteen seventy six, Jim claimed
that the incident happened in his senior year of high school.

(25:33):
And this obviously works well for structuring and narrative, so
we can claim, like, oh, I was a DJ, I
was doing all this stuff, throwing all these parties and
events and stuff. I was on track to like go
into Hollywood or go to New York or whatever, and
then you know, I'm there at this tragedy. I hit
this kid, and seeing this boy survived miraculously like forces me, uh,
turns my soul over to God. Um. And he claims

(25:54):
that like, after this happened, he quit all of the
arts and stuff he'd been into djaying dances and throwing
parties and whatever, and started focusing on the Bible. But
this is a lie because the crash occurred in nineteen
fifty six, two years before he graduated, and he continued
making his variety show DJ and going to parties and
entertaining people for the rest of his time that he
was in high school. Um. There's zero evidence that this

(26:14):
event led to some sort of instant transformation in his life. Sure,
maybe it was like bubbling under the surface and it eventually,
but he didn't. He lies about the way that this
all works in a way that is pretty understandable. To
people who study this kind of Christian grifter, like they
all every they all need a story like this. You know,
I was, I was on this bad path and then

(26:35):
this thing happened and it turned me over to God. Um.
So yeah, this is Jim's thing, right, because he can't obviously, like, honestly,
if you're if you're, if you're a modern day version
of this guy, you lean into the fact that you
were abused as a kid or whatever, and you tell
that story. But Jim doesn't, like, you know, you can't
really square with that, and so he turns to this

(26:57):
other story about hitting a kid with his car and
claims at that it's what what switched him over. Um,
so yeah, I don't know, that's what he what he
does and he goes to North Central Bible College in Minneapolis,
where he meets a young woman named Tammy fay La
Valley in nineteen sixty. Now, Baker had a restaurant and
the department store at the college, and Tammy worked nearby.
She was the oldest of eight children who grew up

(27:20):
in a rural home with no indoor plumbing. The two
fell instantly in love and dropped out of college together
after their third date. Uh, they decided that they didn't
need any more book learning and they were going to
be traveling evangelists. So that's an important aspect of Jim
Baker's things. He starts going to school to learn how
to be a Bible professional and he drops the funk
out and uh he will later claim had never actually

(27:43):
read the Bible when he started doing this. Uh. He
just starts criss crossing the United States with Tammy. And
during this period, it's important to understand the real United States,
particularly and like a lot of the South was regularly
criss crossed by this dense network of of revival preachers. Uh.
These were charismatic, evangelical kanman grifters who gathered huge groups

(28:03):
of worshippers together under colorful tensor, hosted special preaching sessions
at large local churches. Most of these preachers were men,
but there were also a number of popular husband and
wife couples. There was even a small child, mar Joe Gortoner,
whose parents trained him like a monkey and had him
reciting marriage ceremonies from Rote when he was four or
five years old. Um. There's a really amazing documentary about
mar Joe that covers this whole subculture. This like evangelical

(28:27):
preacher grift traveling thing. Um. And the movie is just
called mar Joe Won an Oscar. It's great. People should
watch it if they want to understand kind of the
what Baker comes up in. Jim and Tammy Baker like
make this their life, um, and they're they're good at it,
you know they Jim has in an eight talent for
show business and a desperate need for approval, so he

(28:48):
was really good at performing. His only weakness was that
he couldn't sing for ship, and his wife, Tammy had
a beautiful voice and could play the accordions. So they
were really a perfect match together. Yeah, yeah, it's this
works out great. Uh. So the two stood out enough
from the pack that started in the early nineteen sixties
they were able to get a gig with one of
the very first names in Christian television, the Reverend Pat Robertson.

(29:13):
Yeah here's old Pat. So Pat had formed the Christian
Broadcasting Network in nineteen sixty, which is the same year
that Jim and Tammy met, and prior to the existence
of the c B in evangelical preachers had been dominant
voices on the radio. The mid sixties sparked the first
great wave of American televangelists, though guys with names like
Rex Humbard and Oral Roberts harangued their flocks with stories

(29:36):
of an active and physically present devil. They warned of
Christ's imminent arrival any day now, and taught that the
Bible had to be believed literally in order to avoid
God's wrath. So these are these are the folks that
Jim and Tammy, these are like the heroes of their
their era. Yeah, yeah, so this is great. So Tammy

(29:56):
and Jim created a children's puppet show for the c
b N. It was a hit, and they were contracted
to start another show, the very first Christian talk show
in history. Um. Now, this was not a very particularly
original idea. Jim at the time basically just said, I
want to do the Johnny Carson Show, but for Jesus um.
And that's that's basically what they did. As John Wigger
writes in PTL quote, Jim and Tammy created their own

(30:18):
unique style, often doing two hours or more of live,
unscripted television to day in front of a studio audience.
Viewers came to believe that they were part of PTLS
mission and the drama of Jim and Tammy's personal life.
The Bakers became their friends and PTL their extended family.
Yeah interesting, yeah, a part of it. Yeah yeah, so

