To appreciate fully the Bakkers’ significance requires locating them in a spiritual lineage that extends back to early American history. A post-Reformation phenomenon in religious culture—referred to as “religious enthusiasm” in the combative literature of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe—came to have an enormous influence on American Christianity. For religious enthusiasts, the doctrines and traditions of Christianity are sometimes less important than individual intuition and personal experience. A grasp of the main themes of American religious enthusiasm as it developed historically will help to shed light on the particular appeal of the Bakkers—as well as the appeal of those who have come after them.

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were a husband-and-wife televangelist team who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s before their ministry was brought down by scandal, trickery, and bankruptcy. They lived extravagant lives in front of the camera, inviting viewers into their beautiful homes for holidays and vacations. While most children in this era grew up on television, the Bakkers’ kids grew up on television.

In the early days, Jim and Tammy Faye carried on a centuries-old tradition of religious enthusiasm that placed them beyond the boundary lines of respectable mainstream culture. They began their career together as itinerant Pentecostal healing evangelists, aspiring to their tradition’s extravagant belief in a God who answers prayers in dramatic and miraculous fashion. They became television superstars, broadcasting in 40 countries around the world, and then turned to a new dream of a theme park, and even a whole community, where good Christian families could find fun and respite from the secular world. They grew rich as they grew famous.

Then they broke apart. Jim was sent to prison for fraud after losing his ministry to a group of shrewd fundamentalist Baptists in the wake of a sex scandal. Tammy Faye divorced him during his incarceration and withdrew from the public eye. With their downfall, the Bakkers became symbols, their names a cultural shorthand for corruption and venality. They had embodied a poor person’s dream of wealth and were crushed by a public eager to see them made small again.

But in the Bakkers’ heyday, their voices were carried up into the atmosphere and sent back down to hundreds of affiliate stations, which beamed them into the homes of millions of devoted viewers. Their network was one of the very first to invest in a satellite uplink, which enabled them to broadcast their programming 24 hours a day to a global audience. “God loves you. He really does,” Jim Bakker would say at the close of each episode of The PTL Club, their signature program. Modeled on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the Bakkers’ show had dozens of guests from all corners of American culture in the ’70s and ’80s: Eldridge Cleaver, Pat Boone, Oral Roberts, Evelyn Carter Spencer, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Gary S. Paxton, Ronald Reagan, and Billy Graham, whose childhood home Bakker reconstructed, brick by brick, in his theme park. Their voices and the voices of their guests mingled in impromptu conversation in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms all over America.

University of Missouri historian of religion John Wigger’s PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire captures the thrill of the couple’s ascent and the scale of their eventual collapse. The book also provides an opportunity for reflection on the meaning of their moment in American cultural history. The PTL phenomenon is almost wholly unknown to those who were too young to watch the story unfold in the ’70s and ’80s, but it remains an important episode in the recent past, a signpost along a path to the cultural crises of the present. Although it is easy to imagine televangelism as a fad that arrived suddenly and disappeared quickly, the Bakkers represent the upswell of a strong undercurrent in the American spirit—one that still pulls powerfully on our social imagination.

To appreciate fully the Bakkers’ significance requires locating them in a spiritual lineage that extends back to early American history. A post-Reformation phenomenon in religious culture—referred to as “religious enthusiasm” in the combative literature of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe—came to have an enormous influence on American Christianity. For religious enthusiasts, the doctrines and traditions of Christianity are sometimes less important than individual intuition and personal experience. A grasp of the main themes of American religious enthusiasm as it developed historically will help to shed light on the particular appeal of the Bakkers—as well as the appeal of those who have come after them.

The American continent, wrote Monsignor Ronald Knox in 1950, “is the last refuge of the enthusiast.” Knox, a Catholic writer and friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, considered the 600-page study Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion his life’s work. The primary emphasis in religious enthusiasm, he wrote, “lies on a direct personal access to the Author of our salvation, with little of intellectual background or of liturgical expression.”

In both Catholic and Protestant variations, enthusiasm knocked established Christianity off the rails. This personal spirituality was often accompanied, Knox wrote, by “a conviction that the Second Coming of our Lord is shortly to be expected” and “ecstasy, under which heading I include a mass of abnormal phenomena, the by-products, it would seem, of prophecy.” Then, too, there were the tremors and shakes, the falling into trances, and the glossolalia—outbreaks of “unintelligible utterance” believed by the utterers to be a private means of direct communication with the Lord.

Before the mid-18th century, such wild disorders were not widespread phenomena in the New World. Here Jonathan Edwards becomes a pivotal figure. Born in 1703, he was a dour and serious-minded young man, endlessly resolving to commit himself to more rigorous spiritual disciplines—until one day, as he read the Bible, his soul was stirred with “a sense of the glory of the divine being.” He later described this transformative moment: “I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was; and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapt up to God in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.” Edwards’s study of Scripture took on a charge of delight and his pious reveries grew more intense. The experience of joy in his adult devotions would ripen into a fixation on what Edwards took to be the bedrock of God’s glory: his divine sovereignty over all things.

