The Death of a Televangelist
Jim Bakker’s death was announced by his wife, Lori, on Monday, October 5, 2026; reports say he died in hospice care after suffering several strokes in recent years. She called him “a pioneer of Christian television.” Few would dispute that he was a pioneer. Raised by parents who had left the Reformed Church for Pentecostalism, Bakker trained at North Central Bible College, an Assemblies of God school in Minneapolis, and worked with Pat Robertson at the Christian Broadcasting Network before founding the PTL Satellite Network in 1974. The PTL Club, a Christian talk show modeled on late-night television, went national in 1975. At its peak it reached as many as 13 million viewers, and his Heritage USA resort in Fort Mill, South Carolina, drew some 6 million visitors a year.
The fall was as dramatic as the rise. In March 1987 Bakker admitted to a sexual encounter with church secretary Jessica Hahn, who had been paid to keep silent; he resigned, and the Assemblies of God dismissed him as a minister. In 1989 a federal jury convicted him on all 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy for overselling “lifetime partnerships” at Heritage USA. Sentenced to 45 years, he was paroled in 1994 after his sentence was reduced. In later years he hosted The Jim Bakker Show from near Branson, Missouri, where he sold end-times survival food, and in 2021 he settled a lawsuit over claims that a “Silver Solution” product could cure COVID-19, agreeing to $156,000 in refunds.
To his credit, Bakker admitted some of his errors. In his 1996 book I Was Wrong, he confessed that he had first read the Bible all the way through while in prison, and that he had twisted Scripture to support the prosperity gospel he once preached. But on the doctrines that most shaped his ministry — tongues as the sign of the Spirit, and an open door to every charismatic regardless of the gospel they believed — he never changed course.
Tongues as the Badge of the Spirit
Bakker came from the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Its Statement of Fundamental Truths teaches that “the baptism of believers in the Holy Spirit is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues.” In other words, in Pentecostal teaching, speaking in tongues is the outward proof that a person has received the Holy Ghost. That belief ran through everything PTL did: its worship, its testimonies, and its sense of who was a true, Spirit-filled Christian and who was not.
That same conviction opened PTL’s doors wide. The 1970s and 1980s were the high tide of the charismatic movement, when speaking in tongues spread out of the Pentecostal churches into Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist — and Roman Catholic — congregations. Bakker’s program presented itself as a home for Spirit-filled believers of every stripe, and Catholic charismatics were part of that world. Conservative Protestants of the time criticized PTL and the wider charismatic movement for this openness, warning that shared experiences were being allowed to override doctrine. We are aware of no occasion on which Bakker told his viewers that Rome’s gospel is a false gospel. He was not an apologist for the papacy; he simply did not treat the difference as one that mattered.
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in February 1967, when faculty and students from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh began speaking in tongues during a retreat. It spread to Notre Dame and from there around the world. By 2013 it claimed over 160 million members, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Far from being a movement away from Rome, it has been embraced by Rome. Pope Paul VI welcomed it in 1975; John Paul II praised it; and in 2019 Pope Francis established a new Vatican body, CHARIS, to oversee it. Four popes have now acknowledged it.
Catholic charismatics speak in tongues, raise their hands in praise, and sing many of the same songs as Pentecostals. But they remain fully Roman Catholic. They attend the Mass, which their church teaches is a true propitiatory sacrifice. They pray the rosary and venerate Mary. They believe, with the Council of Trent and the modern Catechism, that justification is conferred in baptism, increased by good works, lost by mortal sin, and restored through penance. Their tongues have not changed their gospel. Rome has simply absorbed their tongues into its system.
The Contradiction Jim Bakker Never Answered
Jim Bakker, like every Pentecostal of the Assemblies of God, would have said that salvation is a gift of grace and not of works. But look at how Pentecostalism actually teaches a person is saved. The Assemblies of God states that “salvation is received through repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.” In practice the order is this: a sinner must first sincerely acknowledge his sins and repent; he must then decide to place his trust in Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour; and upon his repenting and believing, the Holy Spirit enters his heart and he is born again. Pentecostal churches also teach that a believer can later fall away and be lost.
