236 Book Reviews

John Wigger PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (New York, NY: Oxford University, 2017). 407 pp. $34.95 hardcover.

John Wigger is a professor of United States social and cultural history at the University of . According to Methodist historian Grant Wacker’s 2010 Christian Century book review, Wigger’s 2009 American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists was a “definitive and magisterial” biography of one of the most significant figures in American history. In 2017 Wigger engaged a more recent revivalist tradition with an analysis of the religious and cultural sig- nificance of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their Pentecostal and charis- matic disciples. On many levels, PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire is an insightful look at the founders of an “evangel- ical empire” and will again prove to be definitive. Wigger’s first twelve chapters, “The DJ and the Queen,” “A Show of His Own,” “Everyday in the USA,” “Abundant Life,” “The Emperor’s New Groove,” “Look Me in the Eye,” “Time Bomb,” “Special Math,” “Secret Lives,” “Four Days and Three Nights,” “Cover-Up,” and “Saturday Night” build to a climax, which in Wigger’s own words, led to a point “when all hell broke loose” (246). The last three chapters, “Scandal,” “Holy War,” and “Judgment Day” serve as an explosive dénouement to what for many observers was a very hellish episode in Evangeli- cal Christianity. Anyone familiar with the story of PTL, of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, will be tempted to guess the contents of each chapter based upon the brilliantly crafted titles. In 1974 Jim and Tammy Bakker started a Christian television show in Char- lotte, N.C., the PTL Club. PTL eventually grew into a worldwide ministry, the PTL Television Network. By 1987 PTL had become an institution worth more than $170 million, with television production studios, a 2300-acre theme park (Heritage USA), and millions of devoted followers. In 1987, a salacious sexual scandal, financial misdeeds, and corruption caused everything to come crash- ing down in a media feeding frenzy. Jim, a former minister, went to federal prison for five years. The final chapters in Wigger’s book bring us up to date with Jim and Tammy. After Jim was released from prison the Bakkers divorced and each married again. Tammy died in 2007. But, that is not the end of the story. Jim’s ministry has experienced renewed life. Morningside, a miniature Heritage USA, is the setting of a new one-hour Jim Bakker Show which is broadcast by satellite and online from Branson, Missouri. Jim interviews guests with his most recent wife Lori as co-host. Wigger’s last chapter, “Epilogue: Apocalypse Chow,” describes his multiple visits to the show and his growing belief that Jim Bakker has turned

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001016Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 03:18:21PM via free access Book Reviews 237 his ministry around and is relevant again.The theme of the Jim Bakker ministry is a blend of doomsday and the selling of last days survival food and survival gear, hence the chapter title. With this well-documented book, Wigger dives into what some might call the dark side of Pentecostal and Charismatic studies. Scholars writing and reflecting on American society and culture will be intrigued by Wigger’s even- handed exposé, which is a model of relatively dispassionate historical anal- ysis. Those who relish reading about scandal in the church may be irritated with Wigger’s indirect disapprobation, wanting a more vigorous critic. But I also wonder how those from similar religious experience and tradition, whose expectations and hopes coincided with the dream of Jim and Tammy, will react to this book. Wigger’s motivation for writing the book is not obvious to me. My best guess is that he sensed an opportunity, a gap in a crowded field which needed to be explored, and he took a risk hoping his effort would be received well by the peo- ple who still remember and those who might need closure in some academic and therapeutic sense.Wigger gives credit to former Charlotte Observer Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Charles E. Shepard who wrote, The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry. Yet Wigger explains that he has taken a different path of analysis. In his Francis Asbury book and this book on PTL, Wigger argues that the rela- tionship between religion and culture is a powerful force.Wigger then advances a proposal that the Bakkers’ demonstrated a blending of popular culture and religious innovation in the best tradition of American religious practice. For Wigger, this natural and common American encounter between religion and culture, suggests that religious developments such as “PTL will not be the last” of their kind (338). Wigger places the PTL story within the “well-established trajectory of Amer- ican evangelicalism,” which, for Wigger, includes a capacity to connect with American culture through the use of innovative methods. This connection has been employed in American religion from the time of George Whitefield, who Wigger identifies as colonial America’s first celebrity. The Bakkers too were celebrities; and Jim’s professional profile follows that of an evangelist, albeit a modern television evangelist whose sermons functioned on a popular level much as the preachers of bygone years with innovative field preaching and camp meetings, and more recently big tent revivals and radio. Television was the next step in the evolution of innovation according to Wigger: television was a larger camp meeting, but with a potential for living room intimacy. Wigger identifies a kinship between the dramatic sermons of Whitefield and the dra- matic communication of Jim Bakker in front of the camera sitting on a couch

