Of God and Greed

"My enemies are trying to kill me. They plot my ruin and spend all their waking hours planning treachery . . ."

Jim Bakker may be officially defrocked from the ministry, but he demonstrated . last week that he has lost none of his preacher's skill at summoning up a supportive Bible verse. He recited the above words from Psalms 38: 12 during the second of two remarkable performances on ABC-TV's Nightline show, capping a soap opera-like, ten-week saga of money, power and sex that has transfixed skeptic and believer alike. Flanked by his moist-eyed wife Tammy Faye, Bakker informed Nightline Host Ted Koppel and his television audience -- the largest in the show's seven-year history -- that his lethal enemy was the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the televangelist to whom he had entrusted his scandal-stained PTL* ministry last March. Bakker portrayed Falwell as a liar and thief who

"stole" PTL from its rightful ministers.

Until last week, Falwell, a Fundamentalist Baptist from Lynchburg, Va., with his own TV-based spiritual empire, had been relatively reticent in detailing the sins of the Bakkers, who are Pentecostals. Obviously irked when Bakker leveled the charge during his first Nightline appearance, Falwell called a press conference that stretched over 90 minutes and even displaced the Iran- contra hearings on Cable News Network. Falwell fumed that Bakker "either has a terrible memory, or is very dishonest, or he is emotionally ill." He portrayed Bakker as a man consumed by avarice and said that he had documented evidence of homosexual misconduct by the fallen preacher.

The angry exchanges stemmed from Bakker's abrupt, unexpected resignation on March 19 as head of PTL, a glitzy TV and entertainment empire that he had created and nurtured over 13 years. Responding to charges that were about to break in the Charlotte Observer, Bakker confessed that he had paid $265,000 in hush money to cover up an afternoon of adultery in 1980 with Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary from Long Island, N.Y. At Bakker's request, Falwell became PTL's new head, amid rumors that another TV evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart of Baton Rouge, La., was conspiring to wrest control of PTL.

Succeeding weeks brought new disclosures of scandal, including accusations that the Bakkers and their cronies had siphoned huge sums of money from PTL and allegations that Jim had been involved in homosexual activity. Four weeks ago, Bakker was ousted from the ministry by the Assemblies of God, a major Pentecostal denomination. Jim and Tammy fled to their handsome retreat in Palm Springs, Calif., from which Jim sent messages indicating that at some point he hoped to reclaim his domain.

| And no wonder. At stake in the Bakker-Falwell struggle was an empire consisting of a daily TV show carried on 161 stations; the largest all-day religious cable service, transmitted to 13 million homes; and the gaudy 2,300- acre Heritage USA theme park at Fort Mill, S.C., a kind of Christian Disneyland that last year had more than 6 million visitors. PTL claimed 1986 proceeds of $129 million.