I’m a big fan of religious television.
Seriously.
Back in my hometown, they had a low-wattage Christian
station with all sorts of weirdoes and bad production. We’ll give them a pass
on the limitations of their hand-me-down equipment, but they must take full
responsibility for the cast of characters that passed through their television
studios.
One segment they had featured a local lady with ties to the
right to life movement. She once was put in jail for trespassing after she
tried to superglue the locks at the women’s health clinic in Carthage , Illinois
because they also performed abortions there. The town was about 15 minutes away
from where I lived, but its best known as the town where they murdered Mormon
founder Joseph Smith.
She’d do things like stand outside the Planned Parenthood
with huge signs of fetuses. The last time I saw her, she was holding a similar
sign on Highway 61-the same one of Bob Dylan fame-fighting off the wind
turbulence of a passing semi while trying to keep her bloody fetus sign
upright.
I have no recorded footage of her unfortunately, but I do
have hours of the channel’s footage on an old VHS tape somewhere and it’s
remarkable. I even have recordings of old Jerry Falwell programs and the master
of sleazy pastoral duties, Robert Tilton.
I don’t know if there’s any local, over-the-air Christian
stations around Cedar Rapids, but we have DirecTV, which is probably better
thanks to the endless variety of Christian programming available on its channel
line up. Sure, the production quality is better, but they have shows for every
kind of faith, including old footage of Mother Angelica.
But one late night, I was drawn to an old favorite. JimBakker, the disgraced former host of the PTL Club continues to broadcast shows
that are even more surreal than his past heights.
Now in Branson, Missouri with second wife Lori Baker, Jim
has developed Morningside Church, another sprawling complex that is currently
underway, suspiciously mirroring the Heritage USA theme park, if not in sheer
extravagance then at least in kitschy décor.
Jim gives a tour of his new television studio. Paid with beans and rice. |
Originally, I mistook Lori’s lisp for ignorance, noting how
she would chime in about irrelevant matters while Jim struggled to put together
some kind of mock sermon while selling survivalist items.
That’s right, Bakker’s new program features just about as
much selling things than actual religious preaching, and the aging Jim Bakker
looks like he’s very uncomfortable with the entire setup.
Where do you go after you’ve preached to the end of the
world? When Bakker looks for reasons why we should spend money on gasless
generators, solar power sources, and huge, industrial bags of rice and beans,
he gets frustrated. He stutters like he’s thinking “What part of ‘End of Times’
don’t you understand? Shit’s gonna be annihilated, and you’re gonna need
‘lectricity!”
What once was lifetime members to Heritage USA via their old
“Lifetime Member” contributors has turned into which poor sap will spend over a
grand on fueless generators, a few hundred on solar powered ovens, and don’t
forget the popular water barrel.
He works himself up to a point where an assistant begins to
rattle of the feature list of the items of their survivalist “specials,”
calming Jim down to a point where he can feign excitement over the news that the
new waterwheel is nearing completion.
They bill their relatively new digs as “a place of refuge
from the raging storms of a world gone wild – and a sanctuary for the Last Days”
all in the remote confines of the Missouri Ozarks.
For a dude that still owes millions of dollars in tax judgments
against him, Jim Bakker seems to be producing remarkable results by barely
going through the motions. Sure, there are those aforementioned moments when he
gets riled up about the “last days,” but it’s only because he needs to fill the
RV park up to help pay the bills. And you’re welcomed to stay in the available
condos that they have around Morningside, rental properties that Jim has
decided to stay clear away from, possibly thanks to his checkered past in the
hotel industry.
Throughout it all, wife Lori smiles, occasionally mentioning
the 10 year relationship she had with an abusive husband in the 70’s &
80’s, the one that left her as a pot-smoking pill-popper living in a
double-wide trailer and securing five abortions during her first time as a
housewife.
She’s adopted five children with Jim, perhaps the number
signifies the ones she chose not to carry, and she has the ability to turn
moments like visiting with Jim’s first son into an uncomfortable encounter
after she considers how the first son she aborted would be about the same age
as Jim’s boy now.
For Lori’s past sins, you can now donate $1,000 and become a
“builder’s club” member of Lori’s House, a place still under constructions in
which unwed mothers can come and live, making sure that they carry the baby to
full term instead of stopping by an abortion clinic for a quick termination.
It’s atonement for somebody else’s struggles with coming to
terms with the bad decisions she’s made in her life previously. In some ways,
Lori is the perfect spouse for Jim, carrying enough sin with her in her own
past to match Jim’s.
At Morningside, they can quietly build one final monument to
Jim, to realize his dream on a much smaller scale so that it doesn’t bring
attention to the Missouri Ozarks. There, they can peddle their survivalist
gear, thereby funding Jim and Lori Bakker’s own retirement village, one that
requires him to record shows three days a week in shorts, polo shirt, and an
ever-present hat that covers the missing follicles of a once-mighty head of
hair. He rambles through his list of products that he needs to sell,
occasionally peppering the discretions with an appropriate bible passage,
lecturing to everyone that the horrible news they hear each night should be enough
to convince them of the need for their products.
Bakker smartly places banks and lending institutions as the
real enemies, occasionally telling a story from his old PTL days about how he
experienced first hand at how banks refused to work with him when times got
tight. He suggests how they will be the ones that initiate a complete economic
collapse, and how certain Christians can overcome it with just a quick call of
the toll-free number.
All of it seems to point to how utterly little either one of
them have learned from their past indiscretions. With Lori, it suggests that if
she just had a refuge, one where people could constantly barrage her with
stories of how abortion is wrong, then she wouldn’t have had the five performed
on her.
Again, the number of abortions that Lori Bakker had with her
first husband is officially five. What’s that saying about fool me once?
For Jim, it appears that the only way he could get out of
the six million dollars he still owes the IRS for Heritage USA mismanagement is to create yet
another empire out of selling solar panels instead of time-share investments.
I’m not sure if all of this qualifies as rehabilitation, but
it makes for some incredible viewing if you’ve made televangical voyeurism a
personal hobby like I have.
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