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 Missouri. 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 Assemblies of God 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: 10.1163/15700747-04001016 Book Reviews 237 his ministry around and is relevant again.The theme of the Jim Bakker ministry is a blend of doomsday apocalypticism 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