God and Money

By David Brand

By turns angry, bewildered and curious, an anxious crowd descended on the Jefferson Square Theater in Columbia, S.C., last week. Their aim: to play a role in the next installment of a long-running American serial of sex, cash and power -- a show resembling some lurid made-for-TV mini-series that might be called God and Money. For six hours, harassed officials of the embattled PTL (for Praise the Lord or People That Love) ministry were confronted at a public bankruptcy hearing by members of the flock that had supported the $203 million religious empire created by its ousted leaders, Jim and Tammy Bakker. The officials struggled to assure PTL donors that the foundering television- and-theme-park ministry, now about $68 million in debt, might soon turn a profit. Asserted the new PTL chief operating officer, Harry Hargrave: "We will be able to pay our debts. We are very confident of that."

Someone apparently less confident, though, was Televangelist Jerry Falwell. The Lynchburg, Va., preacher, who took control of PTL after Jim Bakker's March 19 resignation, looked grim as he faced studio cameras later in the week on PTL's regular morning television show. Falwell told viewers that donations had taken a nosedive since PTL formally filed for bankruptcy on June 12. If $1.75 million is not raised by July 31, he announced, PTL might be forced to stop broadcasting on some of the 161 stations that, for a fee, carry the ministry's born-again message. Said Falwell: "There's no more postponing. We've come down to D-day."

But as Falwell spoke, the PTL scandal continued to cast a pall across the entire secretive big business of televangelism. As never before, "skeptics have fuel for their fires," said David Hubbard, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "They may see this as reflecting on the excesses of the whole evangelical movement."

Aside from his cash flow, one urgent problem facing Falwell is what to do about the claims of 120,000 PTL "Lifetime Partners" who each gave at least $1,000 to the organization, with the promise of free lodging for three nights a year at the ministry's theme-park hotel. The organization, though, has little hope of fulfilling those pledges because the number of donors exceeds the number of hotel rooms available by 5 to 1. Falwell noted last week that if the court declares those donations, which total $180 million, as debt, PTL will have to close down.

Days of reckoning have seemed to come and go with nightmarish frequency for PTL since Jim Bakker's admission that he had had a sexual tryst with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, N.Y., and had paid out $265,000 in hush money. Last week Hahn's lawyer announced that she would cash in further on the incident by telling her story in Playboy for an undisclosed sum.

As last week's bankruptcy hearing wore on -- in anticipation of PTL's corporate-reorganization plan due in October -- no fewer than 18 investigators from the Justice Department, the U.S. Postal Service and the Internal Revenue Service pored over mountains of the ministry's financial records at its headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C. The officials were readying material for a federal grand jury hearing, scheduled to begin in Charlotte, N.C., on Aug. 17. The focus, according to sources close to the investigation: the possibility of criminal tax fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud by Jim Bakker and other PTL leaders who have left the ministry since Falwell took over.

The House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee has also launched an investigation into the tax-exempt status not only of PTL but also of ten other major televangelist organizations. The committee has asked PTL representatives, among others, to appear at a hearing, probably in September. Texas Democrat J.J. Pickle, a member of the committee, last week met with the eleven religious broadcasters involved in the probe, including Falwell and Preacher Jimmy Swaggart of Baton Rouge, La., to question them closely about TV ministries' finances.

Increasingly, a growing number of Americans are focusing on the doings of the huge, semisecret gospel business empires like PTL that have sprung up in little more than a decade of fervent television preaching (see following story). Many are not happy with what they see. A Gallup poll survey this spring showed that since 1980 there has been a sharp decline in American public esteem for four of the country's most important TV preachers: Oklahoma- based Oral Roberts (whose approval rating dropped from 66% to 28%), Swaggart (76% to 44%), Virginia's Pat Robertson (65% to 50%) and California's Robert Schuller (78% to 61%).

The televangelists are also suffering where it hurts the most -- among viewers. Arbitron, which measures the size of local- and cable-television audiences, says most TV ministries have suffered a significant fall in viewership. Concurs Fred Vierra, president of United Cable, the nation's eighth largest operator: "We do not see their audiences growing. They're staying relatively flat." One evangelist cracks, "I was in West Irian on the island of New Guinea, and even some of the Stone Age people are familiar with the PTL scandal. That's how far it has gone."

It may go further. Within weeks of losing his grip on power at the Fort Mill ministry, Bakker began denouncing Falwell as a usurper. A solid core of Bakker loyalists at PTL apparently believes him. One complicating issue is that Falwell is a Fundamentalist, a group that rejects the faith healing and speaking in tongues practiced by the Pentecostal PTL faithful. Amid last week's emergency pitch for donations, Falwell disclosed an apparent plot by dissident PTL members to sabotage his fund-raising efforts. During the funding telethon, PTL lines were jammed by crank and obscene calls. Falwell eventually announced that no pledges would be accepted over the telephone and urged donors to send checks by mail.

One reason the struggle for control at PTL continues is that the stakes, even in bankruptcy, are considerable. For all its financial woes, PTL remains a glittering prize, with its daily TV show, its all-day religious cable service transmitted to 13 million homes, and the splashy, 2,300-acre Heritage USA theme park, the ministry's entertainment centerpiece. PTL's Hargrave denied at the bankruptcy meeting that Falwell had usurped PTL's 518,000-donor mailing list and that checks made out to PTL had gone to the Lynchburg ministry. Bakker loyalists remain unconvinced. Said Robert Zanesky, the lawyer for a group of PTL contributors intent on removing Falwell: "His credibility stinks." Says Ryan Hovis, a bankruptcy lawyer representing Bakker: "No stockholder in Chrysler would sit still if Lee Iacocca were chairman of the board for Ford."

The two central protagonists of the PTL turmoil, meanwhile, continued to parade their opulent life-styles. The couple breezed into San Francisco on July 11 as guests of their flamboyant tort lawyer, Melvin Belli, who is now laying the legal groundwork in his effort to have Bakker reinstated at PTL. During their week-long stay, the Bakkers were billeted on Belli's 105-ft. ocean-going yacht, The Adequate Reward, and were taken to parties, dinners and exclusive stores by Belli's wife Lia. Tammy enjoyed a makeover at Lia's favorite hair salon, 77 Maiden Lane.

A week earlier Jim and Tammy Bakker had been supervising $300,000 worth of renovations to their Gatlinburg, Tenn., home, which they bought for $148,000. Hammer in hand, Bakker greeted two TIME correspondents at the house, high above the resort town in the Great Smoky Mountains. Both Jim and Tammy vowed either to return to Fort Mill or to begin their own ministry, perhaps in California. For an hour Bakker defended himself as a "visionary" who had a "dream to build something very special for God's people." He asked, "Even if Jim and Tammy did everything we're accused of, does that give Jerry Falwell the right to steal my dream, my life, my home, my everything and my reputation from me?" Amid the growing investigative ferment surrounding the wounded ministry, it appeared that a host of interested parties would soon be trying to answer that question.

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/Baton Rouge and Michael Riley/Fort Mill