For a few years during the late nineteen-eighties, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were among the most famous, and notorious, people in the country. (Jim died this week, at the age of eighty-six; Tammy Faye died in 2007.) The pair became tabloid fixtures after their influential Pentecostal empire—which included a daily television program and a kind of Christian Disneyland in South Carolina, complete with a hundred-and-sixty-three-foot water slide, called Heritage USA—collapsed under the weight of Jim’s sex scandals and financial crimes. (When Jim faced fraud charges, the prosecutors exposed the pair’s lavish spending, which once included sending their clothes across the country by private jet.) In 1990, the New Yorker contributor Frances FitzGerald reported from the trial and told the full story of two outlandish, complicated, and quintessentially American figures. | 
