Word: scandalizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...weeks sweet order has fled, seemingly overwhelmed by hot words and rackety confusion. 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...
...pure chance, the Bakker scandal -- involving sex, greed and ministerial rivalries -- has coincided with a controversy swirling about another televangelist. The Rev. Oral Roberts, operator of a TV ministry, university and medical center in Tulsa, had broadcast that God would "call Oral Roberts home" unless by March 31 believers came up with $4.5 million for missionary work. Many Christians, including some Roberts followers, were scandalized by what they perceived to be implicit spiritual blackmail. The Bakker-Roberts furor raised questions about the future of TV evangelism, a fast-growing, klieg-lighted mode of Christian proselytizing -- and fund raising. Counting radio...
...quickly developed that the rival was the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, a fiery preacher from Baton Rouge, La., with a substantial U.S. television audience. Swaggart denied any interest in "stealing" PTL and said the Bakker scandal was a "cancer that needed to be excised from the body of Christ." Swaggart did admit, however, that he had passed along rumors about Bakker's illicit behavior to officials of the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal denomination in which both are clergy. Swaggart says yet more scandals are brewing. "I believe they will come out. But they won't come from...
Shortly thereafter Swaggart alerted Assemblies of God leaders to the impending scandal. Then, on March 19, Bakker beat the Observer to the punch. He confessed to the newspaper his adultery and the payment of "blackmail," quit PTL, and to the surprise of his followers handed control over to Jerry Falwell...
Important questions hover over new PTL President Dortch, who may face action by the Assemblies of God for his part in the Bakker scandal. According to Roper, Dortch was more deeply involved than Bakker in arranging the payments to Hahn. Falwell offered no enlightenment last week on whether the $265,000 hush money had come from contributions to PTL ministries, but he said an audit committee would go to work on it. That word came at a PTL headquarters press conference, at which Falwell handed out financial reports showing that PTL revenues exceeded expenses by $19.8 million in the year...