Disgraced televangelist, convicted fraudster, and accused rapist Jim Bakker died Monday, making America a slightly better place. Bakker was that most American of types, a flamboyant con man with a gimmick. He was the first American televangelist to make effective use of satellite technology to get his message — and his endless fundraising — to a far broader audience than could be reached by conventional broadcasting. When Bakker began beaming 24/7 religious programming to cable TV providers in 1978, only HBO and Ted Turner’s little UHF station in Atlanta were also up in low earth orbit; ESPN was a year behind Bakker.
Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye, who got her start telling children Bible stories with hand puppets, were very canny broadcasters who merged their Prosperity Gospel brand of fundamentalism with folksy, daytime-TV programming. Unlike a lot of their televangelist contemporaries, they were short on Bible-banging and condemning sinners. Instead, they marketed being born again as a neat lifestyle choice, and promised viewers that if they’d just help Jim and Tammy spread the Good News, God would reward them, just as He had rewarded the Bakkers with riches. (OK, sure, all that wealth actually came from the faithful, but obviously that was God’s will.)
And if viewers had to overextend themselves to have nice things (while also sending money to Jim and Tammy), God would see that risk-taking as a leap of faith, not profligacy. Bakker reassured viewers that “God wants you to be happy. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to prosper, even as your soul prospers.”
Bakker truly lived by his own bullshit principles, believing that he could endlessly milk the faithful for more and more money to build out his Heritage USA theme park and resort. He sold “lifetime memberships” for timeshare hotel rooms, and when funds ran short, he sold the memberships to far more people than could actually use the rooms in any given year. To bring in more cash, he launched still more building projects, trying to fund them through a series of Ponzi schemes that eventually landed him in federal prison for defrauding investors.
In so many ways, Bakker and the rest of the grifty televangelists of the ‘70s and ‘80s prepared America for the rise of Donald Trump, another con artist with a talent for attracting attention and parlaying financial scams into wealth and power. It’s almost no wonder that current-day fundagelicals are among Trump’s most loyal supporters, even as more and more Americans reject him. They’ve been conned by some of the slickest faith-slingers ever, and they like what he’s selling.
The MAGA faithful believe in a freaky End Times Judgment Day in which Trump will mete out Old Testament fury upon America’s enemies — most of whom are other Americans who aren’t like the MAGA faithful.
Then he’ll send everyone who’s left a check for $5,000. You just have to believe.
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Trump may not know anything about the Bible or Christianity, but he knows about faith, and about how to whip up fervor among those who attend his tent revivals. It’s about the excitement, not the fiddly theological details. Trump’s fantastic lies and promises are entertaining, even if they’re completely divorced from reality. We have to do whatever policy Trump wants, and in fact, we have no choice. Only he can do it.
The Trump pitch isn’t all that different from how Oral Roberts told his TV flock in 1987 that a 900-foot-tall vision of Jesus commanded him to raise $8 million to send graduates of Oral Roberts University on medical missionary trips. If he didn’t meet the goal, Roberts said, God would “call him home.” Of course, in those less-enlightened times, Roberts was considered a loon, and his reputation never recovered, but he still had a core of followers who were happy to believe he could raise people from the dead (through the power of Jesus, of course).
Trump also has a televangelist’s knack for sermonizing about anything that’s getting attention in the news and attempting to put an ideological spin on it. Jerry Falwell blithely explained that 9/11 happened because God had lifted His “curtain” of protection from the USA because we had offended Him by allowing abortions and other horrors:
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.’”
Similarly, Pat Robertson insisted that God sent Hurricane Katrina to hit New Orleans in 2005 to punish America for abortion, and Falwell agreed. Katrina was actually a matter of some theological disagreement; John Hagee, who went on to promote Trump, said a gay pride parade had provoked God’s wrath on New Orleans, while Franklin Graham said God had sent the hurricane to punish the city for sexual licentiousness during Mardi Gras and also for the practice of voodoo.
Trump, on the other tiny hand, is far more likely to say world events center on him. Wars happen because he’s not in power, good economic news during Joe Biden’s presidency was due only to businesses anticipating Trump would return to power, Trump made it possible for Americans to finally say “Merry Christmas” again after the phrase was banned for years, and even the Best Picture screwup at the 2017 Oscars was due to the award show’s production staff being too focused on attacking him.
American politics has also had many versions of such doomsday prophets, like Glenn Beck, who during Barack Obama’s presidency rode a wave of paranoia and racism to the top of the ratings, with all sorts of wacky predictions of coming Apocalypse, too. Remember that time Beck said he was going to go blind, and we all knew it was because his entire shtick was mental masturbation? Beck was a master of promising some big coming disaster — like Barack Obama committing mass murder any day now — that never came to pass. Very much like a certain president who has since 2017 been promising an amazing new healthcare plan, which he’ll reveal in two weeks.
Hey, speaking of fading memories, we had almost forgotten Beck’s 2010 big slob picnic “Restoring Honor” rally in DC, and how after that America’s honor was restored, or at least there were some hot gay hookups on Craigslist. That completely forgettable nonevent at least inspired the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert “Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” where we first realized Stewart had fallen in with a bad both-sides crowd.
Trump’s political career is the apotheosis of politics as a kind of tent revival, where religion and politics are blended with weird spectacles like July’s big UFC Bouncy House Battle Brawl or the America 250 shitshow on the national mall, all aimed at glorifying Trump, God, and America, which are the same thing. See also all the weirdass AI iconography of Trump as Jesus (or a doctor, maybe), or the bizarre rhetoric about how God Himself demands we build a gilded ballroom (and drone base) unto the Lord.
We guess the only real difference between Trump and the TV evangelists who preceded him is that when those guys had sex or money scandals, they were sometimes shamed out of their jobs. Jim Bakker lost his ministry and money, then eventually came back from prison and resumed grifting, but never regained the audience or influence he once had. After news broke that he visited prostitutes, Jimmy Swaggart tearfully apologized and went away, leaving only a soiled condom on the chair.
Trump, on the other hand, simply can’t do anything that will bother his diehard supporters, as we’ve seen again and again. We can only conclude that he’s bigger than Jesus.
OPEN THREAD.
[Juicy Ecumenism / Mother Jones / WaPo (2018) / NYT (gift link)]
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I had to do a little dance to get his attention for this picture.
Harry thought bubble: yes human dance for me, I am cat!
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-355022624?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
"Trump, on the other tiny hand"
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