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Jim Bakker (pronounced baker), 46, is the boyish-faced Pentecostal proprietor of the PTL (for People That Love or Praise the Lord) Network in Charlotte, N.C. The network ranks second to Robertson's CBN in Christian cable (13 million households, 24 hours, all religion). The featured offering is the daily Jim and Tammy show, a variety-and-talk program with Bakker and his wife as hosts on an opulent, hacienda-style set with orchestra, singers and live audience. Bakker's receipts exceed $100 million a year. Much of the money is eaten up by his Heritage USA theme park, opened in 1978 near Fort Mill, S.C., and already the third-largest such attraction in the country, with nearly 5 million visitors a year. Unlike Walt Disney World and Disneyland, which rank ahead of it, Heritage USA charges no admission. The grandiose 2,300-acre project, which is years away from completion, includes Bakker's Assemblies of God church, a 500-room luxury hotel, a mock turn-of-the-century mall with 25 boutiques under an artificial sky, and an amphitheater for staging passion plays and living Nativity spectacles.
Jerry Falwell, 52, presides at the 21,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., whose Sunday worship is seen in 172 markets. A Fundamentalist of genial manner and granite opinions, he used his TV clout to launch Moral Majority, the influential conservative political lobby. That group was subsumed last month under the new Liberty Federation, signaling Falwell's increased involvement in foreign affairs. He also runs Liberty University (7,000 students) in Lynchburg. The 1985 receipts of Falwell's ventures: $100 million. Last year he started a Sunday-night call-in show on Ted Turner's superstation, WTBS. Last month he purchased a cable hookup (rebaptized the Liberty Broadcasting Network) that reaches 1.5 million homes. It will run a new daily Falwell talk show.
Oral Roberts, 68, of Tulsa, the century's most famed faith healer, has a TV flock that helped build the 4,600-student Oral Roberts University and the 294- bed City of Faith hospital and research center. The City of Faith is rumored to be in financial straits, but Roberts will divulge no details. The overall budget of his enterprises reportedly runs to $120 million. Roberts' Sunday half-hour still appears in 192 markets, but the "Prairie Tornado" is showing his age. The spotlight is shifting to a daily talk show inaugurated in 1984 to star Son and Heir Apparent Richard Roberts, 37. Due for partial opening next July is Oral's $14 million Healing Center, which will feature, among other attractions, a three-hour tour of animated films of Bible stories.
Dynamic and high-profile achievers, every one, yet none of these preachers can compare to Robertson as a TV entrepreneur. Robertson pioneered the first religious TV station, the first reli- gious network and the first Christian programming to use a talk-show format, as well as a number of now widely imitated viewer-response and fund-raising techniques. He was also the first Christian broadcaster to sign up commercial sponsors, a development that ; appears to be the trend of the 1980s. His 24-hour CBN network reaches 30 million subscribers, making it not only the largest Christian cable operation but the fifth largest of any kind (No. 1 is ESPN, with 36.9 million subscribers).