(30:39):
this works out really well and that that family VIC
that extended family would come to include I'm just gonna
call him America's greatest hero, Colonel Sanders. Yeah yeah, Now
you've done a whole video about this, VIX, so you
don't need to hear it again, but you, the listener,
need to hear Colonel Sanders and his friend laborious. You

(31:00):
tell Jim Baker about Colonel Sanders is fecal matter because
it a little too much detail, astounding. When you think
it's over, it goes a little dec This is gonna
be like three minutes, and the listener, you need to
know as we play this that the whole time this

(31:21):
is going on, there's an absolutely massive bucket of KFC.
It's awesome, such a good moment in history. All Right,
we're gonna play the clip now four or five years
ago as observation, are you going to prepare for operation
for taking a poodle polup out of the big corn

(31:43):
And that's a fore erunner of the capture. You see,
brother Rogers happened even that. Come into my room and
four he left. Why you when I have a pastoral
prayer and I love that the ladies and I told
him how simple the operation going to be. They just
dripped in there, you know, in colon was right before
you picked out. He laid his hand on my stomach

(32:05):
in the prayer and prayed to God that you need
to remove him malady. That caused my trouble. Next morning
when they opened up, they had more polyp or anything
in the world. Yeah, I remember, I remember when it passed,
but I didn't think they gave you an animal that
next morning to get the barrier. I'm all out of

(32:27):
the cold, you know, for the surgery, and I remember
doing it discharge of that barrier. But I heard something
going plunk in the camboda. Well, of course it's a miracle, okay.
And I couldn't see what it was. I just think
it might be some fetal matter out of the wrinkle
of the colon, you see, and lo and behold, why
if you finding nothing there but the large work that

(32:50):
poor boy? Do you do you remember that situation? Do
remember that, jim uh? This polyp had blocked the colonel's bowels,
and he was, yes, it was quite large. And the

(33:11):
physician went ahead and performed the surgery. But when he
performed the surgery, he couldn't find the growth. And he
searched in the intestine ten inches both ways and couldn't
find it. And of course, when you operate on someone
as famous as Colonel Sanders, and it looks like it's
been a mistake, while the doctor is quite upset, and
the the head of the surgical review board happened to

(33:35):
be a famous surgeon who was a member of evangel Tabernacle.
He knew what had happened, but the Jewish attorney who
performed the surgeony didn't know really that that it was
a miracle of God, that God had healed him. And
so the colonel told him. He said, well, God has
healed me, and so that's the reason, and said, I'm
not mad at you for performing the surgery, because he

(33:56):
was doing what he thought was right, of course, but
God beat him to it. Okay, we're back, and I
hope you all, I hope you all really enjoyed that
plopping in the commode plopping And it's so detailed and
that's I've never heard that, like the wrinkle of the colon,

(34:17):
I've never like, yeah, never, I hope I never hear
it again. Actually no, But this is like this thing
that we're making fun of the fact that he is
this is just an old man talking talking the way.
You know. I have heard elderly people talk in that
detail about bowel movements before, and it's always been like

(34:37):
family members, you know, And that's kind of what wiggers
talking about. We're talking about. What makes PTL special is
that this was something this like people sitting at home
and fucking you know, bum funk wherever in the middle
of nowhere, and they're like it did this did make
them feel like part of the family because they've got
an older talking about moments exactly, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's

(35:00):
no nobody's polished in this. Nobody seems uh like a
celebrity or anything. Like they feel like your friends and
family and that. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh, it's
kind of like a big part of like what makes
modern you know, YouTube celebrities and podcast hosts and whatnot,
um so attractive to their audiences is that they're they're

(35:22):
just living their lives on camera. Um. Like that that
is now a thing that is a dominant aspect of
our culture. People make millions of dollars doing that, and
it's everybody's got pretty much got someone in that vein
um that they love. But you know, Jim and Tammy,
there's a lot of talk about how, you know, influential
they were in the history of like televangelism, but just
in the history of like normal media, Like they really

(35:45):
predict something that is kind of the modern wave of
our culture. Um. I think that's pretty interesting. Um. Yeah.
So the Jim and Tammy Show evolved over the next
few years into an increasingly professional production like Jim's old
variety shows that were a number of different acts. There
would be theological lectures by Jim and guest preachers, musical acts,
emotional stories of falls from grace and salvation, and of

(36:07):
course there were regular please for donations. Jim and Tammy
switched from Pat Robertson's network to Trinity Broadcasting Network in
nineteen seventy four. They picked up a new name, to
the PTL Club, and depending on who gives the answer,
PTL stands for Praise the Lord or people that Love
or to their critics, pass the loot, Yeah and PTO

(36:31):
grew into an extravagant affair, which BuzzFeed describes able in
this rite up quote. Jim and Tammy Fay acted as
host to famous ministers and artists like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts,
Mickey Rooney, and Mr t. On each episode, they would
enter the stage to rapturous applause, holding hands and waving
to their fans. On set, the couple would be flanked
by a full choir on one side and a backing
band on the other. The spotlights were bright, often reflecting

