Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner) may be dead and very much missed by her legion of fans, both in and out of religious circles, but her ex-husband, the disgraced Jim, is still out there being the low-key huckster he has always been. It's arguable he is even worse now.
Bakker isn't peddling timeshares for buildings he couldn't afford to sustain, but instead he is peddling all kinds of survivalist nonsense in preparation for the "end times." I have watched his current program, episodes of which can be found on YouTube, and he is a far cry from what he was thirty years ago, when his ministry went down in scandal. He used to have a lot of hair then, but prison life and time have taken their toll. He is almost completely bald, with a hedge of white hair around the edges. He also sports a moustache and a beard, equally white. He is 79 years old now. Bakker's second wife, Lori, is as dull as he is. She has no discernible talent, and worse, she has utterly no charisma whatsoever. She is completely different from the incomparable Tammy Faye, who was the real draw of the original PTL and not Jim.
Anyway, more than a few observers have noticed Bakker's return from the televangelist dead, and more of those observers are totally appalled at what Bakker is doing:
The show, which is broadcast Monday through Friday, is often little more than an extended infomercial for alternative medicine, Christian paperbacks, and, most infamously, two-to-six-gallon buckets of end-times survival food. (All of it tax-exempt, filtered through the euphemisms of “free gifts” and “donations.”) Bakker’s buckets were the centerpiece of video editor Vic Berger’s Bakker compilations a few years back, which slowed down and emphasized the show’s creepiest moments. Berger didn’t have to do much — the buckets are about as disgusting as you would expect bulk food aimed at the generation that invented Jello salad to be. A 2015 NPR article about Bakker’s survival food contained phrases like “felt like eating wet cement” and “one of the worst things I've ever eaten in my life.” Buckets contain either one type of slurry in bulk, like the $290, six-gallon “Cheesy Broccoli Rice” offering, or an assortment of dried foods in a particular style, like the $79 “Thanksgiving Feast” bucket. (The latter’s description says it recalls “the sounds of family visiting,” somehow making Thanksgiving-in-a-bucket even more depressing.) Typically, Bakker will let the pictures on the buckets do the work, but on the rare occasion they are dumb enough to pop the tops, the results tug at, and occasionally resemble, vomit.
Little has changed for sure.
For masochists or just the curious, Jim Bakker's YouTube channel can be found here.
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