In 1986, the third most-visited theme park in America wasn’t in Anaheim or Orlando. It was in Fort Mill, South Carolina, just across the border from Charlotte — a 2,300-acre Christian empire called Heritage USA where, for a brief and extraordinary window, six million people a year came looking for salvation and waterslides.
It didn’t last. But the story of how it rose, and how spectacularly it fell, remains one of the strangest chapters in American religious history.
Jim and Tammy Faye
The story starts with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who were not conventional preachers so much as pioneers of a new format. Before building their own ministry they helped launch The 700 Club and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, working out an idea that would reshape American evangelicalism: ministry didn’t have to look like church. It could look like prime-time television.
In 1974 they launched The PTL Club — Praise the Lord — a Christian talk show with soft couches, celebrity guests, and high-production musical numbers. Critics called it Pass the Loot. At its peak, PTL had its own satellite network reaching millions of homes. Jim was the visionary, convinced that God wanted Christians to prosper. Tammy Faye, with her famously dramatic mascara and unguarded emotionalism, was the heart of the operation.
She was also, in her own way, a radical. In 1985, at the height of the AIDS crisis, she interviewed a gay minister dying of the disease on national television and told her audience to show him love. It was decades ahead of her evangelical peers and would eventually define how history remembers her.
But Jim wanted more than a television show. He wanted a kingdom.
Building the Kingdom
Construction began on Heritage USA in 1978. What Jim Bakker built over the following years was genuinely staggering in its ambition: a 501-room luxury hotel with a climate-controlled Victorian Main Street, a 12-acre water park with a Noah’s Ark play area and wave pools, a 24-hour prayer chapel modeled on the biblical Upper Room, an outdoor amphitheater for Passion Plays, a television production studio, a shopping mall, and a retirement village. There was an unfinished 21-story hotel tower in the works. There were plans for more.
For families in the Bible Belt, Heritage USA offered something no secular theme park could: a world-class vacation without the alcohol, gambling, or rock music of the outside world. A holy pilgrimage with a water slide.
Behind the scenes, the Bakkers were living on a scale that strained even their own theology of prosperity. Rolls-Royces. A $600,000 lakeside mansion. A $5,000 air-conditioned doghouse. Rumors of gold-plated bathroom fixtures and $100 cinnamon rolls. God wanted Christians to be blessed, and the Bakkers were living proof.
The Math That Didn’t Work
Heritage USA wasn’t financed through conventional loans. It was financed through Lifetime Partnerships — Jim Bakker told viewers that a $1,000 donation would earn them three free nights a year at the Heritage Grand hotel for the rest of their lives.
The hotel had 500 rooms. The Bakkers sold roughly 66,000 partnerships. Even if every partner came only once a year, the hotel would need to be booked solid for over 130 years just to honor existing commitments — and they kept selling more. Across multiple proposed facilities, the Bakkers eventually sold more than 150,000 partnerships, raising over $158 million. New donor money funded operations that could never actually deliver on their promises. The IRS revoked PTL’s tax-exempt status in early 1987. The cracks were showing.
The Holy War
In March 1987 it collapsed. A former church secretary named Jessica Hahn revealed that Jim Bakker had sexually assaulted her in a Florida hotel room in 1980, and that PTL had paid her $265,000 in hush money using donor funds.
Desperate to protect his empire from rival preachers moving in around him, Bakker made a decision he would spend years regretting: he voluntarily handed control of PTL to Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, believing Falwell would hold the ministry until the scandal blew over.
Within weeks, Falwell went on national television and publicly called Bakker a liar and an embezzler, declared PTL a den of iniquity, and announced that Jim and Tammy Faye would never return. Bakker accused Falwell of a hostile takeover. The headlines called it a Holy War. Then the federal government moved in.
The Conviction
The financial investigation was devastating. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy. The judge sentenced him to 45 years — one of the harshest sentences ever handed down for a white-collar crime. It was later reduced to 8 years. He served 5. Tammy Faye, never charged, filed for divorce while he was in prison.
The human cost extended far beyond the Bakkers. Thousands of working-class donors — people who had sent retirement savings, grocery money, modest nest eggs — lost everything. They had believed they were building the Kingdom of God.
What’s Left
Most of the 2,300 acres have since been redeveloped into upscale neighborhoods and golf courses. The original Heritage Grand Hotel is now owned by MorningStar Ministries. The Upper Room has been restored and still functions as a prayer chapel.
And the unfinished 21-story tower is still there. It has been there since 1987, a skeletal concrete structure rising out of the Carolina pines, the subject of decades of legal battles and a monument to the moment when the money ran out and the dream stopped mid-construction.
Tammy Faye spent her later years as an unlikely cultural icon, celebrated by the gay and lesbian community for her early compassion during the AIDS crisis. She died of cancer in 2007. Her story was later told in the award-winning film The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
Jim Bakker returned to television after his release from prison, having traded the Prosperity Gospel for survivalism. He now broadcasts from Missouri, selling doomsday food supplies and warning of societal collapse. The hustle never ended. It just found new packaging.
Heritage USA lasted less than a decade at full operation. But the questions it raised about faith, entertainment, and unregulated commerce didn’t go away with it. The concrete tower is still standing. So are the questions.
