Televangelists Who Were Anything But Holy

Televangelism. What is there to say about it that hasn't already been said in countless documentaries, exposés, and depositions? In theory, it's a beautiful way to spread a message of faith to the masses. In practice, it seems to end disproportionately in hand-tailored suits that cost as much as a down payment on a mortgage and, in more than a few cases, prison. What's the deal?

It's true. If you're looking for a celebrity figure who's going to get hit with a scandal, you'd do alright perusing the ranks of televangelists. Some people will call it dumb luck. The more skeptical would probably point to how easy it is to take advantage of a position of power. If you're one of the people on this list, you're almost definitely going to say the devil made you do it. What did he make you do? Let's take a look and find out.

Jimmy Swaggart is notable for a number of reasons, but none so important as the fact that his face is the first thing that pops up if you Google image search "televangelist crying."

The story goes like this. Back in the 1970s and '80s, Swaggart was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in America. He was producing shows nearly every day and being broadcast on hundreds of channels across the world. When he talked, the people in his community listened. When he exposed fellow TV preacher Marvin Gorman for having extramarital affairs, that guy wound up out of a job. Unfortunately for Swaggart, hell hath no fury like a minor television celebrity scorned, and Gorman had Swaggart followed and photographed during a rendezvous with a local sex worker.

What followed was a "House of Cards"-worthy circle of blackmail that saw Gorman reinstated and Swaggart taken off the air for a spell. Soon afterward, he gave the speech where he cried a lot and asked for forgiveness. It was a touching moment of humility from atop a pillar normally reserved for moral superiority. Truly, we are all human, and even the best among us must strive to be better.

Anyway, then he did it all again three years later and lost everything, but by 2009, he had his own network again. In June 2025, Swaggart was hospitalized after suffering cardiac arrest. 

Ted Haggard was the Chiclet-toothed face of evangelism for three years as the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Life was a hoot and a holler for Haggard. He had everything. A loving wife. Five adoring children. Regular meth-fueled hookups with a male sex worker named Mike Jones. Unfortunately for the reverend, that last part brought everything tumbling down.

Jones figured out who Ted was during his non-meth-and-solicitation hours and blabbed to the press. Haggard's responses to the accusations varied over the next few months, running the gamut from "I don't know who that guy is" to "I bought meth from that guy but I threw it away" to, eventually, "yeah, I did all that stuff."

Haggard wound up disgraced and ejected from his church. He was poised for a comeback in 2009 when HBO produced a documentary on his return to the righteous path, but wouldn't you know it, more allegations of the abusive variety popped up.

Oh, and in 2012, he was on "Celebrity Wife Swap." He switched lady friends with Gary Busey. So that's fun.

You know how it is. Every year, you take the kids shopping for new shoes. A month later, they've outgrown the darned things, and you have to ask your parishioners for $54 million to buy new ones. Well, Jesse Duplantis feels your pain. The same thing happened to him, but with a private jet instead of new kicks.

In May 2018, the famed television minister put out a call to action. His old jet (not to be confused with his other two old jets) was wearing a little thin at the seams, and he just knew his followers would help him, a humble servant of Jesus. (You remember Jesus. He's the guy that eschewed material wealth and said it was easier to thread a needle with a whole camel than it was for a rich dude to get into heaven.) He only needed a small tithing of millions and millions of dollars to buy a sweet new Falcon 7X passenger jet. According to Duplantis, God personally told him that He wants him flying in that particular plane, presumably because the Good Lord would never expect his followers to fly Southwest.

No, for real, why doesn't God want televangelists flying business class? In a broadcast from 2015, Duplantis and fellow preacher Kenneth Copeland said it was because regular airliners are filled with people who would constantly be asking them to pray. Yeah, praying for people would be a bummer.

It all started in 1969 with a small ministry an hour outside Hollywood run by married couple Tony and Susan Alamo (ah-LAH-mo, but who cares). Their methods were questionable and their message was a horror show, but otherwise, it was an unspectacular enterprise.

