CONMEN FOR THE LORD

The televangelists hid their sins. The Episcopal Church repealed them. And when neither worked, the bishops closed ranks. Jim Bakker's death is a reminder that no one in this story would submit to judgment

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I October 6, 2026

One by one they die off. Conmen for the Lord. The latest, Jim Bakker, bowed out on Monday at the age of 86, having disgraced the gospel and the Lord he professed to love and serve. Jimmy Swaggart went before him in July of last year, at 90.

His wife Lori announced the death on social media, calling him a pioneer of Christian television. That he was. He was also a convicted felon.

At that time, I expressed concern over the Bakker scandals. I viewed them as indicative of deeper issues within the televangelist movement and the church at large. I was critical of the moral failure of prominent figures like Bakker saying they would undermine the credibility of Christian leadership and accountability within the church community. It would even undermine the gospel itself. Leaders are held to a higher standard. See James 3: 1.

Give the man his due. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker built something remarkable out of puppets and a borrowed television studio. By the 1980s the PTL Club was a satellite empire and Heritage USA, their Christian theme park in South Carolina, drew millions of visitors a year. Bakker had a showman's genius and an uncanny gift for making ordinary believers feel they were part of something God was doing.

Then it all came apart. In 1987 it emerged that Bakker had a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room seven years earlier, and that roughly a quarter of a million dollars had been paid to keep her quiet. The Assemblies of God defrocked him.

Worse was to come. In 1989 a federal jury convicted him of fraud and conspiracy for selling "lifetime partnerships" at Heritage USA, promising lodging the ministry could never provide, while ministry money went to mansions, luxury cars, gold-plated bathroom fixtures and an air-conditioned doghouse. He was sentenced to 45 years. The sentence was later reduced, and he was paroled in 1994 after about five years behind bars.

And here is the part his obituaries will skip. In prison Bakker read the words of Jesus for himself and concluded that the prosperity gospel he had preached was a lie. In 1996 he published a book with a title few preachers have ever dared to use: I Was Wrong. It was, for a moment, a genuine act of repentance.

It did not last. He resurfaced near Branson, Missouri, selling buckets of survival food to the faithful for the coming apocalypse, and in 2020 he hawked a silver solution on air as a remedy for the coronavirus. The State of Missouri sued, and he was forced to refund buyers. The man who wrote I Was Wrong went back to passing the plate.

They Hid It

Bakker was not an aberration. He was a type. The televangelists are a fixture of the American evangelical landscape, men and women who claim God raised them up to save the masses from their sins, only to find that they themselves have stumbled along the way and fallen into sin.

They soaked gullible evangelicals for millions and lived high on the hog while they proclaimed salvation from sin for the masses, only to find sin in their own beds of iniquity.

The list is endless. The failures never end.

Jimmy Swaggart, the Pentecostal firebrand who had helped bring Bakker down, was himself photographed with a prostitute in 1988. His tearful "I have sinned" confession became infamous. Three years later he was caught again.

Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, campaigned against same-sex marriage until 2006, when a male escort revealed that Haggard had paid him for sex and bought methamphetamine. His anti-gay sermons were rapidly discredited.

Billy James Hargis, the anti-communist crusader of the Christian Crusade, was forced out of the college he founded in the 1970s after students, male and female, accused him of sexual misconduct.

Robert Tilton's prosperity empire was exposed by ABC's PrimeTime Live in 1991, which reported that prayer requests mailed in with donations ended up in dumpsters. Peter Popoff's "word of knowledge" healings were revealed in 1986 to be messages from his wife fed to him through an earpiece.

Mike Warnke made a fortune telling evangelical audiences he had been a Satanic high priest, until Cornerstone magazine showed in 1992 that the story was largely fabricated. Tony Alamo died in federal prison after his 2009 conviction for taking underage girls across state lines for sex.

And there is a second tier of offenders who, though popular, never made it into the national hall of sexual infamy.