(36:54):
the shin off Jim Baker's forehead, the iridescent highlighter surrounding
Tammy Fay's big, big eyes, and the shiny tears bleeding
down her cheeks as she's saying or backed up Baker's
religious testimony. Baker would speak slowly, his cadence even, and
just slow enough to draw viewers in, making them feel
as though he and Tammy Faye were delivering private messages
to them, sent directly from God. Yeah, this is good,

(37:17):
this is all good, and it should be noted. Um,
you're gonna expect, I think, in a story about this
kind of guy, especially someone who's going into a major
Trump surrogates some tales of racism that does not appear
to have been a factor, and in fact PTL was
renowned for having a huge being very popular among black people,
having a large black audience, and also like one of
their most popular guests was a former black panther who

(37:39):
would talk about like getting into shootouts with the cops
and stuff. Um like they they they were from the beginning,
really good at um. I guess you would just broadly
say not being racist. So yeah, accepting of others because yeah,
I guess they like anybody that has money to Yes, yes,

(38:00):
but but I know is green. I know. Tammy Sue
was very supportive of the gay community, like later in
her later they were. No, they were profoundly homophobic. Homosexuality
is evil, it is the devil. They talked about that
frequently on their show in this period. We'll talk about

(38:21):
a little bit about Yeah, that happened much later, that
is not happening now. Yeah. Uh. One of the things
that separated PTL from other shows of the same format
was again the unpolished nature of the content. No matter
how dressed up like the set got um, the focus
of the day was always just Jim and Tammy and
whatever they wanted to talk about, and they talked about
real issues drug abuse, depression, exercise, diet, anxiety, like their

(38:43):
own struggles with all those things. These were all regular
topics and this realism yeah, like kind of foreshadowed reality
TV as well in some ways. UM. The show's other
piece of brilliance was Jim's decision to broadcast on a
satellite network. This was groundbreaking at the time. ESPN didn't
even start podcasting satellite until ninety nine, a year after
the PTL Show did. Satellite allowed Christian programming to reach

(39:06):
people all over the world, even folks in very isolated
rural areas who would otherwise not really have access to
TV at all. PTL started selling airtime to other churches
and built up a whole network of Christian content. No
one had ever done this before, So yeah, they start
is just the Jim and Tammy Show, and it turns
into like this network with a very large and dedicated

(39:26):
cult following. UM. Jim was smart enough to lean into
this too. He began airing testimonials from viewers at the
ends of episodes. The book PTL Highlights One from nineteen
seventy nine quote, a woman in her twenties or thirties
smiles at the camera and says that having PTL in
her home was like friends being there when other people couldn't.
I know, PTL would be there every day. Baker ended

(39:48):
his shows by looking right at the camera, smiling and
telling his viewers God loves you. He really does, so
really leaning into speaking to the low only making the
lonely his audience and then getting pup pumping him for cash.
That's the PTL strategy. And Jim Baker knows how to

(40:09):
reach lonely people because he's a profoundly lonely man. Um. Yeah, yeah,
it's good. Yeah yeah yeah, um awesome. So from nineteen
seventy nineteen seventy seven, the PTL network grew from three
TV stations to more than two hundred uh In nineteen

(40:32):
seventy nine, it made one and a half million dollars
a month. By five it was making more than ten
million dollars a month. They started experimenting with foreign networks
in different local hosts, and the money brought changes. In
nineteen seventy six, they went from renting a single studio
to buying a twenty acre compound and constructing a three
million dollar church in recording studio upon it. By doing this,

(40:53):
Petail almost immediately pushed itself well beyond its financial means.
But this was fine and actually part of Jim's and
ten see, Jim's particular brand of Pentecostalism had a strong
entrepreneurial bent to it. We call it the prosperity gospel today,
and Jim is kind of part of an ancillary chunk
of that. If something was meant to succeed in this

(41:13):
particular branch of the faith, God would make the numbers work.
So like, you don't worry about not being able to
afford something. Um, you leap into things that you can't
afford to do, and you trust that God will find
a way to to to to make it possible. And
if you're doing things like try to be like, Okay,
well no we can't afford it. We can only afford
a five million dollar church now, so let's build that
now and if we need to expand later we can.

(41:34):
That's actually sacrilegious, like because you're not trusting that God exactly. Yeah, yeah,
you got to get the bigger private jet, you know, yeah,
exactly make it work for us. If I was just
buying first class flights that would be angering God. He
wants me to Like that's literally the theology. It's kind

(41:57):
of fucking brilliant, and I want to steal it, right.
I do think I could probably if I, if I
really committed, I could reinvent myself as an evangelical preacher,
you know, I could. I could claim that I I
learned from all the drug abuse and and all the Yeah,
I think I do it. And then you start going,

(42:18):
start going, you go bankrupt, and you tell your followers
I'm going bank out and need money. Help me out,
help me out, you know. Yeah, And the worst, I mean,
the best thing about it is like I could really
the worst things that I would that I do on
my fall from grace, the better I become it being
a preacher later Like yeah, there's there's no there's no
floor's it really rules. Um so that's anyway, that's my

