PTL Follower’s Crisis in Confidence

“Jim and Tammy Bakker present Move That Mountain.” “Jim and Tammy Bakker Say You Can Make It.” “Jim and Tammy Bakker Offer a Grand Celebration for Triumphant Living.”

“Jim Bakker gives Six Powerful Messages That Will Change Your Life.” “Tammy Bakker Sings Enough Is Enough.”

This, by no means, is all of David Miller’s library of books, videotapes and record albums--at least $500 worth--which he has bought from the Bakkers’ TV ministry known as People That Love since his conversion three years ago by a voice that told him, “Turn on the television set” when he was contemplating suicide.

Albums, Books and Tapes

The books he has proudly piled on the dining room table of his Ventura home have begun to yellow, especially “Showers of Blessing” which features a loving portrait of the husband and wife in day-glo rain slickers. The record album covers are peeling in places. And the videotapes’ plastic protectors are cracking, particularly around the edges of the Bakkers’ broad smiles.

Now something else of Jim’s and Tammy’s that Miller has treasured has become soiled and damaged: the reputations of the Bakkers themselves.

“When I became a Christian,” the 29-year-old room-service waiter says, “I didn’t know any other Christians, and I could come home after work and watch ‘The Jim and Tammy Show’ and look at these materials and be built up in the Lord and really feel great. But, I don’t feel so great right now.”

Don’t misunderstand, Miller is quick to point out. What’s bothering him is not that the Bakkers are embroiled in a scandal involving sex, drugs and blackmail. Or that they have been branded as “a cancer that needed to be excised” by fellow TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Or made to look like laughing stocks by Johnny Carson, who joked in his monologue that Jim Bakker really checked into a Florida motel room in 1980 not to have an affair with a PTL secretary but “to study up on the Gideon Bible.”

No, what bothers Miller is that the Bakkers aren’t on the air.

“It’s just that it isn’t the same watching ‘The Jim and Tammy Show’ nightly without Jim and Tammy. I enjoy it a lot more when they’re there.”

“See, I don’t know what’s going to happen, what God plans for them, what God plans for PTL. It has been Jim and Tammy that have made that ministry. I don’t go for all this division in the body right now. I don’t go for hearing about lawsuits. I don’t go for pointing fingers. Yeah, I’ve heard about what may have happened. But this doesn’t change my feelings toward them. I’m just hoping they come back to TV.”

The Disillusioned

But not everyone is. Outside the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Christians attending a special Easter service seemed disillusioned with the couple and worried about the scandal’s effects on TV evangelism in general.

Marian Jenkins, 50, a cathedral usher from Santa Ana, says bluntly, “I don’t like any immorality and deception on television.” She worries that the PTL scandal will hurt the innocent TV evangelists “who are genuinely sincere in their beliefs. But people draw general conclusions.”

Miller’s ties to the Bakkers are stronger than some other followers. He credits them with saving his life.

He remembers every detail. The day--March 17, 1984. Even the time--11:55 p.m.

He had come home from work “and I decided I was going to kill myself,” he says. He was coughing up phlegm from his third-straight bout with walking pneumonia “and the doctors had told me I was on my way out.”

He had also fallen into a deep “bottom-of-the-pit” depression after breaking up with his girlfriend and that was jeopardizing his job. “Since I was dying anyway, I just wanted out.”

Then, “and I swear this on a million Bibles,” a blaze of light filled the room, an “all-knowing” person stood beside him “and a small, very calm voice inside of myself said, ‘Turn on the television set.’ ”

‘I Was Healed’

He turned it on to PTL’s Christian television network. Fort Worth, Tex., evangelist Kenneth Copeland was signing off just as “The Jim and Tammy Show” was about to come on. Then Tammy Bakker appeared on the screen “when I had my conversion. And she was telling me to give it all to the Lord. It was just the most phenomenal thing and I was healed from that day forward.

“It’s because of Jim and Tammy’s determination in saving souls for the Lord Jesus Christ that I’m alive today. Because I would have committed suicide.”

Immediately, Miller became a devoted follower of the couple and their ministry. Reared as a Catholic who went to church only on Christmas and Easter, he found an assistant pastor at the Channel Islands Christian Fellowship who also was a PTL fan and began attending services weekly. He replaced the “unsaved” tenants in his $80,500 town house with “born-again Christians.” “I wanted harmony in my house,” Miller says.

