Religion: Tuesday, The Rabbi Bought PTL

As the latest incredible news broke last week at the PTL ministry’s forlorn theme park at Fort Mill, S.C., barely a tenth of the rooms were occupied in the Heritage Grand Hotel. Along the adjoining Main Street shopping arcade, stale popcorn was piled unsold in a vendor’s cart, and saleswomen without customers knitted listlessly in a crafts shop. Cranes, brought in to construct Jim Bakker’s fantasies, stood eerily idle, as they have since scandal struck 19 months ago.

The compound has become Christendom’s most lumbering white elephant. Last week an unlikely angel of rescue appeared. He is not a Gospel glad-hander but an Orthodox Jew named Stephen Mernick. The reticent 34-year-old Toronto businessman reportedly underwent intensive religious training and holds rabbinical ordination but has never led a synagogue. Meticulously observant, Mernick attends daily synagogue prayers and declined to visit his South Carolina kingdom last week because it was Simhath Torah, celebrating God’s gift of the Law.

Mernick’s family has long dealt in real estate, and his worth is estimated at $40 million. Heretofore he has made more mundane investments: landfill sites, travel agencies and assorted properties. He negotiated with M.C. (“Red”) Benton, the wily PTL trustee named by a federal bankruptcy court, outbidding another Canadian with a $115 million offer. Some $65 million of that is supposed to be dispersed eventually among PTL creditors, the IRS and the 114,200 “lifetime partners” who each gave Bakker $1,000 or more to help develop the ministry.

So what’s a Jewish entrepreneur going to do with a 500-acre Christian theme park, a born-again retirement village and North America’s biggest all- Christian cable TV network (sent to 13 million homes, 2 million fewer than before the scandal)? “I have made no decision whatsoever” he told a press conference but said the project, with 1,700 undeveloped acres, is a good investment with excellent “breakup value.” The local church that Bakker founded is not involved.

Jim and Tammy, lately encamped nearby in a disciple’s mansion, failed to make good on a $172 million offer but hope vaguely to return to their Valhalla. Jim questions whether the hotel can be filled again without a star evangelist. Him, for instance. The demoralized Fort Mill staffers are mostly relieved that the chaos has ended, at least temporarily. “All of us just want somebody to take it and carry on,” said Dean Chandler, the hotel’s service manager.

The TV operation, which has dropped the dread PTL name in favor of the Inspirational Network, claims to make $250,000 a month. It could be spun off, if Mernick feels uncomfortable presiding over such soul-saving shows as Zola Levitt Presents, which aims openly at persuading Jews to follow Jesus. One dubious PTL officeworker figures that to save his investment Mernick may have no choice but to foster evangelistic Christianity. “People can go anywhere for a theme park, hotel or campsite,” the worker says. “Why would they want to come out here in the middle of nowhere? The reason is simple. This place is different. People come here because they want the Christian atmosphere.”