(42:41):
retirement plan. Um bumble into that, folks. It's going to
be a ride. Uh so yeah. Yeah. Literally, when Jim
Baker gives his own histories of PTL during this time,
it's full of stories where like the church would need
to make a hundred thousand dollars in a weekend. Otherwise
they're going to go bankrupt and then suddenly a bunch

(43:01):
of donations would flood in. And he leaned into this
in n he wrote, some people think you need plenty
of money in the bank before you can begin to
operate in faith. I never have. Are you currently debating
over taking a step of faith in the Lord? Or
are you waiting until it looks safe to move? Remember,
facts don't count when you have God's word on the subject,

(43:21):
which is the essential part of why this like liberal
obsession with like facts matter and and you know, trying
to argue or fact check or it will never work.
It will never ever work. They don't care, and it
doesn't matter how many of them get diseases like crowding
into churches and stuff like. That's not what this is about.

(43:43):
You're playing the wrong game. Um. It's about stopping people
from falling into these weird cults like and and helping
them get out. But convincing them will never happen. Arguing
with them will never work. This is this is the
facts don't matter. It's God's word on the subject. That's
what we're fucking dealing with here. Um and it's awesome

(44:03):
and good. So as essentially the CEO of his own
TV network, Jim never let facts get in his way.
On one occasion, when his network found itself owing twenty
dollars with nothing in the bank, he wrote a bad
check and sent it off to the station manager. Enough
money came in the next day to come to the balance.
So Jim kept on doing the same thing, and he
would tell this story openly to people, um, and he

(44:23):
would claim it as like, look at how good God is,
look at how great you know my faith is that
I was willing to do this, But he was just
writing bad checks like like, which is a crime, Which
is absolutely a crime. This is check fraud. He just
got lucky. Um. But yeah, he bragged regularly about check fraud. UM.

(44:47):
And he would always leave out the fact that like,
this wasn't he wasn't really just throwing himself into the
wind and trusting and faith. He always had Telethon's plan
for the day that he would write these bad checks,
so he knew that the money was going to come in.
He had a pretty good understanding of how much he
could bring in. But the fact that he was just
throwing himself on God's mercy, you know that that that
drew people to him. That was part of the fucking appeal.

(45:08):
That was part of the grift. So yeah, it's good, um, yeah,
and and it's awesome. And Jim's message to his followers
by doing stuff like this was that in their own
lives financial caution was an act of religious heresy, and
even if they couldn't afford it, they should keep throwing
money at Jim Baker and his his operation, which they did.

(45:30):
At the end of nineteen seventy seven, he wrote a
short book titled The Big Three Mountain Movers. Now it
was angled as a book of like biblical financial advice
and the like. He told his flock that God wanted
them to have money and would provide it, but they
had to provide God with testaments of faith first. And
this was essentially he was not an original idea for Jim.
This was an evolution of the ideas that Oral roberts

(45:50):
Um had had started. And roberts was maybe the greatest
preacher of this era. We'll have to do an episode
on him at some point. His great innovation was the
idea of seed money, which is money that you pay
earl Roberts that unlocks God's blessings. So the idea of
seed money is you want something, you need something, You're broken,
you're desperate. You know, you can't make the mortgage, you
can't make rent. You take all of the money you have,

(46:12):
and rather than like using it to buy food or
trying to like set up a payment plan, you you
give that to Oral Roberts it or whatever preacher is
telling you, and that God will see that um that
expression of faith, and he will turn that expression of
faith into a seed that grows a tree that will
return more money to you. And that's because like Oral
has a direct connection to God. That yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,

(46:35):
I mean essentially the idea is that that's what it
evolved into, is that like, you know, I'm I I
have such a great connection to God. I think initially
it was just this idea that like if you, if
you prove to God that you really trust him by
throwing all this money at his church and not thinking
of your own financial needs, he will take care of you,
you know. So that's good and healthy and sounds legit.

(46:58):
And this becomes the fundamental idea behind the prosperity Gospel,
which is today one of the most I mean, all
of the preachers. Trump surrounds him with our prosperity. His
religious advisor pulls her flock. Yeah, you have to donate
your first month's salary to my church every year, like
even if you can't afford it, because that's how you
prove she's married to Yeah. Yeah, fun one of the

(47:19):
some fucking one of the musicians from what is it um? Yeah,
from Journey, Yeah yeah, like the guy that wrote all
the hit songs. Yeah, that's a real bummer because I
have some great memories of drunkenly singing Journey in street crimes.
But what a sad, sad tale. We should we should

(47:40):
execute people once they make a great song. Just get
him out of there, don't let him ruin anything, just like, hey,
yesterday is a great tune into the chamber. You go,
come on words, Paul. Yeah, that's where you draw the line.
That's that's what's page all right, let him write one

(48:01):
more sock. Uh. You know who else supports mandatory executions
for great artists. They don't. So, oh well, this is
an ad plug. Here's products we're back. So uh, we're

