James Orsen Bakker (born January 2, 1940, in Muskegon, Michigan) is an American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host (with his then-wife Tammy Faye Bakker) of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program. A sex scandal led to his resignation from the ministry. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about his imprisonment and divorce and effectively ended his time in the larger public eye.

In 1960, Bakker met Tammy Faye LaValley while both were students at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tammy Faye worked in a boutique for a time while Jim found work in a restaurant inside a department store in Minneapolis. They were married on April 1, 1961, and left the Bible College to become itinerant evangelists. They had two children: daughter Tammy Sue (Sissy) Bakker Chapman (born March 2, 1970) and son Jamie Charles ("Jay") Bakker (born December 18, 1975). Jim and Tammy Bakker divorced on March 13, 1992, and he married Lori Graham Bakker in 1998.

In 1966, the Bakkers began working at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, which at the time barely reached an audience of thousands. The Bakkers greatly contributed to the growth of the network, and their success with a variety show format (including interviews and puppets) helped make The 700 Club one of the longest-running and most successful televangelism programs.:6 The "Jim and Tammy Show" was broadcast for a few years from their Portsmouth, Virginia, studio. It was aimed at young children, whom they entertained with such films as "Davey and Goliath", a claymation Bible-story series. The Bakkers then left for California in the early 1970s.