However it is worded, that is salvation conditioned on something the sinner does. The sinner’s repentance and the sinner’s decision come first; God’s work of new birth comes second, as His response. Grace becomes God’s answer to man’s act, and the decisive step that makes the difference between the saved and the lost is taken by the sinner’s own will. That is merit, however softly it is put — a work done in order to be saved.
The Bible teaches the reverse order. A dead man cannot repent or believe: “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). The Holy Spirit must first give life, and He does so sovereignly: “The wind bloweth where it listeth… so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Those who receive Christ were “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Faith itself is His gift: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8); “unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ… to believe on him” (Philippians 1:29). So is repentance: God has “granted repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18), and Christ is exalted “to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:31). When Lydia believed, it was because the Lord “opened” her heart first (Acts 16:14), and “as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). The Spirit does not wait for the sinner to repent and then come in; He comes in, gives a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26), and the sinner, now alive, repents and believes. Repentance and faith are the fruit of the new birth, not the price of it.
This is where Bakker’s position collapses. Pentecostals like Bakker placed the decisive act in the sinner’s own repentance and decision. Roman Catholics place it in baptism, the sacraments, and good works. The details differ, but both make salvation hang, at the crucial point, on something man does — and both speak in the same tongues. Bakker taught that tongues are the Holy Spirit’s gift to the saved, the sign that a person has been born of the Spirit; yet millions of Catholic charismatics trusting in a gospel of works spoke in tongues all through the years of his ministry. If the Holy Spirit seals both, He seals two gospels of human merit. But the Spirit of truth (John 16:13) does not put His seal on “another gospel” (Galatians 1:6–8). The simpler explanation is that the tongues in both camps came from the same place, and it was not the Holy Spirit.
We know of no place where Jim Bakker ever faced this question. Instead of testing the experience by the gospel, he let the experience define fellowship. The message that reached millions of viewers was that what a person believes about salvation matters less than what he experiences. A Catholic trusting in the Mass, and a Pentecostal trusting in his own decision, could each look at the tongues and conclude that God accepted him. Both were misled about the most important question there is: how a sinner is made right with God. The answer is not in anything the sinner does, but in what God does for him in Christ, and by His Spirit in him.
What the Bible Teaches About Tongues
The modern tongues movement does not match the gift described in the Bible.
Biblical tongues were real languages. This is the heart of the matter. On the day of Pentecost the apostles “began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). What happened next is described in detail:
The apostles were Galileans, unlearned men (Acts 4:13). They had never studied the languages of Parthia, Media, Egypt, or Rome. Yet visitors from at least fifteen nations heard the gospel in their own native languages, the very dialects they were born speaking, and understood every word. The gift of tongues was the miraculous ability to speak a real human language the speaker had never learned, so that people of other nations could hear and understand the wonderful works of God. The Greek word translated “tongue,” glōssa, is the ordinary word for a language, and Luke uses dialektos, “language” or “dialect,” for the same thing in Acts 2:6 and 8.
Nothing in Scripture describes the gift as ecstatic, unintelligible sound. Even in Corinth the problem was real languages that no one present understood, which is why an interpreter was required: “Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air” (1 Corinthians 14:9). Readers of the King James Bible should also notice that in 1 Corinthians 14 the word “unknown” in the phrase “an unknown tongue” is printed in italics, meaning it was supplied by the translators and is not in the Greek. Paul was speaking of a language unknown to the hearers, not of a heavenly speech unknown to all mankind.
What is practiced today in Pentecostal and Catholic charismatic meetings alike is something else entirely: strings of repeated syllables that no listener from any nation recognizes as his own language. Linguists who have studied it have reached the same conclusion. William Samarin, a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto, recorded and analyzed tongues-speaking in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Jamaica, and concluded in Tongues of Men and Angels (1972) that “no glossa, no matter how well constructed, is a specimen of human language, because it is neither internally organized nor systematically related to the world man perceives.” In other words, it is not the gift of Acts 2 at all. And that the same babble is shared by Pentecostals who claim to believe in grace and by Catholics who trust in the Mass is itself proof that it is not the work of the Spirit of truth.
