10/07/2026
The Gospel for Sale: From Heritage USA to the White House
By A Country Pastor
Jim Bakker died last night at 86. The empire he built collapsed decades ago, but the show he invented never went off the air. Somewhere an elderly widow who once mailed him a thousand dollars still remembers the hotel room she was promised and never got to sleep in. Today our prayers go to the family grieving a husband and father, and to the thousands of ordinary people who trusted a television preacher with their savings because they believed they were giving to God. Grief and honesty are able to sit at the same table, and honesty matters most in the moments we are tempted to look away. The story of Jim Bakker belongs to all of us, because the stage he built is the same stage our nation is standing on today, and the man now standing at the center of it learned every line.
PTL began in 1974 and grew into a satellite empire fed every week by viewers who sent whatever they could spare. Jim and Tammy Faye sang, cried, laughed, and asked for money, and the money came. Out of it rose Heritage USA in South Carolina, a Christian theme park that became one of the most visited attractions in America. Faithful viewers bought lifetime partnerships for a thousand dollars each, promising three free nights a year, and more than a hundred thousand were sold for far fewer rooms than could ever honor them. Meanwhile the Bakkers lived with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and an air-conditioned doghouse. When a young woman's story threatened the empire, money was paid to keep her quiet, and when the truth came out anyway, the whole thing collapsed. In 1989 Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sent to prison. The people who paid for all of it were mostly working families, retirees on fixed incomes, and widows who gave out of devotion, and for them it was never a punchline.
Scripture saw this coming long before television existed. The prophet Micah described leaders whose "priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, 'Surely the LORD is with us!'" (Micah 3:11). Gehazi chased down Naaman's silver after Elisha refused it, and Simon the magician tried to buy the power of the Holy Spirit, only to hear Peter answer, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God's gift with money!" (Acts 8:20). Jesus warned about religious men who "devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers" (Mark 12:40), and in the very next breath he sat down to watch a poor widow give her last two coins. He saw her heart, and he saw the system that was taking from her. When he walked into the temple and found it crowded with sellers, he turned over their tables and said, "My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of robbers" (Matthew 21:13). Every generation has its sellers in the temple, and Jesus never once looked the other way.
In a federal prison cell, with the cameras gone and the money gone, Jim Bakker sat down and read the words of Jesus straight through, and he came away convinced that the prosperity gospel he had preached for years could not stand beside them. He wrote a book with a title few preachers ever find the courage to write: I Was Wrong. Then he walked back onto a television stage and started selling again. This time the product was fear instead of prosperity, buckets of survival food for the coming end times, and in 2020 a silver supplement pitched to frightened viewers as protection from a pandemic, which ended in a lawsuit and $156,000 in restitution. The promise changed from "God will make you rich" to "the world is ending, so buy now," but the sales pitch never left. A man can see the truth clearly in a quiet cell and lose sight of it again once the lights come back on. Knowing the truth once has never been enough to keep a heart from drifting back to the old ways, and that should sober every one of us.
Set Donald Trump's career beside Jim Bakker's and the two stories line up almost step for step. Bakker sold timeshares in rooms that did not exist, and Trump sold a university that promised the secrets of success and ended in a $25 million settlement with the students who paid for it. Bakker's ministry money paid for luxury, and Trump's own charitable foundation was shut down, with a court ordering him to pay $2 million for using its money to benefit his campaign. Bakker paid to silence a woman, and Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts tied to paying to silence a woman. A New York judge found that Trump had inflated his wealth for years to win better loans, while casino after casino went bankrupt and the investors and contractors absorbed the losses. After the 2020 election he raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters for an election defense fund that investigators later said never existed as promised. Each time, the people left holding the loss were ordinary folks who believed in him, while the man himself walked away living in luxury, living in safety, living his best life ever. The pattern has never been hidden; it has simply been forgiven by people who wanted to believe.
Then Trump stepped onto the televangelist's stage and claimed the faithful as his own audience. Even the stagecraft carried over, the tears on cue and the carefully made-up faces of PTL now echoed in a president who treats every appearance as a television production, because both understood that the face on the screen mattered more than the heart behind it. He sells Bibles bearing his name for $59.99, golden sneakers, and a cryptocurrency, each one marketed as though buying it were an act of devotion. His spiritual adviser, Paula White, is a prosperity preacher from the same tradition that built PTL, and she now leads a faith office inside the White House. The fundraising letters arrive with the urgency Bakker perfected, the crisis only one man can fix, the enemies at the gate, the plea to send money today before it is too late. When Trump stood before the nation and declared "I alone can fix it," he was preaching the oldest sermon of the Kingdom of Man. The televangelist once lifted up the politician, and now the politician plays the televangelist, wearing a savior's role that belongs to Jesus alone.
Jim Bakker, for all his failings, once looked at his life and wrote the words "I was wrong." Donald Trump was asked whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness, and he said he was not sure he ever had. Before we point at Heritage USA or the White House, we have to ask the harder question of ourselves. Why did so many good people send those checks, and why do so many good people send them still? The prosperity gospel works because it flatters us, telling us that comfort is proof of blessing, that wealth is proof of faithfulness, and that the right strongman can deliver us from every hardship if we just believe in him hard enough. The pious Christian is drawn to a God who rewards loyalty with prosperity and power, while the Jesus-Christian follows a Savior who "has nowhere to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20). The salesman only succeeds when something in the buyer wants what he is selling, and the honest question today is what in us still wants it.
Jesus sent his disciples out with instructions that would bankrupt every television ministry and every political fundraising operation in America: "You received without payment; give without payment" (Matthew 10:8). He rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, owned nothing he could not walk away from, and laid down his life for people who could give him nothing in return. The Kingdom of God has never had a merchandise table. The father in the parable of the prodigal son did not ask his boy for a seed offering when he saw him coming up the road; he ran to him, threw his arms around him, and called for a feast the son had done nothing to earn. That is the heart of God, and it is free. That same grace met Jim Bakker in a prison cell when he finally read the red letters for himself, and it waits today for every one of us who ever felt foolish for trusting the wrong man. It waits even for the president, if he ever chooses to put down the merchandise, speak the words "I was wrong," and come home.
So today we pray for the Bakker family in their grief, and for every widow and working family who gave until it hurt and never saw what they were promised. We pray for this country too, a nation that keeps mistaking showmen for shepherds and salesmen for saviors, and that prayer is how we bring our own hearts and choices into unity with the love of God. It looks like learning to know leaders by their fruits (Matthew 7:16) rather than by their tears or the fears they stir up to keep us buying, and it looks like putting our money and our votes where that love can be seen. The people decide whether this show goes on, because every stage depends on an audience willing to keep paying. The father keeps watching the road for every one of us who has bought into the gospel for sale, and the way home has always been open. The grace of God has never carried a price, and the only people who ever profited from pretending otherwise were the ones holding the collection plate.