Cut to the mid-'70s. Susan and Tony are broadcasting their gospel and living in a 14,000-square-foot mansion in Arkansas on a compound staffed by their followers, who are paid $5 a week and get food when they're good. When Susan died in 1982, Tony had her body on display for six months, with his congregants performing a constant vigil over the corpse so it would come back to life.

Things get creepier the more you read about the Alamos. Their ministry fell pretty clearly under the umbrella of "that's absolutely a cult" when it was discovered that they had followers working in a sweatshop, producing high-end denim jackets that were sold for hundreds of dollars. The government started taking action in the early '90s, and Tony found himself on the wrong side of the law. He'd been operating his businesses as tax-free nonprofits, which the IRS called bull on pretty hard. Oh, also, he stole his wife's body from the compound after it was shut down. The kicker was his conviction on 10 counts of transporting girls as young as 8 across state lines for the obvious, evil reason. His shining quote: "Consent is puberty." Yeah, he died in jail.

Fans of Robert Tilton know him as the host of "Success-N-Life." Early frequenters of YouTube know him as The Farting Preacher. Pretty much everyone else knows him as a giant fraud.

Tilton's message has been clear from the start: Poverty is the result of sin, and also please send money. His ministry became so popular that he attracted between 8,000 and 10,000 worshipers to his megachurch every week, and his broadcasts brought in scores of letters with personal requests for prayer and (naturally!) donations.

During an undercover investigation, ABC discovered that prayer letters sent to Robert Tilton's television ministry were sent straight to the bank, where their donations were marked and their prayers were thrown in the dumpster. Tilton's rebuttal? Nuh uh. He said he prayed so hard over the letters that the ink leaked into his bloodstream, and by the way that's why he needed plastic surgery, paid for by aforementioned donations.

Billy James Hargis was the grandpappy of many televangelist trends, like mail fraud and swearing that the broadcast would go off the air if people didn't send money ASAP. His church, the Church of the Christian Crusade, spread a staunchly conservative interpretation of Christianity. God hated Communists, he said, presumably explaining why Jesus accepted Venmo for all of those loaves and fishes. Hargis even went so far as to write a speech for Joseph McCarthy, the famous Communist witch hunter.

It wouldn't be his political views that would bring him down. Not his anti-labor union manifestos or the fact that he'd light up a room with his smile when you brought up segregation or his connection to a series of bombings in the 1960s. He was made of stuff too stern for something as trifling as a complete lack of moral fiber to knock him out of the box.

Yes, Billy James Hargis was steadfast. Billy James Hargis was resolute. Billy James Hargis ran into some trouble when two members of his congregation got married and, surprise, revealed that neither of them were virgins on account of Billy James Hargis.

If you've ever been at a cheap hotel, flipping through channels in the middle of the night, you've probably seen Marcus Lamb's work. He's the founder of the Daystar Television Network, the second-largest Christian TV network on Earth.

Lamb's story is a familiar one. He found the church at a young age and started preaching as a teenager. His whole life was all about spreading the news. It turns out that some news just gets spread faster when you're being blackmailed for $7.5 million.

During a stunning sermon in 2010, Lamb admitted to having had an affair a few years earlier. According to him, three women who had previously worked for him had threatened to go public with the information if they weren't paid $7.5 million. Taking the high ground (anything is high ground once you get low enough), Lamb repented, asked his congregation for forgiveness, and naturally went on Doctor Phil. His wife stuck with him, even after he was sued for allegedly going all "bad touch" on employees during mandated "quiet time." Lamb stirred controversy again at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he advised viewers to eschew vaccination in favor of prayer. He died in November 2021 after contracting COVID-19. 

If you learn one thing today, let it be this: America is the land of second chances, and televangelism is the seedy island territory just offshore where we house third, fourth, and fifth chances.

The personification of this phenomenon might well be Peter Popoff. With his grinning California charm, charismatic preaching methods, and Mother Goosian alliterative name, Popoff was the man to see in the '80s for revival services and quick-as-a-bunny faith healing. Attendees of his sermons were amazed when he'd call out strangers by name, knowing exactly what afflicted them through the divine providence of God.