(48:29):
talking about the prosperity gospel. You know, which is a
child of Oral Roberts, and Roberts was a regular guest
on the PTL Club, and Bakers shamelessly stole his idea
for promising godly people blessings in exchange for cold, hard cash.
He'd held telethons before, but in the late sixties and
early seventies, they've been pretty normal, kind of like the
stuff you see on NPR, you know, or whatever, not NPR,
but like public television, like you know where they'll do

(48:51):
these regular fundraising drives. Give us money, and we can
keep doing this. That was how it started. It evolved though, yeah, yeah,
like it was any normal at first, and it evolved
into him promising his audience that they would get rich
by making him rich. In n he harangued his viewers,
many of you have never given because you really don't
trust God, um, And they were regularly. One of the

(49:13):
terms you'll hear a lot in these kind of preachers
is prove God by doing this by this donation, Like
you prove the existence of God by throwing us money.
It's it seems profoundly sacrilegious to me, an atheist, But
what do I know? What the fun do I know? Um?
So he promised that God would reward their donations a hundredfold,

(49:35):
and he would also throw eternal life into the deal.
Uh and said things like, I mean, that's about the
best deal I've ever heard in my life. You get
rich and you live forever. All you gotta do is
give me your rent money. Um fucking awesome that this
is legal. I can't I can't overstate what a good
thing it is. That this is fine. God states, Yeah,

(49:57):
we're perfect society. So Bill Perkins, an administrator for PTL,
resigned his position in nineteen seventy eight after he grew
disturbed by the fact that money seemed to be growing
increasingly central to the decisions that Jim Baker made. So
a lot of the people who like sign up with
them early on will say that this was a legitimate
religious enterprise at first, and Baker really believed hard and

(50:18):
it it turned into a grift, and that maybe that's
probably true. Like I'm not an expert on it. I'm
so critical. I guess of all of these guys that
it's hard for me to believe Jim Baker ever had
good intentions. But he may. He may have a lot
of people believed he did, and there were folks in
the seventies who were like, you have changed, and I
can't be a part of this anymore, especially earlier on

(50:40):
going after you know, doing the puppet shows and everything
seems pretty, you know, pretty legitimately. Yeah, I had trouble
believing that the puppet shows were a grift, you know,
no drifts with puppets. Hopefully he wasn't asking the kids
to mail money to him, no, no, um and And
Perkins later claimed, quote, Jim Baker had a knack with
a microphone, and I think he began with good intentions,
but he let hour and money get to his head. Now.

(51:02):
Mr Perkins later told The New York Times about the
moment he realized that something had changed with Jim. Quote.
Jim used to quote from Psalm's thirty seven four Delight thyself.
Also in the Lord, and He shall give you the
desires of thine heart. I argue that the scripture does
not mean worldly wealth and fame or fancy cars are
big houses. Mr Perkins said, it means inner peace and joy.
The desires ought to be God's desires, not man's. Mr

(51:26):
Baker's defiant response, said Mr Perkins, was to quote another
bit of scripture, which he intended to end the conversation.
Touch not God's anointed, and do his profits no harm.
So Jim has had a bit of a change at
this point. You can say it's gone to his head,
you know, whether however he started, he is now calling

(51:46):
himself a prophet and using that to shut down debate
with his loyal followers. So that's not a great thing. Um,
Although I am going to get that tattooed on my chest. Uh,
and I'll just I will just point to it defiantly
when Sophie tells me not to swing machetes around in
the recording studio, I do. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Touch not.

(52:09):
God's annoying it. You know, do as profits no harm
when they're doing harm by recklessly endangering the recording studio.
Whether or not he was a profit, Jim was definitely profitable,
which is a line I was proud of. Um. So
thank you, thank you, thank you. I desperately need praise
as I as I grow into the cult leader that

(52:31):
Jim Baker has convinced me I can become. So And
by the way, do you want to really prove your
faith in the Lord, why don't you send two dollars
to bastards behind the bad Just address an envelope, Sophie.
This is the only way. By the end of nine,

(52:54):
revenue was more than four million dollars a month and
expenses were only around a million. So on paper, that's
a pretty pretty solvent business, right, Yeah, you would think
that you could. You could do a lot of ministering
with that kind of a yeah, all tax free. Um.
And for a while, Baker pumped the extra money into

(53:16):
funding new shows and new hosts and local content and
different communities around the country and around the world, and
it looked like he was building PTL into the Christian
equivalent of twenty first century Fox. Like there's a period
where it looks like, oh my god, Jim is going
to create like a media empire on par with any
of the major networks, on par with something like, yeah,
twenty century Fox. Um. But then just as he's like

(53:40):
on his way to becoming the Prosperity Gospels Rupert Murdoch,
he suddenly pulls away and heads in a completely different direction.
You know what this direction is, Vick, I think I do?
I think thank you was watching what Walt Disney was up. Yeah,
he decides to become Christian Walt Disney. UM. Yeah, which

(54:01):
is an interesting move. UM. In nineteen seventy, the Bakers
broke ground on Heritage USA. Now, this was Jim Baker's
most ambitious plan yet, and it would eventually become the
third most popular amusement park in the United States, right
after Disneyland and Disney World. So this is a huge yeah.
Built on twe acres of Carolina Land, Heritage USA was

