The Evangelicals by Frances FitzGerald

Author:Frances FitzGerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. When Robertson’s prophecies were disconfirmed, he tended to blame the problem on something like interference—or noise—in the channel between himself and the Lord. (“If I am hearing him correctly.”) Harrell, pp. 316–17.

II. The Bakkers divorced while Jim was in prison, and both later remarried. Tammy embraced the gay men who supported her, started attending gay pride events, and in 1996 became the cohost of a syndicated television talk show with an openly gay actor. She acted in a few movies, and had a film and musical made about her. She died of colon cancer in 2007. Jim repented of prosperity theology, saying that he had never read through the Bible before he went to prison. In 2003 he started a new broadcasting ministry in Branson, Missouri, and in 2008 he moved to Blue Eye, Missouri, where he broadcasts from a studio in a residential/retail complex bankrolled by a developer who claims Bakker saved his marriage.

Jim and Tammy had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy, Jay Bakker, who was thirteen when his father went to prison, didn’t finish high school, took up drugs and alcohol, and covered himself in tattoos and piercings. Gradually he found his faith and started his own ministry, the Revolutionary Church. In 2006 he took his ministry to New York, where he preached at a hip bar in Brooklyn. A social liberal, he became an ardent supporter of gay rights, including gay marriage. In 2013 he went to Minneapolis to found a second Revolutionary Church.73

As for Swaggart, he was brought down by Marvin Gorman, the very preacher whose career he had ruined by exposing Gorman’s adulterous affair. Gorman, who was suing him for defamation, photographed him going into a motel with a prostitute a few hundred yards from his New Orleans church. As the New Yorker reporter Lawrence Wright wrote, it was as if he were courting his own destruction and asking for punishment. He repented tearfully, but refused to follow the Assemblies of God presbyters’ instructions to step down from his television ministry for a year and spend another year in probation. He was defrocked, and when he returned to his pulpit after three months, his enormous ministry was already in ruins. In October 1991 he was caught with another prostitute in California. He and his wife and son managed to hang on and to continue broadcasting on local stations.

III. Titus went on to join a private law firm and in 1996 ran for vice president of the United States on the U.S. Taxpayer’s Party ticket with Howard Phillips. He became the lawyer for the Gun Owners of America, an organization far to the right of the National Rifle Association.

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