Jim Bakker, the charismatic evangelical preacher who built a Christian television empire, only to see it collapse in scandal, recrimination and prison, died Monday, his wife said. He was 86.
\n\n“It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,” his second wife, Lori Bakker, said on the Facebook page of Bakker’s most recent TV show, “The Jim Bakker Show.” She did not disclose a cause of death.
\n\nBakker’s son, Jay Bakker, who became a prominent evangelist in his own right with a much more liberal view of Christianity than his father’s, confirmed the death in his own Facebook post.
\n\n“We had a very complicated relationship and he was also my father and a grandfather and I need to mourn in my own time,” he wrote.
\n\nBakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and his flamboyant first wife, Tammy Faye, was born in International Falls, Minnesota, but they embraced the South when they started a puppet show on a Virginia TV station in the 1970s. It soon turned into a high-energy, Southern-flavored talk show called “The PTL Club” on cable, attracting some of the biggest celebrities of…
Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/business