Tongues were a sign, chiefly to unbelieving Israel. “In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people… Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not” (1 Corinthians 14:21–22, quoting Isaiah 28:11). They announced that God’s message was going out beyond Israel to the Gentiles.
Not every believer spoke in tongues. “Are all apostles? are all prophets?… do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” (1 Corinthians 12:29–30). The expected answer is no. The Pentecostal doctrine that every Spirit-baptized believer will speak in tongues contradicts the plain words of the apostle.
Tongues were strictly regulated. Even when the gift was active, no more than two or three were to speak, one at a time, and only if someone interpreted: “But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church” (1 Corinthians 14:27–28). Women were to keep silence in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34). The noisy, uninterpreted, everyone-at-once tongues common in charismatic worship break every one of these rules.
Tongues have ceased. “Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away” (1 Corinthians 13:8). The sign gifts confirmed the apostles’ message while the New Testament was being given: the gospel “was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost” (Hebrews 2:3–4). Now that “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) has been completed in the Scriptures, the signs that confirmed it have served their purpose. We have “a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Peter 1:19).
Ecstatic speech is not unique to Christianity; similar experiences are found in many non-Christian religions. It is not, therefore, proof of anything. The proof that the Holy Spirit dwells in a person is not a sound from the lips but a heart that trusts in Christ alone and a life that bears His fruit: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23).
Rome Is Not a Sister Church
The Bible-believing Christian cannot treat the Church of Rome as a fellow church, no matter how its members worship. Rome teaches that salvation comes through its sacraments and that grace must be merited and increased by good works; the Scripture says that we are saved “by grace… through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Rome offers Christ again in every Mass; the Scripture says that “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). Rome sets up a man as the vicar of Christ on earth; Bible-believing Protestants have long recognized in the papacy the very spirit of Antichrist, who “opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4). Whatever their worship style, a church that teaches such things is preaching “another gospel” (Galatians 1:6–7).
That is why ecumenism with Rome is so serious. It is not a matter of good manners between denominations. It is a matter of whether souls are told the truth about how to be saved. “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord” (2 Corinthians 6:17). “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins” (Revelation 18:4).
A Ministry That Pointed Away from Christ
Jim Bakker’s ministry reached millions. Through it multitudes were taught that God wanted them rich, that tongues were the mark of the Spirit, and that a Catholic who spoke in tongues was a Spirit-filled brother regardless of the gospel he believed. He later admitted he was wrong about the first. He never, as far as we know, retracted the others. The Lord Jesus warned of exactly this kind of ministry: “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:22–23).
Only God knows any man’s heart, and Bakker now stands before Him. But this much must be said plainly: a false gospel cannot save, and a ministry that tells people they may be accepted by God on the strength of an experience, while trusting in their own works, leads them not to Christ but down the broad road “that leadeth to destruction” (Matthew 7:13). Many who followed Jim Bakker’s teaching were misled away from the only Saviour of sinners.
The True Gospel
The way of salvation is not through tongues, not through sacraments, and not through any work of ours. It is through Jesus Christ alone, who “died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). God “justifieth the ungodly” who believe (Romans 4:5), not by anything in them, but by the perfect righteousness of Christ credited to their account. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Let Christians pray for the millions still trusting in charismatic experiences, prosperity promises, or Rome’s sacraments, that God would open their eyes to the sufficiency of Christ. And let every reader test every preacher, however popular, by the Word of God: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).
Sources: NPR, CBS News, ABC News, Religion News Service, and Deadline obituaries (October 5–6, 2026); Christianity Today; the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths; reference works on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal; The Gospel Coalition’s review of John Wigger’s PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire (Oxford, 2017); Bakker’s own I Was Wrong (1996). William J. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (Macmillan, 1972), as quoted in the American Scientific Affiliation’s review. All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.