In a roundabout way, it was true. If God created man and man created the small two-way radios that Popoff and an assistant used to have secretly communicate while Popoff was performing, then hallelujah. Prestigious debunker James Randi exposed the trick on national television, and Popoff was never heard from again.

Sorry, that was a typo. He kept going, and now does infomercials selling his "miracle spring water," a guaranteed cure for, according to Popoff, basically everything.

Everybody's known that one dude who can't stop himself from one-upping. You just got a dog? He just got a bald eagle. You've been to Europe? He's an archduke, and his armies march on Luxembourg this very night. To most people, it's exhausting. To fans of Mike Warnke, it's Sunday morning.

Warnke was sort of a big deal back in the day. Though he didn't focus on TV, he lived the good life as a minister and Christian comedian, traveling the world spreading his message that the devil is coming for you and you'd better be ready to fight him. How did he know? Because he totally used to be a satanist. No, not just a satanist. A satanic preacher. With a whole cult. Like, 1,500 people followed him. They made blood sacrifices. He absolutely claimed all of that.

Among his other supposed accomplishments: his doctorate in philosophy, his two bachelor's degrees, and the somewhere-between-two-and-five wounds he accumulated in Vietnam. Was any of it true? Negative, captain.

What makes Warnke's case all the more fascinating is that he was actually outed as a fraud by a Christian publication, "Cornerstone Magazine," in an exposé in 1991. The resulting backlash was split. Some were angry at Warnke for his deception, others were upset at the magazine for calling out a man who was bringing the word of God to the people. It's so hard to focus your anger sometimes!

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted that "there are no second acts in American lives." There's no way of knowing if this actually happened, but it just feels right to imagine that Jim Bakker responded by saying, "Hold my miracle cure."

Quick recap: in 1973, Jim and his then-wife Tammy Bakker co-founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network, home of their program "The PTL Club." Small screen success led to high-minded ambitions, and the Bakkers soon began construction on Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with water slides, a 500-room hotel, and the staple of all amusement parks, tax exemption. The $1.3 million in church funds that an IRS investigation found redirected to the Bakkers' personal accounts couldn't take Jim down, but CNN reports the alleged hush money payment of $279,000 to cover up the rape of his secretary certainly pushed the "pause" button on his success story. In 1989, Bakker was convicted on 29 counts including mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy, and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

A sentence reduction later, Bakker was paroled in 1994, and it wasn't long before his cherubic face was once again warmed by studio lighting and the liberal application of pancake makeup. His latest puckish misadventure: getting sued by the state of Missouri for selling a fake coronavirus cure.

Donald Trump's presidencies will be, with any luck, the most polarizing point in American history that we'll live to experience. The decisions that have been made and the tweets that have been tweeted have led to deeply divided public opinion and celebrity impersonations being hammered so far into the ground that they could be used to secure a subterranean mole people transcontinental railroad.

One star player has been Paula White, President Trump's spiritual advisor. Among other things, she's a hard and fast believer in the prosperity gospel, and also claims that all world leaders are put in power by divine grace and that to disagree with them is to disagree with the will of God, shining a whole new light on the place of pharaohs in society.

There's plenty of behavior to throw stones at here, but the Bible takes a pretty firm stance on that. Interestingly, it also states in Matthew that Jesus said, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Paula White, as quoted by Newsweek, doesn't seem to agree with that, saying, "Anyone who tells you to deny yourself is from Satan." Awkward.

As reported by UPI, when Jim Bakker bounced out of PTL in 1987, he became concerned that his ministry was about to be the subject of a hostile takeover by Jimmy Swaggart, who initiated the investigation into the Bakker clan. To avoid Swaggart's potential power grab, he handed Jerry Falwell Sr. the keys to the kingdom. Televangelism feels a lot like "Game of Thrones" once you read enough about it. Falwell certainly had the resume to back up the job. In the previous decade, he'd founded the Moral Majority PAC shortly after an all-white Christian academy that he founded was threatened with losing its tax exempt status due to new legislation regarding segregated schools.

There's a lot of ground to cover with Jerry Falwell. He once sued Hustler for $45 million because they ran a parody piece making fun of him, and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost. He also stated that a gay-friendly church was a satanic cult and that its inevitable annihilation would cause a celebration in heaven.