What unites them is the lie. They preached one thing in the pulpit and did another in the motel room. They knew what they were doing was sin. That is why they hid it.

They Repealed It

Episcopal and Anglican bishops are not exempt from the same failings. But their sin took a more sophisticated form, dressed in the purple robes of righteousness with an air of sanctimony that would make Jesus spew them out of his mouth.

The televangelists hid their sins. The Episcopal Church simply repealed them.

It found a wonderful way of delisting sin, thus freeing the offender from the guilt and shame that usually accompanies it. Resolution D039 at the 2000 General Convention acknowledged "other life-long committed relationships" alongside marriage, effectively delisting fornication. Resolution B012 in 2018 pushed same-sex marriage rites into every diocese, over the objections of the few remaining orthodox bishops. If the Church could not stop the sinning, it could at least stop calling it sin.

Consider Gene Robinson. Nobody can accuse him of hypocrisy. He hid nothing. He married a woman, fathered two daughters, divorced, took up with a man, entered a civil union with him, married him, and then divorced him too. All of it was done with the Church's blessing, and he was consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 to wild applause in a hockey arena.

That is precisely the point. Bakker at least knew he was a sinner; that is why he lied. The Episcopal Church decided there was nothing to lie about. You could skirt the Bible's sexual prohibitions because the Church had come of age, and God, they believed, had changed his mind. It was the best of all possible worlds.

Hypocrisy, said La Rochefoucauld, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. The Episcopal Church stopped paying the tribute.

They Closed Ranks

And when neither hiding nor repealing would do, the bishops did what the institution always does. They closed ranks.

Charles Bennison, Bishop of Pennsylvania, was convicted by an Episcopal church court in 2008 for failing to act when he learned, decades earlier, that his brother, a youth minister in Bennison's own parish, was sexually abusing a teenage girl. The conviction was overturned on a statute of limitations technicality. In Maryland, the diocese elected Heather Cook its suffragan bishop in 2014 despite knowing of a prior drunk-driving arrest. Months later, drunk and texting, she struck and killed cyclist Thomas Palermo and drove away. She went to prison.

Most of the sexual misdeeds of Episcopal and Anglican priests have been confined to local parishes. Their sins never made the six o'clock news. Anglican Watch has documented case after case in diocese after diocese in which the Title IV disciplinary canons became a shield for clergy and a maze for victims, with bishops sitting on complaints until they quietly went away.

Across the Atlantic the Church of England did no better. Peter Ball, former Bishop of Gloucester, was jailed in 2015 for abusing young men in his care, and an independent review found the Church had colluded with him for decades. The Makin Review into John Smyth, the barrister who savagely beat boys and young men at evangelical camps, found the Church had known for years and failed to act. In November 2024 Justin Welby became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to resign over a safeguarding failure.

Orthodox Anglicans cannot claim immunity. The ACNA's own archbishop, Steve Wood, was inhibited last November and went to a closed church trial in Charleston beginning September 7 on allegations of sexual misconduct, bullying and plagiarism, which he denies. The court has up to 101 days after the trial ends to deliver judgment. Whatever the verdict, the test for the ACNA is whether it lets the process run in the light. Too many of its critics already suspect the instinct to circle the wagons.

No One Would Submit to Judgment

America's televangelists were the most brazen. They soaked the gullible, milked the faithful, and brought discredit on the very gospel they said they proclaimed. Their hypocrisy outshone their message. Their falls from grace were ruinous to their marriages and to the faithful they claimed to be saving.

But the root is the same in the motel room, the General Convention, and the bishop's study. The televangelist hid his sin. The progressive church abolished it. The institution buried it. Three roads, one destination: no one would submit to judgment.

"For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God," wrote the apostle Peter. It still must.

Jim Bakker once wrote I Was Wrong. It may be the only honest title in the whole sorry library. At the end of the day the conmen for the Lord saved no one and nothing, not even themselves. The bishops in purple simply did it more quietly.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com