(54:22):
initially planned as almost a whole enclosed Christian society built
in the twin images of Jim Baker and Walt Disney.
His planning went along, Jim's ambitions expanded. He wanted to
include a university, a day school, a campground, and even
a hospital in a nursing home. The whole estimated bill
for this was well over a hundred million dollars of
nineteen seventy eight money. UM. Baker wanted the main work

(54:44):
done in less than six months, which was just rank lunacy. UM.
He failed to secure the fifty million dollar loan he
needed to make his dreams come true. So Baker reigned
in his faith and started small, promising the construction company
that PTL would fall no further than five hundred thousand
dollars in payments behind during the construct action, UM, and
which is like, it's incredible. They were like, yeah, you
can be half a million dollars in debt to us

(55:05):
and that's fine, um, And he can't even stick to that.
By month three, they had blown past that by a
factor of four and owed more than two million dollars
to the company. And this calamity was all caused by
Jim Baker. UM. Soon the finances of the network were
an absolute crisis. PTL started laying off employees and making
up the shortfall in labor by calling for Saturday work sessions,

(55:26):
which were unpaid. Employees were told that showing up to
work for free would be a vivid illustration of who
was committed to God and who was not. Oh my god,
I didn't know. I didn't know he fleeced his own
workers to Oh he sure as shit did. Oh my gosh, yeah,
he absolutely. He's a big fan of unpaid labor, which
there are other terms for, but I have forgotten them. Um. Now.

(55:49):
At the same time all this was happening, Baker talked
the board of his company into tripling his salary. He
argued that basically, UM who was the fucking big guy
at the time, the the Johnny Carson. He was like Johnny,
I work harder than Johnny Carson and he makes more
than me. Like the fox up with that, So they
triple his salary. And at the same time as they

(56:09):
triple his salary, they stopped reporting on the church's finances
to the press. They said they had once been a
very open operation that would tell you like where their
money was going and being used on, and they just
suddenly stopped doing that. Uh, and this has no effect
on their followers. Money continues pouring into the baker pockets
and increasing denominations. When Jim needed to look magnanimous, he
would write letters to the board and demand that they

(56:31):
cut his salary by and then he'd used company money
to buy himself fancy rich guy toys from the book PTL.
Only three weeks later, this is after firing a bunch
of people, he used six thousand dollars of PTLS money
for a down payment on a houseboat, a forty three
ft drifter with two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, television, and
gas grill. The total price for the house boat was
thirty dollars, so at the same time Jim bought that boat,

(56:55):
he's writing letters to his flock, begging them for donations
and telling his workers that they have to work for free.
And the terms he would use in these, like please
for money from his followers were imminent and apocalyptic. Unless
God performs a financial miracle, this could be the last
letter you receive from me. It's like this is these
are the kind of things he's putting in his Yeah,
he wind about the two and a half million dollar

(57:17):
construction bill as if it had like something that had
suddenly been slammed upon them, rather than them deliberately going
over budget. Uh. He lied that Tammy and I are
giving every penny of our life savings to PTL And again,
this is the same month that he uses Ptail's money
to buy a houseboat. So this is total grift by
this point, right if it was. Yeah, by one, Jim

(57:40):
and Tammy had a thoroughly acclimated to their new lives
as hideously wealthy monuments to God's generosity. Here's a clip
from one of their episodes in nineteen eighty one that
really lays the whole prosperity gospel thing out. And I
think this one may be new to you because it's
just I mean, there's thousands of powers of this. No
one can listen to all of it. But I'm gonna
play this. Um, I'm gonna send you this clip and
I want you to yeah, well, um, you know, I'm

(58:00):
gonna shoot this to via Skype. Then I'll tell you
the time stamps. We've got to start enjoying God again.
I really do. I think we need to say, Lord,
look at this beautiful lake out here. I look out
this window here and I see that blue sky today
and I see the beautiful water, and I say, Lord,
you made that lake for me to enjoy. Jim, can

(58:21):
I tell you a little miracle? I just want to
tell you a little people, a little miracle about what
happened with this house. We shouldn't have this house. That
is really the honest truth, because in all in all
human when you think of it, in the human aspect,
it was impossible for us to ever get this home
at all. And I had prayed and I said, now, Lord,
you know, Jim and I had to had to have

(58:42):
a new home. We need to be out of our
old one. And within like three weeks, and it was
just just didn't know what to do. We were just
and I said, oh God, you know, I said, I
couldn't figure off I want to swimming pool or lake,
but I knew we'd never had either, and I wanted one,
please Lord. So I said, well, Lord, I don't know
what to ask. Yeah, so I said, you give us
what'll make us happy. I knew we couldn't swim in

(59:02):
the pool, you know, in the in the winter, and
yet I knew we could see the lake all year around.
So I couldn't make up my mind. You know what
God did, He said, I want you to have both
of them, and he gave us a beautiful pool out
there plus the lake out back to Jim. Isn't that
just like the Lord? M hmm, Yeah, swimming pool or lake.