Then there was the time that he said the September 11th attacks happened because God was angry at America's acceptance of, among others, "the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle." He referred to the attacks as "what we deserve" (via The Guardian). He was also the guy who got really upset about the purple Teletubby back in the '90s. He had a lot of feelings.

Ernest Angley had a rough go of things toward the end of his life. A Christian Post piece from late 2019 outlined some of his financial struggles: his Boeing 747 had been on blocks for two years, since the six-figure repairs it needed were out of Angley's reach, financially speaking.

A lot of that had to do with the minister's legal troubles and fall from public grace. The accusations were numerous and diverse. According to Forbes, one man who began working for Angley at 18 claims that he would regularly be called to the preacher's house for "special anointings" involving personal massages and a marked lack of clothing. Angley has previously been accused of operating a cult where, according to a former church member, followers were taught that enough prayer can heal HIV and "childless men are encouraged to have vasectomies." The unidentified congregant went on to say that "Angley — who preaches vehemently against the 'sin' of homosexuality," insisted on "[examining] the genitals of the male parishioners before and after their surgeries."

Paul and Jan Crouch got into the televangelism game during its early days, buying up television stations across the country and forming the Trinity Broadcasting Network, best known as the only television station that the TV in your Motel 6 room seems capable of playing. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, more than 40 years later, their media empire has an estimated value of $750 million.

It's also extra-strength shady, according to allegations made by Jan and Paul's granddaughter Brittany Koper. According to her, the network serves as a personal bank account for the Crouch family, who aren't above zany shenanigans like having their chauffeurs ordained to avoid having to pay taxes on their salaries. Speaking to the New York Times after being fired from the company, Koper stated that her "job as finance director was to find ways to label extravagant personal spending as ministry expenses."

In 2012, another of the Crouches' granddaughters sued the couple, claiming that she had been sexually assaulted by a TBN employee when she was 13 and that Jan had turned a blind eye and blamed the child for the attack.

If there's a stereotype of televangelists doing little more than constantly and aggressively urging their live audiences and viewers watching their TV broadcasts at home to send in money, that may have been perfected by Oral Roberts. His career as a public preacher began around 1947 with revival-style tent services where he purportedly healed followers of their maladies. Taking his talents to TV in 1954, he'd eventually become the top-grossing televangelist by the 1980s, promising viewers that they'd get wealthy if they sent Roberts money as a religiously minded donation. His $500 million Oral Roberts University complex, which includes a university, hospital, and medical school, opened in 1965 and still stands.

In the late 1980s, Roberts reported that his relationship with a higher power was in significant jeopardy, and that his viewers needed to help him out of a high-stakes situation. Roberts delivered a sermon in Dallas on Easter Sunday 1986, claiming that God told him he needed to come up with $8 million in sacred donations by the close of the year. If not, Roberts said, God would kill him. In January 1987, Roberts repeated the tactic, announcing on his television show that God would end his life if he didn't get that $8 million in by March 30 of that year. By the deadline, Roberts' adherents had sent him more than enough money to evidently save his life — he didn't die until 2009.

Since 1979, Texas-based charismatic movement minister Kenneth Copeland has headlined "The Believer's Voice of Victory," first a weekly and then a daily TV program syndicated to stations across the U.S. He's collected millions in donations for his ministries, and in 2018 Copeland purchased a very expensive (the exact amount wasn't publicly revealed) Gulfstream V jet from entertainment mogul Tyler Perry. That made three luxury private planes for the televangelist, which he'd said more than two years before that last purchase were a job requirement. In 2015, he said in an interview with televangelist Jesse Duplantis that it was "agitating his spirit" when he'd get on a regular commercial plane and he'd be hit with numerous requests from strangers asking him to pray for them. "You can't manage that today, in this dope-filled world, get in a long tube with a bunch of demons," Copeland explained (via the Washington Post).

