Word: bakkers
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...raucous world of TV evangelism, which was still stumbling toward recovery after a disastrous 1987. Oral Roberts kicked off last year's proceedings by announcing to an incredulous public a divine mandate to raise $8 million, or God would "call me home." Then it was Jim and Tammy Bakker and the revelation of Jim's payment of $265,000 in ministry funds to cover up sexual straying. Next came the revelations of the Bakkers' morass of financial mismanagement and personal aggrandizement at PTL. Suddenly watching evangelists became a national pastime; the place to catch them was as likely...
...strife continued. Bakker handed over control of PTL to Jerry Falwell only to turn against him and charge that the Virginia Fundamentalist had duped him in order to grab his empire. PTL filed for bankruptcy. Falwell escaped from the mess last October, calling it the "Watergate of evangelical Christianity." But even as Falwell abandoned politics a month later, Pat ; Robertson jumped in, leaving his Christian Broadcasting Network to get along without his strong presence. Left personally unscathed in all the turmoil were more churchly TV preachers such as Billy Graham and Robert Schuller...
Swaggart played sexual inquisitor when moral accusations arose against Bakker and Swaggart's Louisiana rival Marvin Gorman, both ministers in Swaggart's Pentecostalist denomination, the Assemblies of God. When each was defrocked, he proclaimed good riddance...
Then came the Bakker mess, first the revelation of the PTL leader's adultery and then of his hush-money payments and mismanagement. The avenging angel took wing again. Swaggart passed word to denominational leaders of an impending Charlotte Observer report on the hush money and pressed for a cleanup. He declared the scandal to be a "cancer that needs to be excised from the body of Christ...
Whatever Swaggart's ecclesiastical fate, laborers in TV evangelism, who stand to suffer yet more diminution of public esteem, emphasize that his sin does not remotely compare with Bakker's. Says Mark DeMoss, spokesman at PTL after Bakker resigned: "Last year's episode involved a lot of financial wrongdoing directly related to contributions. If Bakker had merely been accused of an affair with Jessica Hahn, he'd still...