(59:25):
We need water. We know we need water. We know
we need water. Yeah, it's open and no one bats
in either. You know, they're like, why didn't Why didn't
everybody just get up and walk out hearing that? Because
this is how God works. He wants you to have this.
He wants all of you to have this. We I

(59:50):
think people talk a lot when they like complain about,
you know, the lack of like class consciousness in the
United States. How every poor American thinks of themselves like
a temporarily embarrassed mill you are. This really illustrates what
that means emotionally these people, don't You would think they
would hate like people like in the in the fucking seventies,
is like stagflation is hitting and like the economy is

(01:00:12):
in the shifter and they live in the middle of nowhere,
and like the Japanese economy is eating us manufacturing alive
and people are like out of work. And seeing this
person talking about like we just couldn't decide between and
God provided us with a swimmer pool and the lake,
you would think that would infuriate them, but it's just
like it hasn't hit them yet, or hasn't you know,
God hasn't touched them enough yet. So yeah, sending the

(01:00:34):
checks in and then yeah, this will be their life.
It's something else. It's really something else. But like, yeah,
you have to understand how like blatant about it, like
they're not pretending to live humble lives here exactly. Yeah,
Um it's awesome. Um now, yeah, so this is good

(01:00:56):
for her part. Tammy Face seems to have had trouble
with with some aspect of them The gigantic, grifty nature
of all of this. She started taking massive doses of
valium for stress and became horribly addicted to a variety
of of of of drugs. She and Jim both put
on weight because again I think they are losing their

(01:01:16):
souls and becoming monsters. Uh, And they start taking off
that weight with what would become a series of different
diet and weight loss programs, and they talk about all
of this openly on their show, their successes and failures
and challenges, and of course then they're able to like
advertise for different like diet programs and stuff and books,
and yeah, it always works for them. So the whole

(01:01:37):
situation could have stayed this way probably forever, if Jim
Baker had been capable of even mild amounts of self control.
But he was not. PTLS content was dictated almost entirely
by his impulses, which is kind of the same thing
with Alex Jones today. Um. He would regularly announce new initiatives,
new product lines, new new shows for on his network,

(01:01:58):
live on the air, and like his crew would have
to live figure out how to like meet these things
that he was introducing and like make them work. And
this was part of the show's charm and dynamism. It
was part of why he was successful, but it also
led to gigantic problems, like Jim doubling the size of
Heritage USA. Well huge amounts of it were still under construction.
Um you know, committing to building a five room hotel

(01:02:20):
in a water park, and you know, then needing to
find more money. Um, so Jim would flog his viewers
mercilessly for more donations. As former PTL security chief don
hardis sterlcalled quote, we had a cash office, and at
times there was certainly more money in it than I
could imagine. People would send us mink coats, diamond rings, deeds.
I mean, we got all sorts of donations. It's okay, wild,

(01:02:43):
but this works. It's just the most artless grift in
the world. And that's why it works. It's fucking amazing
to me, like l Ron Hubbard has to make a
fucking religion to get your money, and Jim Baker's just like, no,
just send me the deed. Dear fucking house. I need
another lake. I'm gonna build a hotel next to my lake.

(01:03:07):
Fucking amazing, need more water. But it still wasn't enough.
All this money wasn't enough. The demands of Baker's new
empire were too high, and in the nineteen eighties, he
started asking his followers to pay a thousand dollars each
for lifetime partnerships. Now, these lifetime partnerships would earn them
a three night stay at the new hotel that he
built on his land. And on the surface, this could

(01:03:29):
be a great idea. You know, it's basically a timeshare.
But they barely get any time there and they pay
a bunch of money. But Jim couldn't even abide by,
like like, this is a This could be a perfectly
legal grift, but Jim had to break the law. He
vastly oversold these partnerships until he wound up with more
partnerships than his hotel could possibly host a year, sixties,

(01:03:50):
six thousand of them. And again, this is a five
room hotel. Like you do the math. Now there were
other grifts too. He started offering David and Goliath statues
to his viewers, and he would tell them these were
an investment because the statues were like works of art
that were worth a thousand dollars each, and he sold

(01:04:11):
them for just a hundred and twenty five dollars, but
they were really ten dollar pieces of like poorly crafted
metal bullshit. Um, it all works, though he makes a
shipload of money, but he is now committing fraud. Like
up to this point he was really all within the
lines of the law other than writing bad checks. And
they're never gonna like the money wound up being there,
So it's fine. He has crossed a legal line now.

