If you grew up leaving the TV on past midnight, you remember them. The stadium crowds with their hands in the air. The soft music. The man on stage who could heal your bad back, provided you called the number on screen.
The death of Jim Bakker sent us back to late-night Channel 10 Australia, and we came out with a lot of questions. How did a guy with a puppet show become one of the most powerful men in American television? How did a Christian theme park with a water slide end up the third most popular in the country? And how did it all end with five years in prison and a second career selling buckets of freeze-dried food for the end times?
Along the way we meet Aimee Semple McPherson, who did sermons on a motorcycle in the 1920s, Fulton Sheen, the bishop who beat Frank Sinatra in the ratings, and Oral Roberts, who told viewers God might take him if he didn’t hit his fundraising target. Then there’s Benny Hinn, whose healing technique Alex can still do from memory.
We look at where televangelism lives now. Spoiler, it’s on YouTube, and the thumbnails are better than ours.
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