PNEUMA 40 (2018) 213–279 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 03:18:21PM via free access 238 Book Reviews on a Christian talk show. Bakker’s innovation on this familiar revivalistic for- mula was to take the church to the living room in the manner of Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show. Wigger specifically identifies PTL as a Pentecostal representation of evangel- icalism in contrast to a more fundamentalist one, stating:

PTL was more Pentecostal than fundamentalist. Pentecostals have a bet- ter sense of how a culture feels than how a society works. Pentecostalism tends to be more therapeutic and lacks the militancy of fundamentalism, which is why Bakker closed his television shows by smiling into the cam- era and saying, “God loves you, he really does.” 7

This difference between fundamentalism and Pentecostalism explains how Bakker could be so effective in motivating and engaging the public. It might also explain the willingness for so many to respond Bakker’s appeal without seeking to hold him to stricter accountability. Pentecostals believed, hoped, but ultimately failed to be discerning. At first, Wigger portrays the Bakkers as simplistic, touchy feely, although sympathetically so. He sees them in the early years as believers with the purest of motives, but that innocence was soon corrupted by their successes. They did not have the maturity nor capacity for depth to handle success, money, celebrity, attention in the form of flattery, nor the responsibility that comes with such a large institution. Corruption soon set in as “the money and celebrity that had been tools to reach the lost became goals” (337). The ministry’s leader- ship was not sufficiently grounded in its own religious convictions to resist the darker temptations it rubbed up against (338). Indeed, the darker temptations won out. The Kindle edition of the book contains photographs that the print edition does not include. Forty-six photographs in chronological order at the front of the book take on a visually riveting significance. This chapter of photographs has the feel of a family album that reveals a tragic conclusion. The last three photos, U.S. marshals leading Bakker off, reading the September 1987 issue of Playboy magazine, with Jessica on the cover, and Jim and Tammy leaving the Charlotte Federal Courthouse in 1989, leave the viewer in thoughtful reflection. Wigger desires to offer convincing evidence, visually and textually, that PTL was a tragic episode, a colossal failure in the history of American Evan- gelicalism, but a failure that in a sense symbolized the symbiotic connection in America between religion and culture. It has been thirty years since the collapse of PTL. Perhaps the time is ripe for some of the millions of followers to explore the events and absorb any lessons

PNEUMADownloaded from 40 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2018) 213–279 03:18:21PM via free access Book Reviews 239 to be learned? Wigger has done a favor for the Church by writing this book, because it has teaching potential. Religious leaders who supervise clergy and students preparing for ministry will benefit from using this book as a compo- nent of Christian formation. I encourage leaders in the churches to read the book and engage with the narrative in small group discussions. Every Pente- costal and charismatic in the United States should be aware of the era of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The creation of a study guide to accompany PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire to facilitate reflection would be a welcome addition to the book. For the academy, Wigger’s accomplishment demonstrates the possibilities available through cooperative engagement between a scholar and a religious community. The book would not have been possible without his capacity to earn trust and gain sympathetic cooperation from denominational archivists, the many former employees as well as faithful PTLers, who willingly offered input into this fascinating history of American Evangelical religion.

Don Kammer Assemblies of God, Alexandria, [email protected]

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