Believe it or not, folks, a ghost from the past has been pretty active lately–Jim Bakker. Since 2003, the disgraced televangelist has aired a daily show from his current base in Branson, Missouri. He’s mostly stayed under the radar since he airs on two smaller Christian television networks, Daystar and CTN; he depends mostly on DirecTV and Dish Network for viewership. However, People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch noticed that Bakker has become a full-on conspiracy theorist. He has openly embraced a loony suggestion that there are Islamists embedded in this country’s churches.
For much of this week, Bakker’s special guest was End Times radio host and conspiracy theory peddler Rick Wiles. All you need to know about Wiles is that he thinks that President Obama is demon-possessed and a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. On Tuesday’s show, Wiles told Bakker that he has evidence that radical Muslims have embedded terrorist agents in our churches. Right Wing Watch got a clip.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2VQ31Upk5E&w=853&h=480]
Wiles is close friends with Avi Lipkin, an author and fellow conspiracy theorist who, among other things, has argued that Obama is a Saudi plant who is working to deliberately tank the global economy and allow scads of Muslim immigrants to pour into this country and settle land that Obama has seized under Agenda 21. This will supposedly make it easier for Obama to shred the Constitution and establish (oh noes!) sharia law. If your head is spinning from this, you’re not alone. Even though I’m used to hearing this kind of crazy from the wingnut fringe, this had my head spinning.
But Wiles told Bakker that Lipkin has learned of an equally nefarious plot. Wiles said that Lipkin’s wife, who is supposedly an agent with an Israeli intelligence service, frequently monitors Arabic-language media outlets. Supposedly, Lipkin’s wife recently got wind of “Muslims in the Middle East” bragging that they had “infiltrated every Christian church in America” with embedded agents. Bakker jumped on it in roughly as much time as it takes a moth to fly toward a flame. He declared that this was why everyone within the sound of his voice needed to “start praying for discernment,” since “they’re going to come unawares, they’re going to come in among us.”
It went downhill from there. Wiles said he’d had a vision in 1998 that embedded Islamists would start burrowing their way into our churches and get their hands on “he names and addresses of every person on the staff, their spouses, their children, their Sunday school teachers.” At a certain hour, Wiles said, a “war cry” would be issued in the form of “a secret coded message” to be issued to dozens of mosques on Friday–the traditional Muslim day of prayer. This message would alert the Islamists embedded in the churches that the time has come for jihad.
I watched this, and found myself shaking my head. What responsible broadcaster, secular or otherwise, would give succor to this kind of hate? It’s not the first time Bakker has cliff-dived into wingnuttery since returning to television. In the past, he has claimed to have prophesied the 9-11 attacks, which he believes came because God took his hand off this country. He also claims to have prophesied Katrina and Issac slamming into New Orleans. For those who don’t know, some elements of the religious right thought those hurricanes were divine judgment on the Big Easy. And back in 2013, he declared Obama was God’s judgment on this country, and there was a good chance he’d start filling the jails with Christians.
I was eight years old when Bakker crashed and burned for a scandal at his PTL Club, which was based only 20 minutes south of my home in Charlotte. He was convicted in 1989 on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy for selling tens of thousands of “lifetime memberships” in his PTL Club when only one hotel was ever built. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. If not for a case of diarrhea of the mouth from sentencing judge Robert Potter, he would still be in prison today.
Bakker has publicly renounced the prosperity gospel teachings that led to him peddling these memberships. If possible, though, Bakker sounds even worse now. He may not be breaking the law like he did with PTL, but by embracing this kind of hate, he’s contributing to the decline of civility in this country.