Copeland doesn't just use his fleet of jets for work — he uses them to ferry himself around to his various vacation properties. In 2019, "Inside Edition" reporter Lisa Guerrero cornered Copeland in Branson, Missouri, and pressed the preacher about his private jet habit. "Do you really believe that human beings are demons?" Guerrero asked. "No I do not and don't you ever say I did!" he yelled back in a video that went viral. "If you'll give me a chance to talk, sweetheart, I'll explain this to you," he continued. "But it's a biblical thing, it's a spiritual thing."

Ordained Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson helped create the idea of televangelism. In 1960, he created America's first Christian TV outlet, which evolved into the Christian Broadcasting Network. Robertson hosted that channel's flagship religious program "The 700 Club" for decades, using its proceeds to form a university and his fame to run for president in 1988. With "The 700 Club" serving as a pulpit from which Robertson could daily make grand proclamations and statements, he made many controversial remarks over the years. Among the things that Robertson said were possessed by demons or invited demonic spirits into one's home: images of Buddha, sleepover seances, feng shui, yoga, karate, horoscopes, adopting children from overseas, psychics, and the "Twilight" books. He also claimed that Democrats, encouraged by "homosexuals," wanted to put Christians in concentration camps, and that a stroke suffered by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was a literal act of God. In his 1991 book "The New World Order," he claimed that the United States was run by a number of secret organizations tied to Satan, including Jewish banking families.

In 2012, Liberian president Charles Taylor was convicted on numerous war crimes, such as terrorism, sexual assault, murder, and forcing children to be soldiers. During his trial, Robertson urged the U.S. government to support Taylor, with whom he had a deal to mine for gold in his country.

After creating the Orlando Christian Center megachurch in 1983 and holding faith-healing services, minister Benny Hinn took his "Miracle Healing Services" on the road. By 1990, he'd debuted "This Is Your Day," a daily religious program, on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, where it aired for years, as well as on other services.

In 2005, Christian watchdog organization MinistryWatch issued a "Donor Alert," urging against giving money to Benny Hinn Ministries. The reasons, according to the organization: Hinn "lives a lavish lifestyle with funds intended for charitable purposes, preaches a self-serving prosperity theology message," and "is nontransparent and lacks independent board oversight." Two years later, the federal government looked into Hinn's finances. Sen. Charles Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee launched an investigation into the financial makeup of megachurches, searching for signs of exploitation of the institutions' tax-exempt status. Hinn, by that time head of the World Healing Center Church and Benny Hinn Ministries, was among those investigated, although he at first refused to participate. The investigation came to a close in 2011, with no formal allegations of wrongdoing and a call for greater transparency

Harold Camping co-created Family Radio in 1958, broadcasting religious music and fielding listeners' Bible questions. Over the years, Family Radio grew into a network of radio stations and cable TV projects, and Camping became publicly concerned with end times prophecy. Camping said that close biblical analysis revealed the date of the Rapture. He claimed that the world as we know it would end on September 4, 1994, or September 6, 1994... or October 21, 2011. By the time Camping died in 2013, he'd incorrectly predicted armageddon about 13 times, and in the run-up to each doomsday date, he collected millions of dollars from his most staunch supporters.

Many of Camping's followers handed over their entire estates and emptied their bank accounts to help the minister spread the news. "There were a lot of people who sold their houses, who gave up their life savings," Matt Tuter, an ex-Family Radio employee, told Vice. "And Harold thought it was funny. He would come into my office and say, 'So-and-so called me. They're broke, but I'm not giving their money back.' Harold was a very twisted man." Another instance that indicated Camping was in it for the money: an ill-fated move to give out Bibles in China despite a restrictive communist government. A Family Radio initiative to spread Christianity in China in that manner was thwarted by Camping because he wanted his own book distributed, too.

Todd Bentley devoted his life to religion at age 18, following a drug overdose and an assault conviction. Claiming to be a faith healer, Bentley became a preacher and took over the Canada-based Fresh Fire Ministry and staged "crusades." By 2008, he was speaking at megachurches, performing faith healing rituals, and appearing on the GOD TV Christian broadcasting network. In July 2008, "Nightline" ran a story debunking Bentley's faith-healing powers. That same year, Bentley split from his wife following an emotional affair with one of his employees. 

