Review: PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (1986)

PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire
Oxford University Press
$34.95
Hardcover
Published: 04 August 2017
424 Pages | 46 Black and White images
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
ISBN: 9780199379712

I really enjoyed reading this book. It's very well researched and written by John Wigger, professor of history at the University of Missouri, whose research focuses on American religious and cultural history.

I'm a real fan of American religious and cultural history. I've read many books about America's religious and cultural history and, more importantly, I've lived it.

Younger people may not be very familiar with Jim and Tammy Bakker and the PTL Club, but those of us who are older will remember PTL and its scandalous collapse.

Those were the days before the internet and social media, the most influential era for the medium of television, when the so-called televangelists were the top television influencers.

When I was twenty-five years old, in 1985, I became a born again Christian while watching, hearing the gospel, and praying with the folks on The 700 Club, which was a Christian television program Jim Bakker had, years earlier, hosted, when he worked for Pat Robertson at his Christian Broadcasting Network.

During the 1970s Jim and Tammy Bakker were at the forefront of satellite television. Their PTL Christian satellite network, which went live in 1978, was one of the first satellite television networks. Only HBO and Ted Turner's station in Atlanta preceded them.

When reading this book I found those early innovative years of PTL to be the most interesting. As the book progresses, of course, PTL slowly but surely becomes something of a train wreck. It was interesting to learn the details of the collapse of PTL.

Anyone who was a Christian during the collapse of PTL will remember that it became the talk of the town, so to speak. Some of the guys who weren't Christians on my job loved to bring up the subject of PTL's scandalous collapse, knowing I was a Christian. As a new Christian it was something of a wake-up call for me, having to defend Christianity whilst not excusing PTL's sin and corruption and, at the same time, feeling grieved over the end of a popular and influential Christian television ministry.

As the book explains, had Jim and Tammy simply stuck to television and television ministry as their main focus, things may not have ended so badly for them and for PTL. Heritage USA, Jim Bakker's Christian theme park, and the endless fundraising for the building thereof, is what ultimately ruined their ministry (and their marriage).

This is a fascinating true story. It's a story about poverty, love, faith, technological innovation, stardom, riches, greed, hatred, sexual depravity, grace, and forgiveness.

In short, this is a very human story overshadowed by the gracious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. 

If you enjoy books about American religion and culture you are sure to enjoy this book...

PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire (Oxford) https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ptl-9780199379712?cc=us&lang=en&

PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire (Amazon) https://www.amazon.com/PTL-Tammy-Bakkers-Evangelical-Empire/dp/0199379718

ABC 20/20: The Rise and Fall of PTL (Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUDaValP-9OLf44vdkGZHARWHaW_W65Cx

The Eyes of Tammy Faye https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B002WGC6XO






Roseanne interviews Tammy Faye Bakker (1998) https://youtu.be/VwH4MwfDTjs

PTL CLUB 1987 - Jim & Tammy's Goodbye https://youtu.be/we18_hqy5O8

Jim and Tammy Bakker Through the Years https://youtu.be/_NNPJn1KeQQ

Steve Pieters Interview with Tammy Faye Bakker on PTL / Tammy's House Party https://youtu.be/GjXXdQ6VceQ

Pictures of hell set before our eyes

Undoubtedly modern philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis have firmly contested the idea of human sin, guilt, or responsibility in an effort to “liberate” us. A strange thing has happened, then, for we have ended up by being convicted that sin (especially original sin) no longer counts, that there is no responsibility, that we can do as we like with no limits, and the result is not conduct that is open to the good or liberated for it, but frantic egoism, scorn for others, a desire for aggrandizement and domination. Once we begin to attain to the conviction that we are not sinners, what do we see around us? What is brought to us by the thousands of pictures transmitted by television? Epidemics, famines, massacres, genocides, revolutions, everywhere leading to innumerable executions even when the intentions are the best, the installation of bloody and capricious dictatorships, socialism transformed into an instrument of oppression, of murder, and of hatred, the spoliation of the planet by technology. Pictures of hell are set before our eyes every day. 

Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (p. 144)

Neil Postman

“For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.” ~ Neil Postman

“I had a chance to give a talk to some newspaper publishers last May. They wanted me to say something sensible about the future of newspapers. I suggested to them that instead of organizing their paper according to international news, national news, regional news and so on, they should use the seven deadly sins and have lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, and so on, and then categorize the stories in those ways.” ~ Neil Postman

Neil Postman Books https://www.amazon.com/Neil-Postman/e/B000AQ1U26

Neil Postman Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman

Media Ecology Association http://www.media-ecology.org/

Neil Postman http://neilpostman.org/

“If you have not read Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s not too late, but don’t put it off. If you love TV, you must read it now before you’re completely brain-dead. If you still watch TV, but it irritates you to no end, then you probably have foresight into Postman’s argument. If you abandoned TV years ago, then Postman will bolster your sagacity with a host of historical, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological insights. Whichever category you fit in to, the time has come to read Postman...” Continue reading: Neil Postman's Description of Reading http://kuyperian.com/neil-postmans-description-of-reading/

The Disappearance of Childhood

“The telegraph created an audience and a market not only for news but for fragmented, discontinuous, and essentially irrelevant news, which to this day is the main commodity of the news industry.”

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (71)

“Civilization cannot exist without the control of impulses, particularly the impulse toward aggression and immediate gratification. We are in constant danger of being overrun by violence, promiscuity, instinct, egoism. Shame is the mechanism by which barbarism is held at bay, and much of its power comes... from the mystery and awe that surround various acts”

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (85-86)

“Television, to put it simply, does not call one’s attention to ideas, which are abstract, distant, complex, and sequential, but to personalities, which are concrete, vivid, and holistic. What this means is that the symbolic form of political information has been radically changed. In the television age, political judgement is transformed from an intellectual assessment of propositions to an intuitive and emotional response to the totality of an image. In the television age, people do not so much agree or disagree with politicians as like or dislike them.”

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (101)

Amusing Ourselves To Death

“Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? Or five? Or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? . . . These audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend length and complex sentences aurally. In Douglas’ Ottawa speech he included in his one-hour address three long, legally phrased resolutions of the Abolition platform. Lincoln, in his reply, read even longer passages from a published speech he had delivered on a previous occasion. For all of Lincoln’s celebrated economy of style, his sentence structure in the debates was intricate and subtle, as was Douglas’. In the second debate, in Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln rose to answer Douglas in the following words:

‘It will readily occur to you that I cannot, in half an hour, notice all the things that so able a man as Judge Douglas can say in an hour and a half; and I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said upon which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit to comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an impossibility for me to cover his whole ground.’

“It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the White House being capable of constructing such clauses in similar circumstances. And if he were, he would surely do so at the risk of burdening the comprehension or concentration of his audience. People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (45-46)

Literacy Lost

“When a culture disdains literacy for the important functions of public discourse and replaces that with a medium that focuses on format and style -- and therefore entertainment -- then you begin to get... you have a situation comparable to what Huxley meant by the drug soma... that everyone is kept sort of pacified, amused, entertained. President Regan is entertaining... Dan Rather is entertaining... even the nightly news, for all of its gory stories, is entertaining, because the film footage is exciting. The religion on television is amusing. Commercials are very amusing and entertaining. So that, as we move into this imagistic culture of short duration, dynamic, and amusing images, we have a population that becomes pacified... that no longer is capable of the kind of sustained reflection and analytical thought that I think is usually characteristic of literate cultures where typography is vital to every day’s functioning.” ~ Neil Postman (PBS Currents Literacy Lost)

Neil Postman - PBS Currents (Literacy Lost) https://youtu.be/VWNHLKW7n5c

Technopoly

Neil Postman’s Seven Questions For New Technologies

1. “What is the problem to which a technology claims to be the solution?”

2. “Whose problem is it?”

3. “What new problems will be created because of solving an old one?” 

4. “Which people and institutions will be most harmed?”

5. “What changes in language are being promoted?”

6. “What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result?”

7. “What alternative media might be made from a technology?”

College Lecture Series - Neil Postman - "The Surrender of Culture to Technology" https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE 

Neil Postman: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (American Profile) https://youtu.be/a6hVuZBK0XU

Neil Postman on Cyberspace https://youtu.be/49rcVQ1vFAY

Book TV: Neil Postman, "Technology" https://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg

Neil Postman on the Disappearance of Childhood http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Postman1.html