Religion: God and Money

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As last week's bankruptcy hearing wore on -- in anticipation of PTL's corporate-reorganization plan due in October -- no fewer than 18 investigators from the Justice Department, the U.S. Postal Service and the Internal Revenue Service pored over mountains of the ministry's financial records at its headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C. The officials were readying material for a federal grand jury hearing, scheduled to begin in Charlotte, N.C., on Aug. 17. The focus, according to sources close to the investigation: the possibility of criminal tax fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud by Jim Bakker and other PTL leaders who have left the ministry since Falwell took over.

The House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee has also launched an investigation into the tax-exempt status not only of PTL but also of ten other major televangelist organizations. The committee has asked PTL representatives, among others, to appear at a hearing, probably in September. Texas Democrat J.J. Pickle, a member of the committee, last week met with the eleven religious broadcasters involved in the probe, including Falwell and Preacher Jimmy Swaggart of Baton Rouge, La., to question them closely about TV ministries' finances.

Increasingly, a growing number of Americans are focusing on the doings of the huge, semisecret gospel business empires like PTL that have sprung up in little more than a decade of fervent television preaching (see following story). Many are not happy with what they see. A Gallup poll survey this spring showed that since 1980 there has been a sharp decline in American public esteem for four of the country's most important TV preachers: Oklahoma- based Oral Roberts (whose approval rating dropped from 66% to 28%), Swaggart (76% to 44%), Virginia's Pat Robertson (65% to 50%) and California's Robert Schuller (78% to 61%).

The televangelists are also suffering where it hurts the most -- among viewers. Arbitron, which measures the size of local- and cable-television audiences, says most TV ministries have suffered a significant fall in viewership. Concurs Fred Vierra, president of United Cable, the nation's eighth largest operator: "We do not see their audiences growing. They're staying relatively flat." One evangelist cracks, "I was in West Irian on the island of New Guinea, and even some of the Stone Age people are familiar with the PTL scandal. That's how far it has gone."

It may go further. Within weeks of losing his grip on power at the Fort Mill ministry, Bakker began denouncing Falwell as a usurper. A solid core of Bakker loyalists at PTL apparently believes him. One complicating issue is that Falwell is a Fundamentalist, a group that rejects the faith healing and speaking in tongues practiced by the Pentecostal PTL faithful. Amid last week's emergency pitch for donations, Falwell disclosed an apparent plot by dissident PTL members to sabotage his fund-raising efforts. During the funding telethon, PTL lines were jammed by crank and obscene calls. Falwell eventually announced that no pledges would be accepted over the telephone and urged donors to send checks by mail.