Word: bakkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Through the week, TIME's correspondents were active in the strongholds of the video preachers across the South and West. Los Angeles Correspondent Michael Riley and Reporter Bill Blanning interviewed many of the principals in the story, including Tammy Faye Bakker. Meanwhile, Atlanta Correspondent B. Russell Leavitt assessed the deep Fundamentalism of the Southern states. Says he: "Driving through kudzu-covered country on a Sunday morning and flipping the radio dial, one can hear the evangelists by the score. They are a constant refrain, a fixture in the landscape...
...Perhaps not since famed Pentecostalist Preacher Aimee Semple McPherson was accused of faking her own kidnaping in the Roaring Twenties has the nation witnessed a spectacle to compare with the lurid adultery-and-hush-money scandal that has forced a husband-and-wife team of televangelists, Jim and Tammy Bakker, to abandon their multimillion-dollar spiritual empire and seek luxurious refuge in Palm Springs, Calif...
...revelations capped a series of aggressive reports on Bakker by the Observer that caused the evangelist to cry persecution. The paper ran a 1979 story alleging the diversion of TV contributions for PTL overseas work into U.S. projects. The result was an FCC investigation, which was halted when Bakker sold off a TV station in Canton, Ohio. The Justice Department later found no grounds for prosecuting PTL. A subsequent story said FCC testimony had accused Bakker and his wife of funneling donations into such perks as a houseboat, a mink coat and a sports car. The Bakkers denied the accusation...
...Watt. Falwell also called an emergency meeting of the board for this week. His administrative assistant, Mark DeMoss, indicated that Falwell is not empire building and that his organization in Lynchburg, Va., and PTL will have "separate boards, separate management, separate everything." In the shake-up, Richard Dortch, formerly Bakker's top executive, becomes PTL president...
...Bakker, meanwhile, has resigned not only from PTL but from the ministry of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination (membership: 2.5 million) based in Springfield, Mo.; he remains on the clergy rolls pending the church's own investigation of the scandal. Dortch has also resigned as an Assemblies minister because the PTL congregation has become independent of the Assemblies. Meeting with Falwell in California last week, Bakker pleaded with the Virginia preacher to assume the chairmanship of PTL's board. Falwell, who is already fully preoccupied with politics, pastoring and his own struggling cable-TV network, said...