Religion: God and Money

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By turns angry, bewildered and curious, an anxious crowd descended on the Jefferson Square Theater in Columbia, S.C., last week. Their aim: to play a role in the next installment of a long-running American serial of sex, cash and power -- a show resembling some lurid made-for-TV mini-series that might be called God and Money. For six hours, harassed officials of the embattled PTL (for Praise the Lord or People That Love) ministry were confronted at a public bankruptcy hearing by members of the flock that had supported the $203 million religious empire created by its ousted leaders, Jim and Tammy Bakker. The officials struggled to assure PTL donors that the foundering television- and-theme-park ministry, now about $68 million in debt, might soon turn a profit. Asserted the new PTL chief operating officer, Harry Hargrave: "We will be able to pay our debts. We are very confident of that."

Someone apparently less confident, though, was Televangelist Jerry Falwell. The Lynchburg, Va., preacher, who took control of PTL after Jim Bakker's March 19 resignation, looked grim as he faced studio cameras later in the week on PTL's regular morning television show. Falwell told viewers that donations had taken a nosedive since PTL formally filed for bankruptcy on June 12. If $1.75 million is not raised by July 31, he announced, PTL might be forced to stop broadcasting on some of the 161 stations that, for a fee, carry the ministry's born-again message. Said Falwell: "There's no more postponing. We've come down to D-day."

But as Falwell spoke, the PTL scandal continued to cast a pall across the entire secretive big business of televangelism. As never before, "skeptics have fuel for their fires," said David Hubbard, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "They may see this as reflecting on the excesses of the whole evangelical movement."

Aside from his cash flow, one urgent problem facing Falwell is what to do about the claims of 120,000 PTL "Lifetime Partners" who each gave at least $1,000 to the organization, with the promise of free lodging for three nights a year at the ministry's theme-park hotel. The organization, though, has little hope of fulfilling those pledges because the number of donors exceeds the number of hotel rooms available by 5 to 1. Falwell noted last week that if the court declares those donations, which total $180 million, as debt, PTL will have to close down.

Days of reckoning have seemed to come and go with nightmarish frequency for PTL since Jim Bakker's admission that he had had a sexual tryst with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, N.Y., and had paid out $265,000 in hush money. Last week Hahn's lawyer announced that she would cash in further on the incident by telling her story in Playboy for an undisclosed sum.