PTL Club

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker founded the PTL Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1974, after both had worked at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and helped launch Trinity Broadcasting Network the year before. The daily program adopted a talk show format built around music, interviews and the Bakkers' own personalities rather than a traditional pulpit sermon, and by 1978 it reached an estimated 13,000,000 viewers, carried nationally through the PTL Satellite Network, one of the first religious broadcasters to make full use of satellite cable distribution.

The ministry's broadcast income funded Heritage USA, a Christian theme park, hotel and residential complex built in Fort Mill, South Carolina, through the late 1970s and 1980s. Heritage USA combined explicitly religious content, a recreated upper room and passion play, with the amusements of a secular resort, water slides, a shopping promenade and hotel accommodations, and at its peak drew millions of visitors a year, ranking among the most visited theme parks in the United States, a scale achieved almost entirely on the strength of PTL's television audience rather than any single physical draw.

The organization's legal name was Heritage Village Church and Missionary Fellowship, Inc., the nonprofit parent both of the broadcast ministry and of the Heritage USA complex it funded.

Between 1984 and 1987, PTL sold Heritage USA "lifetime partnerships," a one time payment of about 1,000 dollars that entitled the buyer to a three night annual stay at a planned luxury hotel on the grounds. The United States Postal Inspection Service's own history of the case describes the mechanism plainly: PTL sold tens of thousands of partnerships, raising more than 400,000,000 dollars, while only one 500 room hotel was ever built, far too few rooms to honor the stays already promised, let alone the ones still being sold.

The gap between promised capacity and built capacity became the core of the federal fraud case against Jim Bakker, who resigned from PTL on March 19, 1987, amid the unrelated disclosure of a payment to church secretary Jessica Hahn. Investigators found that partnership revenue had been used for operating costs and personal expenses rather than solely for the additional construction the sales were represented as funding. Bakker was convicted in 1989 on all 24 federal counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy connected to the scheme; the convictions were upheld on appeal in 1991, though his sentence was reduced.

PTL entered bankruptcy proceedings following the scandal, and control of Heritage Village Church passed to fellow broadcaster Jerry Falwell. Heritage USA closed in 1989 and was later sold and largely demolished; the PTL Club ceased broadcasting under that name.