And he tried to do whatever the Bakkers asked their TV audience.

When the couple went on the air one evening and asked followers to help the homeless, Miller did. “So the next day, I found out that someone was homeless and brought them into my house. And I’ve been taking the homeless in to live with me ever since.”

And when the Bakkers begged and cried for donations, Miller gave. He became a PTL Partner, giving $20 a month. He also gave $100 and some clothes to the PTL home for unwed mothers and the PTL home for the homeless. And he gave $2,000 for a PTL membership in the newly built Grand Hotel so that he could come to PTL’s Heritage USA, the world’s largest Christian theme park, and vacation every year for seven days and six nights for the rest of his life.

“That was the last $2,000 I had, and I gave it to them,” he says. “And I would give more, if I had more money.” As it is, with monthly car and house payments, “I’ve been living on faith the last few years, praying for the Lord to pay my bills.”

That’s why when the homeless women living in his house ask him for money to stock the refrigerator, he helps them out if they’ll walk to the market “that sells eggs for 39 cents a dozen.”

Somehow, he finds the money to buy the Bakkers’ books, videotapes and record albums, and their leather-bound PTL “Parallel Bible.” But not their jewelry. He looked longingly at a silver medallion being advertised on television by PTL. “I wanted it, but I didn’t have the $100,” he says sadly.

Still, there is no hint of envy in Miller’s reaction to published reports now claiming the Bakkers have lived lavishly at PTL’s expense, that they own several homes including a resort home in Palm Springs, that they drive a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes, that they have $118,000 to pay in “blackmail money.” If anything, Miller appears indifferent to the idea of the Bakkers’ affluence, even if he is hazy about where the money for these luxuries has come from.

“Everything they have is from his salary as a pastor of his church, or perhaps he was given some things,” Miller says. “But I know Tammy donates all the money from her albums back into the ministry, and I think that’s very unselfish.”

In fact, Miller has nothing negative to say about the Bakkers at all.

To him, they have been and always will be “the perfect couple,” unlike his own parents who divorced when he was 16, causing the “most painful period” of his life. There are dozens of photographs of the Bakkers displayed in Miller’s house, yet just one of his own mother and father. Indeed, Miller says that the Bakkers are like part of his family. “I think of them as my brother and sister. I really care about them.”

And, in the spiritual sense, Miller describes how they are the Ron and Nancy Reagan of TV evangelism. “I understand how Tammy’s drug addiction could have happened to her. I think she has probably the most stressful job, like the President’s wife, because people expect so much from both of them and they’re trying to do so much.”

Indeed, when Miller went to Heritage USA and had an opportunity to meet Jim Bakker, he was as shy as if he had been meeting the President himself. So he stayed a respectful couple of paces away “and I didn’t get closer because I felt like tons of people come up to them all the time. I didn’t want to intrude.”

But not everyone is as enamored of the Bakkers.

‘Repulsed by Her’

On her way into the Crystal Cathedral with her family, Benita, a 63-year-old Christian from El Cajon who feared giving her full name because Tammy Bakker “might sue,” says she stopped watching “The Jim and Tammy Show” “because I was so repulsed by her.”

Bakker’s “clownish make-up,” her habit of “constantly interrupting her husband while he was talking,” her “soap opera-ish life,” the grandmother says, “all turned me off. Then I found Jimmy Swaggart on another channel.”

Mary Jane Armstrong, 53, of Gardena says, “It’s a shame that a person who was held in esteem has let down so many people.” And she says that in the long run, its effect will be to “diminish donations to all religions, but especially the TV ministries.”

For his part, Miller cannot understand why people don’t feel more forgiveness toward the Bakkers. He and his friends, after all, have “fully forgiven” Bakker for his extramarital affair, he says. “God has obviously forgiven him years ago. Or else Jim Bakker would not have continued as president of PTL and done all the miraculous things of his ministry,” Miller says.

“So why are all these people making a big to-do about something that happened seven years ago? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Miller describes anyone who has abandoned the Bakkers this week as a hypocrite, especially those ministers who are speaking publicly. “I think that the brothers should stop pointing fingers at each other and should come together,” he says.