Jimmy Swaggart, a prominent televangelist known for his fiery sermons and music, died on July 1. Photo / Getty Images
Jimmy Swaggart, an itinerant Louisiana preacher who became one of the most popular and polarising Christian televangelists of his generation before a sex scandal – etched in public memory by his tear-streaked televised confession – consigned him to relative obscurity, has died. He was 90.
Jimmy Swaggart Ministries announced the death but did not share additional details. His son, Donnie Swaggart, a fellow pastor, said on June 15 that his father went into cardiac arrest and was hospitalised in Baton Rouge. He died on July 1.
Swaggart was one of a handful of televangelists who rose to global prominence in the second half of the 20th century, among them Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jerry Falwell.
At his peak, in the late 1980s, Swaggart reached millions of viewers in the United States and more than 100 other countries. His broadcasts generated revenue of US$140 million ($229.8m) a year, with a signature combination of fire and brimstone, musical performances and the relentless marketing of Swaggart-branded items, including Bible study manuals, T-shirts, records, tapes, mugs, plates, Roman coins and copies of Jesus’ crown of thorns. At its height, his Baton Rouge-based ministry operated the largest mail-order business in Louisiana.
Swaggart was perhaps the most divisive of the broadcast preachers. He attacked Catholicism as a “false cult” and suggested that Jews, by rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, brought the Holocaust upon themselves. Alone among the major televangelists, he levelled searing attacks on other preachers for alleged heresies and – until his own troubles emerged – for alleged sexual misdeeds.
While other televangelists bowed to the norms of television – Robertson’s “700 Club” employed a talk show format, and the Bakkers developed a variety format with interviews and puppets – Swaggart cast himself as an “old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher”.
His sermons were spellbinding. He paced the stage of his 7000-seat Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge and railed against worldly temptations. He fell to his knees and brought worshippers – weeping and speaking in tongues – to their feet. The mood he wished to invoke was that of a Depression-era camp meeting where fellowship was secondary to the message that “hell is no joke”.
Swaggart leavened his sweat-soaked sermons with music. Backed by a choir and a band, he crooned in a world-weary baritone, playing on the piano a gentler version of the boogie-woogie he learned growing up in rural Louisiana with first cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, the tempestuous rock-and-roll pioneer. His gospel albums sold in the millions.
He preached, recorded and sold thousands of sermons. But the one that would come to define him was an emotional confession he delivered on February 21, 1988, admitting to sins that he had long warned others against and begging forgiveness from his family, his followers and God.
“To the hundreds of millions that I have stood before in over a hundred countries of the world … I have sinned against you, and I beg you to forgive me,” he said. “And most of all to my Lord and my saviour … I have sinned against you, my Lord.”
His confession avoided specifics, but the details were already known to the public. Swaggart had been photographed with a prostitute in a motel outside New Orleans.
Swaggart became the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes. CBS News commentator Andy Rooney mock-nominated him for an Oscar. But when Swaggart finished his sermon that Sunday, thousands of his flock poured down the aisles to embrace and pray with him onstage.
To others, Swaggart’s confession represented a comeuppance.
In 1986, he had confronted Marvin Gorman, a rising Louisiana televangelist, with accusations that he had had affairs with several women, forcing Gorman to resign from his ministry. Many of Gorman’s followers and allies, including preacher Jim Bakker, according to newspaper reports, suspected Swaggart of scheming to appropriate Gorman’s audience, an allegation he denied.
In 1987, the Charlotte Observer reported that Jim Bakker had had a sexual encounter with a woman seven years before and paid her to conceal it. Swaggart privately urged leaders of the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal denomination that had ordained them both, to dismiss Bakker as a minister. Publicly, he called Bakker’s misdeeds “a cancer” and said God had told him that it should be “excised from the body of Christ”.
The scandal called attention to questionable financial dealings as well as Bakker’s personal life. He lost his US$150 million-a-year ($246.3m) PTL (Praise the Lord) ministry, was forced to shutter Heritage USA, the Christian-themed water park and resort he and his wife had created in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and later served almost five years in prison for financial fraud.
Jim Bakker, in turn, accused “a well-known individual,” widely assumed to be Swaggart, of having orchestrated “a diabolical plot” to take over his ministry. Swaggart denied the allegation, remarking, “What would I do with a waterslide?”
While the national media covered televangelists’ quarrels over their personal behaviour, a less publicised struggle was playing out in their competition for Nielsen and Arbitron ratings.
