Jimmy Swaggart, the Louisiana televangelist whose name became a watchword for scandal, died in Baton Rouge on July 1. He was 90.
Swaggart was one of the best-known and most successful TV preachers in the 1980s, reaching an estimated half-billion people every week with riveting sermons about the struggle against sin and the good gift of God’s redeeming grace. Then, at the peak of his popularity, Swaggart was caught at a rundown motel paying a woman for sex.
In 1988, he confessed on TV that he had sinned, face contorted with tears as he apologized to his congregation, those watching at home, his wife, his son, his son’s wife, other Pentecostal preachers and evangelists, the Assemblies of God, and, finally, Jesus Christ.
“I have sinned against you, my Lord,” Swaggart said, “and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.”
Forgetfulness couldn’t come fast enough for Swaggart, though, and when the Assemblies of God told him he couldn’t preach for a year, he rejected the discipline, left the denomination, and went back to doing what he had been doing.
He was caught paying a woman for sex again in 1991.
This time the confession was different: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” Swaggart said.
The televangelist went on to shift the blame to Satan and to talk about the scandal as spiritual warfare, describing his own sexual acts as demonic attacks on him.
Swaggart also said Satan was behind all the criticism and condemnation. He argued that those who said he was wrong to stay in the pulpit through scandal were just giving voice to the Accuser, trying to convince Swaggart that he was a joke, “a sideshow,” and an international disgrace. He reminded himself the Devil is a liar and paid them no mind.
Swaggart’s ministry collapsed—but not completely. Eighty percent of his viewers disappeared. His 7,000-seat sanctuary emptied. Sales of his gospel albums slowed. Donations didn’t arrive in the mail as frequently. But Swaggart kept going.
He’s been used as a case study of scandal ever since.
Christianity Today editor Rodney Clapp saw Swaggart as an example of the failure of the modern church.
“Too often, in the spirit of an extreme individualism, the grand Reformation doctrines of sola Scriptura and sola fidei have been turned into pitiful escapes from responsibility and accountability,” he wrote. “Cases like Swaggart’s indicate just how much we need to restudy and then take seriously the New Testament doctrine of the church.”
More recently, historians such as Suzanna Krivulskaya have looked at Swaggart to see how ministers have avoided consequences.
“Disgraced celebrity preachers experimented with obfuscation and confession” and “learned to rebrand their downfalls as evidence of the gospel’s effectiveness,” Krivulskaya wrote. “Resolute in their insistence on the right to preach despite being caught in acts they otherwise label immoral, charismatic ministers of the television age appeared to be unstoppable—scandal and all.”
Swaggart was born on March 15, 1935, in the tiny town of Ferriday, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River. He was the first child of Minnie Bell Herron and Willie Leon Swaggart. His father—known as “Sun” or “Son” Swaggart—played the fiddle at dances and parties.
The younger Swaggart remembered a lot of parties in the earliest years of his childhood. He recalled them as drunken affairs, frequently ending in fights. His parents also drank and fought at home. Then, when he was five, they had a conversion experience, and everything seemed to change.
“Jesus came to my house,” Swaggart would later say. “When they got saved, the fighting ended.”
Swaggart had his own religious conversion a few years later, at eight, standing in line for the movies. He heard God speak to him, as he would recall the story, and say he wanted young Jimmy to give him his heart.
When the ticket machine jammed, Swaggart took it as divine intervention and gave himself to God. He felt God tell him that he had some special work for him to do and had set him apart “as a chosen vessel.”
He started preaching and preforming gospel music as a teenager. By 17, he’d dropped out of high school, married 15-year-old Frances Anderson, and gone into full-time ministry as a traveling evangelist.
It was a hard life. He frequently played piano, sang, and preached from the back of a flatbed truck. The young family struggled to survive on meager donations, sometimes as little as $30 per week. In later years Swaggart would tell a story about awakening to find their campsite consumed by a flash flood.
“The Devil had tried to take our lives,” he said. “For years to come, I would dream about struggling against that current and almost drowning.”
Swaggart said his greatest struggle, however, came from the temptation to join his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, who was on the road pioneering rock-and-roll with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley. Lewis was getting rich and famous singing and playing “Great Balls of Fire,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”
Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, founder of the legendary Sun Records, wanted to sign Swaggart, too, to add some gospel music to the lineup. Swaggart turned him down after a great internal battle.
“Jerry Lee can go to Sun Records,” he said. “I’m on my way to heaven.”