Edwards is remembered for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and high school history teachers paint him with the black, white, and dirty linen colors of the buttoned-up Puritans—terrified that “somewhere, someone might be happy,” as Mencken put it. But Edwards had a rich emotional life, experiencing highs during his contemplations that seem nearly inhuman, and at other times weeping over his sins with such violence “that I have often been forced to shut myself up.” Edwards’s great achievement was not his famously terrifying sermon, one of many to have elicited cries of spiritual agony during the widespread 1730s revival movement that became known as the First Great Awakening. Rather, it was his magisterial treatise arguing against human free will, still excerpted in philosophy sourcebooks today.

“When we ask what it is that Edwards chiefly worshiped in God,” the critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in The Stammering Century (1928),

we find that it was neither Power nor Goodness. It was Will; and not strength of will, but freedom. God alone is infinitely free. The whole mystery of Edwards’ denial of free will to man is in this: that he would not diminish, by the slightest degree, the glorious freedom of God.

What would become of Edwards’s ideas if we were to remove God from them? There would still be left, Seldes writes, “a powerful impulse to self-development, to exercise of the Will.” This is exactly the course that many of Edwards’s innovative spiritual descendants would take.

Edwards also believed in the power of the individual Christian’s personal connection with God. Too humble to credit this dynamic in his own experience, perhaps, he saw something trustworthy in the life and devotion of the woman he married when she was 17, Sarah Pierpont. “They say,” he wrote—can you imagine him blushing?—that God “comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on him.” The raptures inspired by direct communion with the divine, the love-interest as a partner in seeking God—these, too, would become major themes in American religious life.

John Wesley, an Englishman just a few months older than Edwards, was walking alone in 1738 while reading Edwards’s accounts of conversions and revival in New England. “Surely,” Wesley wrote in his journal, quoting the psalmist, “this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.” Greater things were still to come. Seldes writes: “Three months after Wesley had read Edwards’ account of the work of God in Northampton, physical manifestations first occurred in his own revivals.”

Wesley was the founder of Methodism, a believer in the free will that Edwards denied, and, furthermore, a believer in the prospect of moral perfection for the redeemed. He is the exemplary enthusiast in Knox’s study, and the Catholic writer lays at Wesley’s feet a large share of responsibility for wresting English religion away from doctrine and tradition and surrendering it instead to the experience, “real or supposed,” of the individual.

It is impossible not to marvel at Wesley’s vitality: His biographers all note that from the age of 36, he traveled some 225,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons, some of them to crowds of tens of thousands of people. Knox depicts Wesley as an incessant “experimentalist” who was “forever taking the lid off to see how his gospel was working.” Across the decades of his long life, Wesley formed societies intended to pass along “methods” for faithful Church of Englanders to grow in piety, and these societies were part of a larger scheme, Knox writes, to create “not merely a church within the Church but a nation within the nation; a sort of enclave, not only in piety but in daily life.”

In America, Methodist preachers delivered their sermons and prayers extemporaneously. This practice not only helped preserve Wesley’s “experimentalism” but also made for more lively and exciting worship services. Pastors and preachers of other denominations started to follow suit. And in the years after the revolution, as the young country expanded west into the forests and frontiers, the preachers went along. It was in back-country Kentucky in 1800 that the first American “camp meeting” commenced, inaugurating a form of worship responsible for embedding Wesleyan enthusiasm deep in the American psyche. Revivalism spread rapidly. Within two decades of that first camp meeting, most of New England would be “burnt over” by revivalism—so completely consumed by spiritual mania that a traveling preacher could hardly find a soul to save for hundreds of miles.

Camp-meeting preachers shouted and gesticulated; they preached with their fists. Internally, they measured the response of the crowd and adjusted. Their noteless orations gave confidence to their listeners that the words were true; they seemed authentic, and the message they offered was preciously consoling. When an itinerant preacher would speak about Christ to an audience, “he put an end to the terror of their loneliness,” Seldes writes, “and promised them a communion, an intercession, a friend, in their friendless lives.” In this way they “smashed for a moment the systematic impoverishment of the American spirit.”

So: From Edwards and Wesley, we receive a fixation on the will, a desire to create enclaves of piety, and a belief in the possibility of the individual’s direct experience of God. In the work of their successors, such as Charles Grandison Finney, we find latent belief in the sinlessness of the true self and an approach to revival characterized by the appearance of improvisation and spontaneity. These preachers cultivated the spirits of the multitude through results-focused experimentalism in the context of camp meetings around the country, sowing in the American character the seeds of enthusiasm that would yield strange harvests in every decade thereafter. The later 19th century saw the development of quasi- and post-Christian reform movements, fads, and pop-philosophies that would call individuals to embrace their higher selves—such as “New Thought,” which centered the will in a larger project of spiritual self-advancement through the unleashing of “the creative power of constructive thinking.”

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