(01:04:37):
And all of this blatant fraud earned PTL the attention
of the Charlotte Observer, a local newspaper that locked its
teeth onto the legs of the Baker operation and held
on for years like they really some fucking world. They
win a Pulitzer for this, Like they are they right,
like think probably like way over a thousand articles by
the time this is all done. Um. Like they they

(01:04:57):
tear into Baker and like exhaustively detail every way in
which he's breaking the law, every shady thing he's doing. Um,
it's it's it's a great thing that they do. But
they didn't catch everything right away. And one of the
things that they didn't catch when they started reporting on
the financial crimes was the fact that Jim Baker committed
an even worse crime in December of nineteen eighty, have

(01:05:20):
you heard about the rape that Jim Baker committed? Yeah? This? Uh?
Is this Jessica Han? Jessica Han? Yeah, yeah. So Jessica
had grown up, you know, in the church or in
the Pentecostal movement. She was twenty one years old in
nineteen eighty and for her entire childhood, basically, Jim Baker
had been her Mr Rogers. He was the moral center

(01:05:41):
of her universe. Like that is the way that she
looked at him, like he he was he was a
the right arm of God to her um. And she
was elated when she got a job as the church secretary,
which basically seems she basically was working as the Baker's nanny, right,
that was like a big part of her job. And
one December day, when Tammy was out of the house
conduct a telethon, Jim called her into the office. Han

(01:06:03):
later told an interviewer quote, Jim Baker comes up and says,
forget about the kids. The bodyguards are outside the door.
He said, listen to me, Jessica, when you helped the shepherd,
you helped the sheep. And he said, my wife is
having an affair with the choir director and I need
you right now to make me feel like a man.
And I was a virgin and people find that hard
to believe, but when you're raised in the church at

(01:06:23):
fourteen on, that was just the way it is. Um. Now,
Baker wasn't alone. One of his employees, a guy named
John Fletcher, was there too. Fletcher offered Han a drink
which had something probably G HB in it uh and
Han didn't pass out, but she was in a very
altered state when Baker made his move. Quote. So Jim
Baker ripped off the bedspread and said, you know, my

(01:06:44):
wife doesn't make me feel like a man anymore. And
you know when you helped the shepherd, you helped the sheep.
And so it hurt like hell. And then after that,
John Fletcher comes in, who was the middleman, and said,
you know, you can't just be with Jim Baker. You've
got to be with me. He threw me on the
floor head back. I had blood coming out of my
act and you know he just went nuts on me.
So this is a horrific violence. Yeah, this is a

(01:07:06):
horrific rape. Like this is not just like it's usually portrayed,
even by kind of like mainstream news today, like scene
ended the interview, and like so a lot of mainstream
news did a good job of covering this, but like
a lot of times they'll say, like, you know, there
were allegations that it was non consensual, that there were
allegations that this was a violent drug rape. Like this
is as as bad a rape as as it gets,

(01:07:27):
you know, Um, this is a horrific crime committed by
Jim Baker and his guy John Fletcher. So it's bad,
Oh my god? Yeah. Um, Now, Jessica Han kept quiet
for eight years because how the funk like God's right
hand man is rape you? Like, how do you begin
process that? Yeah, it's it's rough. Um. And Jim Baker

(01:07:47):
paid her twenty dollars of hush money up front, which
he told her was show she could get counseling. Uh.
He would eventually pay more than a quarter of a
million dollars of church funds to Jessica Han. And that
vic is where we're gonna end on part one. Right,
How you how you feeling? It's a lot to take
in there. This is a lot the story if Jim

(01:08:08):
Baker is a lot. It's been drifted a long time
you know. Yeah, and he's like the ultimate illustration of
the the fact that like hurt people hurt people like
this kid. Everything scans right, it's not hard to see.
Uh god, mm hmm. Yeah. I'm curious because I don't
I guess nothing really came. I mean, I don't want

(01:08:29):
to jump ahead here, but you know, but like, I'm
just curious about what happened with that rape, if that
uh like the bodyguard guy had to go to jail
or anything like that. But oh no, he died before
Jessica uh came forward. Yeah, so he really he really
got yeah. Um, but also there's never criminal charges. I
don't think his result of that. She doesn't like really

(01:08:50):
press them, you know, right, she comes out in the
media about it later. Uh yeah. So well, yeah, fun story.
Fun story of the United States. Um, a country crafted
in a lab to allow bad people to avoid consequences exactly.

(01:09:14):
Oh my god, it's fucking rules man. Where can people
find you on the internet? What are your what are
your plugs? You can check I would go to my YouTube,
check my channel there. You can see all my Jim
Baker videos there and the endless amounts of Donald Trump videos.
Grifters got a lot of a lot of stuff there.
Um there. You can go to Twitter, Facebook, you know,

(01:09:36):
I's type my name in there. I am there. We
are all right. Check out vic um it's it's important.
Uh beautiful horror. I love it. Uh. And check out
me somewhere. No one knows where. No one's ever found
me on the internet, but the legends say that if

(01:09:57):
you if you hold a cont shell to your ear
while standing on a frigid Oregon coastline in the dead
of midwinter, you can sometimes hear me tweet. So nope, nope, nope,
that's not accurate. That is I'm fairly certain that's accurate.

(01:10:18):
That is not true. Okay, Well, unfortunately no one knows
what the truth is. So we've just got to roll
on in the episode for the day. All right, Well,
thanks for having me on. Hope you uh hope you
get your tolt together in a retirement. Yeah, yeah, I'll
donate