Swaggart was ordained in 1961 and brought his ministry to radio. Within a few years, his program was on 700 stations across the US. He built a church in Baton Rouge that could double as TV studio and made the jump to television in 1971 with The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast.
Even people who didn’t believe Swaggart’s message were often mesmerized by his Pentecostal preaching.
“He bobs and weaves and shouts and cries and spins his own magic,” historian Randall Balmer wrote in CT. “Raucous and controversial … Jimmy Swaggart has rarely had trouble keeping people’s attention.”
People magazine called him “a spellbinding performer” who would “rant, weep, thrust his Bible high in the air,” using the whole stage and “whipping his followers and himself to a devotional frenzy.”
The TV ministry grew until, at its zenith, his sermons were reaching an estimated 510 million people in 145 countries. In 1987, Swaggart was receiving an average of $500,000 in donations every day.
Then came the spectacular fall. A minister named Marvin Gorman was mad at Swaggart for Swaggart’s role in forcing him to confess to an extramarital affair with a deacon’s wife. Gorman sought revenge, and his son Randy was a police officer who knew Swaggart was a frequent guest at a Travel Inn, where men rented cheap rooms for quick sexual encounters.
The Gormans set up a sting operation and captured Swaggart on camera going into the motel with a 27-year-old. The woman, Debra Murphree, later said he’d been paying her $20 to pose for provocative photos and perform oral sex a few times a month for several years. She knew who he was but said he told her to call him “Billy.”
Swaggart confessed to the Gormans. Then to church leaders. Then to everybody, including his wife and God.
He didn’t offer many details but said he’d been succumbing to this temptation since the early days of his ministry—nearly 30 years. He agreed to stop preaching for three months but wouldn’t accept the Assemblies of God’s requirements for a longer restoration process.
Three years later, Swaggart was caught again when a police officer pulled him over for reckless driving in Indio, California. There was a 31-year-old woman named Rosemary Garcia in the car. She said she didn’t know Swaggart. He had picked her up.
In case the implication wasn’t clear, Garcia explained it to a Los Angeles TV station: “For sex. I mean … that’s what I do. I’m a prostitute.”
This time, Swaggart offered the world no tears. He returned to the pulpit after just a few days.
His reputation suffered, though, and the ministry was never the same. Early in 1992, Frances Swaggart sent out a fundraising letter pleading with supporters to help make up a $1.5 million deficit.
“Despite what the world (and most of the church) says,” Frances Swaggart wrote, “we believe the best days for the ministry are ahead.”
In 1998, CT found the vast parking lot around his church mostly empty. Inside the sanctuary, large sections of seats were curtained off, the balcony was dark, and camera angles for the TV broadcasts were carefully controlled to keep viewers at home from seeing the “dearth of congregants.”
But not everyone turned away from Swaggart. Some at the church said they still believed he was anointed and that God didn’t withdraw anointing just because of a moral failing.
They forgave Swaggart his faults and even took some of the responsibility.
“The man is human,” one woman said. “Maybe he got so caught up in being an example that he couldn’t tell someone something was terribly wrong. Now he has. He’s said it to the Lord, and the Lord is going to get him some help.”
Others thought the scandals actually made Swaggart a better minister: He wasn’t as judgmental as he’d once been, they said, and put a lot more emphasis on grace.
Besides, they argued, wasn’t that the point of the gospel? Swaggart’s life and message showed “somehow God can take things that are wrong, like this problem,” a family member said, “and turn them around to His glory.”
Others, however, took away very different lessons. They saw hypocrisy. They saw abuses of Christian theology. They saw evidence that the whole idea of God and forgiveness was all a fraud.
“Religion is nothing more than an excuse,” one woman in California concluded. “Why does ‘God’ allow cheap grace? Because there’s no other kind but accepting responsibility for our own actions.”
Swaggart, for his part, insisted that grace was real. He said that was the truth of his life, that God had healed him, forgiven him, and cleansed him of his sin. He returned to the theme again and again, in sermon and song.
He re-released two songs on streaming platforms on June 13, a few days before he suffered cardiac arrest and went into the intensive care unit in Baton Rouge. One song is called “Mercy Rewrote My Life”; the other “He Looked Beyond My Faults.”
“My faults were great, and I’d wandered so far away in sin,” Swaggart sings on the nearly-eight-minute track. “But his loving heart knew just where, my Lord, I had been. / I cried aloud, and Jesus heard my, my humble, humble plea. / He looked beyond all my faults and saw my need.”
At the time of his death, Swaggart’s ministry said he’d preached on television for longer than any other evangelist. Swaggart is survived by his wife, Frances, and son, Donnie.