Bentley continued to evangelize until minister Stephen Powell levied some serious allegations against his former mentor in 2019. "I believe that Todd has a perverse sexual addiction," Powell wrote on Facebook. "Todd has an appetite for a variety of sexual sins including both homosexual and heterosexual activity. Down through the years Todd has made sexual advances toward (and in some cases engaged in sexual sin with) a number of different men and women outside his marriage, many of them interns and/or students under his leadership care in the church." Following a thorough investigation, a ministerial oversight board discredited Bentley. "Based on our careful review of numerous first-hand reports, some of them dating back to 2004, we state our theological opinion and can say with one voice that, without a doubt, Todd is not qualified to serve in leadership or ministry today," the group wrote in a 2020 statement. "There are credible accusations of a steady pattern of ungodly and immoral behavior."

In the first decade of the 20th century, one of the most seen on-air personalities on the Roman Catholic cable channel Eternal Word Television Network was Father John Corapi. The priest hosted primetime talk shows and documentaries bearing his name, including "Father Corapi and the Catechism of the Catholic Church." Also a member of the religious order the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT), Corapi published well-received books, released religious DVDs and albums, and spoke out about faith from a Catholic perspective.

After receiving a letter from a woman publicly unidentified but known to have been close with Fr. Corapi, the priest's order launched an investigation in 2011 into allegations that he behaved inappropriately in many ways, on many occasions. After poring through Corapi's emails and interviewing individuals involved, SOLT determined that the priest had been sexually active with a woman whom he lived with in a romantic relationship arrangement, whom he'd met during her tenure as a sex worker. Corapi had also apparently overused drugs and alcohol, sexted with at least one other woman, and owned over $1 million worth of real estate, cars, and sport vehicles. Catholic priests take sacred vows of chastity, celibacy, and poverty, and they're also expected to avoid activities deemed outwardly sinful, like recreational drug use. The order barred Corapi from any and all ministerial and priestly activities.

One of the most prolific evangelists in the world, Joyce Meyer has written 150 books on Christian themes while also operating numerous humanitarian programs and appearing daily on "Enjoying Everyday Life." The syndicated televangelism program is broadcast in more than 100 languages, every day of the year, and it dates back to 1993.

Meyer's reputation is one that's fairly clean and wholesome, although she was associated with a horrific and deadly series of crimes in 2009. Christopher Coleman was in the employ of Meyer as her personal bodyguard, when he carried on an extramarital affair. Seeking to be with his mistress, Coleman then killed his spouse, Sheri, and their two young sons, and then attempted to involve his boss and her work by sending phony death threats to his company email address to plant the idea that his family was murdered as an act of hostility against Meyer and her operations. Coleman was convicted of first-degree murder, for which he's currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Sheri Coleman's surviving relatives filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Joyce Meyer Ministries, alleging that it didn't do enough to stop the murderer from carrying out his actions. That case was thrown out of court.

Joel Osteen Ministries broadcasts weekly services from Lakewood Church in Houston on 56 stations, multiple commercial cable channels, and the Inspiration Network and the Trinity Broadcast Network. Head pastor Joel Osteen is the author of seven bestselling books and hosts a satellite radio show, and all of that drives traffic to Lakewood Church, which accommodates 45,000 people weekly. His particular angle of faith is both enticing and lucrative, as he racks up a fortune through his various revenue streams — his net worth sits in the range of $50 million. Osteen espouses the prosperity gospel, arguing that God wants his followers to be monetarily wealthy, and that abundance is a sign of blessing.

That's not a necessarily generous mindset, and in 2017, Osteen was widely criticized for what looked like turning his back on those who were not financially well-off. As Hurricane Harvey bombarded the Houston area with heavy rains and subsequent flooding that put the lives of many locals in jeopardy, Osteen didn't open the massive Lakewood Church property — a converted sports arena with space for 16,000 — as a safe haven, shelter from the storm, or refugee center. The church announced on its social media accounts that the facility was uninhabitable because of flooding, but photographs posted by locals suggested that this wasn't exactly true. After being called out, Osteen opened up the church for flood relief and set up a donation center.