Word: evangelists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...know that [former television evangelist] Jim Bakker's problems really started when Tammy Faye took her makeup off and realized she was really Jimmy Hoffa?" asked Sheryl Underwood. She also told a largely unprintable tale about Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Gary Hart on a sinking cruise ship...
...Observer, Bakker confessed that he had paid $265,000 in hush money to cover up an afternoon of adultery in 1980 with Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary from Long Island, N.Y. At Bakker's request, Falwell became PTL's new head, amid rumors that another TV evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart of Baton Rouge, La., was conspiring to wrest control...
...Falwell renege? He freely admitted changing his mind as the scandal continued to unfold. Falwell charged that he has since learned that on the day in 1980 in Florida when, according to Hahn, Bakker and his companion, Evangelist John Wesley Fletcher, had intercourse with her, a PTL staffer then attempted to do the same, and Bakker later asked the third man, "Did you get her too?" Said Falwell: "That made my blood boil." Falwell-installed auditors subsequently discovered that the $265,000 in hush money had been siphoned from PTL accounts through a false billing...
Frankly, there is no prescribed formula for such a difficult situation. Sometimes, the worst is bound to happen. For example, when the popular TV evangelist Rev. Jim Z was caught in just such an affair, the public wound up believing that not only did he have sex with the young woman in question, but that he was a homosexual to boot. And there was little that a platoon of Marines in the large communist country Q could do to save their jobs...
Like Falwell, the members of PTL's new board are no strangers to controversy. James Watt resigned as Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary after offending several minority groups, and was recently fired by a Native American tribe that claimed his work as its lawyer was inept. Evangelist Bailey Smith, while president of the Southern Baptist Convention, gained brief notoriety by declaring, "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Retired Televangelist Rex Humbard was once rebuked by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling unregistered securities, and was taken to task in the press for spending too much...