Televangelist Jim Bakker fears his MAGA hat would get him ‘murdered in the streets’
Televanglist Jim Bakker told his TV followers Friday that he doesn’t “dare wear a Trump hat” because it could get him “murdered in the streets.”
A woman in his Missouri studio audience at “The Jim Bakker Show” had a football jersey that said, “Pray for 45” on the back.
“I’ve been thinking. I don’t dare wear a Trump hat. The evil in this country is so bad ... if I was a Republican — which I have been my whole life ... I couldn’t wear a hat with my candidate on it without concern about being murdered in the streets,” Bakker said on an episode titled “Apathy: The Church’s Biggest Weakness.”
The show is posted on Bakker’s website. His comment about the hat begins around the 18:15 mark.
The show, co-hosted by Bakker’s wife, Lori, is filmed at Bakker’s Morningside church community near Branson, Missouri.
Bakker hosted the evangelical Christian TV show “The PTL Club” with his then-wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, in the ‘70s and ‘80s until a sex scandal and charges of fraud brought everything crashing down.
Now, from headquarters in Missouri’s Ozarks, he’s preaching of the Apocalypse and selling merchandise to help his followers prep for the end of days — items such as “Extreme Survival Warfare” water bottles and buckets of freeze-dried food.
On Friday’s show he said he gets threats — though he didn’t say who sends them — and challenged fellow Christians: “Why are we putting up with this?”
“I believe there can be a revolution, a revival, a restoration, and I’m concerned. They’re putting us in a corner, and I won’t shut up,” he said. “They send messages to me that I will be killed, that I will be through and yet I don’t stop.
“I’m in the United States of America, and I’m threatened because I want to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, I believe the Bible. I believe this whole book. Why can’t I believe in this book? In America, you cannot believe this book without being harassed.
“What can we do in America? I’m tired of this. This harassment is wrong. It’s not what America was built upon.”
On Monday, President Donald Trump warned evangelical leaders he met with at the White House that Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently” if they take control of Congress during the midterm elections, The New York Times and other outlets reported.
This story was originally published August 30, 2018 at 9:36 AM with the headline "Televangelist Jim Bakker fears his MAGA hat would get him ‘murdered in the streets’."