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Summary: Spiritual Victories and Worldly Defeats
Review: This book may be out of print but it's definitely worth finding and reading.
A driving, devastating indictment of the greedy "televangelists" who reached the peak of their financial powers in the 1980's and then saw it taken away from them in a series of humiliating scandals that made people question their faith...in TV preachers anyway.
I remember chatting with a book store clerk at that time and learning she was a born-again Christian. Shaking her head at the Bakker/Swaggart/Roberts scandals, she said, "The devil really won that round."
"How do you know it was the devil that brought them down?" I asked. "I have the impression that maybe God had had about enough of their shenaningans."
But that's about the extent of my stone-throwing. I end up feeling pity for these people. And feeling horrible for the millions who poured their millions into these lavish lifestyles. My great grandmother could have been referred to as one of Bakker's "Granny Grunts," the elderly ladies he always beseeched to fess up with the cash.
I could see through Bakker even as a kid and felt sorry that my great grandma couldn't. If anything, I think the PTL scandal made her realize where her real devotion should have been: on the savior mentioned in every PTL sales pitch, not the bawling, over-dressed con artists pleading for dollars for that big water slide in their amusement park.
Charles Shepard, the author and reporter for the Charlotte Observer, was the perfect person to write this book: he'd been covering Bakker for years and seeing scams and abuses up close for a long time.
Definitely worth your while to read.
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Summary: Excellent educational lesson for all organizations
Review: This fat but interesting book about the rise and fall of Heritage USA, Jim Bakker and his strange episodes with Jessica Hahn (among others) should serve as an excellent guide to what can happen if a single person gains too much control of an organization. What happens if that individual loses it mentally? Well, that's what is explained in concise and explicit detail by Charles Shepard, a newspaper reporter from the Charlotte Observer who covered the story of PTL's fall in the mid to late 80's.The clear moral of the story is that if an organization's head is doing things that seem odd, don't just go ahead and do them anyway! The book is out of print, but well worth getting if you can find it.
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Summary: Pultizer Prize Winning Account
Review: This text is a fascinating detail of the rise and fall of the PTL ministry, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Jessica Hahn. I felt that Shepard's reporting of the paper trail that eventually undid this infamous televangelist was incredbily educational and compelling. The book reads easily and is a balanced and fair account of all involved in the PTL scandal, especially those peripheral to the Bakker family themselves.
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