The ratings showed that by the mid-1980s, televangelists had saturated their market. In the previous decade and a half, the number of syndicated televangelist programs had more than doubled, while the number of households watching them had peaked and started to decline, according to Jeffrey K. Hadden, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia who wrote a 1993 study of the field.
Even before the sex scandals that engulfed Swaggart, Bakker and Gorman, Hadden wrote, there were not enough viewers to keep all those preachers afloat.
After Swaggart’s confession, the elders of the Assemblies of God ordered him to stop preaching for a year and submit to counselling. When he refused, complaining that he could not afford to be off the air that long, they defrocked him.
Without church credentials, he was back in the pulpit three months after his confession. “I want to serve notice on the whole world. What’s passed has passed,” he said. He pleaded for money and affirmed rumours that his ministry was about to “financially go under” unless donations picked up.
Then, in October 1991, police stopped Swaggart for driving on the wrong side of the road near Palm Springs, California, with a female passenger identified as a prostitute. This time, Swaggart informed his congregants and viewers that God had told him to skip the mea culpas. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” he said.
Jimmy Lee Swaggart was born March 15, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, a town in the Mississippi River floodplain. Ferriday was home to about 2500 people, dozens of churches and, starting in the late 1940s, a seminal rhythm-and-blues club, Haney’s Big House.
His father, Willie, was a grocer, fiddler, sometime moonshiner and itinerant preacher. His mother, Minnie Bell Herron Swaggart, was a homemaker and a talented guitar player who often accompanied her husband on his preaching circuit. A younger brother, Donnie, died in infancy.
In his 1977 autobiography, “To Cross a River,” written with Robert Paul Lamb, Swaggart noted that he was 8 when he first felt a calling to become a minister of the Pentecostal church, a fundamentalist creed emphasising miracles, faith healing and speaking in tongues.
He quit high school and, at 17, married Frances Anderson, then 15, who would remain his wife and business partner throughout his life. They had a son, Donnie. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Swaggart grew up surrounded by cousins, including Mickey Gilley, later to become a country music star, and Lewis, the son of his mother’s sister. Swaggart and Lewis, born the same year in Ferriday, were especially close. Both were drawn to the piano, and both recounted sneaking into Haney’s Big House as teens.
Lewis’ towering success in the late 1950s, recording songs such as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire” initially made Swaggart envious. He considered pursuing a career in commercial music. But his faith – which prohibited theatre-going, card playing, alcohol, tobacco, dancing and secular music – wouldn’t allow it, he wrote.
Relatives told biographers that as a boy, Swaggart was considered the shy counterpart to his reckless cousin Jerry Lee. In “Hellfire,” his 1982 biography of Lewis, Nick Tosches wrote that Swaggart and his cousin shared “the same fulminous vision of good and evil,” but preached “from opposite shores of the river they call salvation”.
Swaggart was ordained in 1961 and became an itinerant preacher like his father. While travelling the country, he began building a local base in Baton Rouge. His weekly radio broadcast, “The Camp Meeting Hour,” launched in 1969, gave him a national audience and a source of funding that underwrote a vast expansion of his ministry.
By the mid-1970s, his Baton Rouge base sprawled over a 200-acre campus, including the Worship Centre, a Bible college, a printing and mailing operation, and a television studio. It was one of the largest employers in the city.
After the prostitution episodes, Swaggart’s show was dropped by the three major religious TV networks. He laid off hundreds of employees and sold or leased much of his property.
A 1990 US Supreme Court decision required that he pay back taxes on merchandise sold during preaching tours in California. In 1991, after a jury found him liable for defamation damages, he agreed to pay US$1.85 million ($3.03m) to televangelist Gorman.
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College who wrote about Swaggart for Christianity Today magazine in 1998, described a disarmingly likable preacher, singing and sermonising at his piano to a much-reduced but fiercely devoted audience.
By the mid-2010s, Swaggart and his family had cobbled together a network of low-powered radio and public access TV channels that could reach most parts of the United States and 12 other countries.
In 2020, he was among a score of televangelists (Jim Bakker and celebrity pastor Joel Osteen were two others) who obtained federal loans through the coronavirus-related Paycheck Protection Program. A local business review reported that Swaggart had put his loan toward US$3.75 million ($6.1m) in building renovations for the ministry.
Swaggart’s persistence suggested that if some followers had lost confidence in him, he never lost confidence in them. His optimism came through in a brief interview he gave Geraldo Rivera in 1988. Yes, he told Rivera, his ministry was in financial free fall, but he insisted all would work out in the end.
“Americans,” he said, “always rally to an underdog.”