Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who became a household name amassing an enormous following and multimillion-dollar ministry only to be undone by his penchant for prostitutes, has died.
Swaggart died decades after his once vast audience dwindled and his name became a punchline on late night television. His death was announced Tuesday on his public Facebook page. A cause wasn’t immediately given, though at 90 he had been in poor health, having suffered cardiac arrest last month.
The Louisiana native was best known for being a captivating Pentecostal preacher with a massive following before being caught on camera with a prostitute in New Orleans in 1988, one of a string of successful TV preachers brought down in the 1980s and 1990s by sex scandals. He continued preaching for decades, but with a reduced audience.
Swaggart encapsulated his downfall in a tearful 1988 sermon, in which he wept and apologized but made no reference to his connection to a prostitute.
“I have sinned against you,” Swaggart told parishioners nationwide. “I beg you to forgive me.”
He announced his resignation from the Assemblies of God later that year, shortly after the church said it was defrocking him for rejecting punishment it had ordered for “moral failure.” The church had wanted him to undergo a two-year rehabilitation program, including not preaching for a full year.
Swaggart said at the time that he knew dismissal was inevitable but insisted he had no choice but to separate from the church to save his ministry and Bible college.
From poverty and oil fields to a household name
Swaggart grew up poor, the son of a preacher, in a music-rich family. He excelled at piano and gospel music, playing and singing with talented cousins who took different paths: rock-‘n’-roller Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley.
In his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, Swaggart said he first heard the call of God at age 8. The voice gave him goose bumps and made his hair tingle, he said.
“Everything seemed different after that day in front of the Arcade Theater,” he said in a 1985 interview with the Jacksonville Journal-Courier in Illinois. “I felt better inside. Almost like taking a bath.”
He preached and worked part time in oil fields until he was 23. He then moved entirely into his ministry: preaching, playing piano and singing gospel songs with the barrelhouse fervor of cousin Lewis at Assemblies of God revivals and camp meetings.
Swaggart started a radio show, a magazine, and then moved into television, with outspoken views.
He called Roman Catholicism “a false religion. It is not the Christian way,” and claimed that Jews suffered for thousands of years “because of their rejection of Christ.”
“If you don’t like what I say, talk to my boss,” he once shouted as he strode in front of his congregation at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, where his sermons moved listeners to speak in tongues and stand up as if possessed by the Holy Spirit.
Swaggart’s messages stirred thousands of congregants and millions of TV viewers, making him a household name by the late 1980s. Contributors built Jimmy Swaggart Ministries into a business that made an estimated $142 million in 1986.
His Baton Rouge complex still includes a worship center and broadcasting and recording facilities.
The scandals that led to Swaggart’s ruin
Swaggart’s downfall came in the late 1980s as other prominent preachers faced similar scandals. Swaggart said publicly that his earnings were hurt in 1987 by the sex scandal surrounding rival televangelist Jim Bakker and a former church secretary at Bakker’s PTL ministry organization.
The following year, Swaggart was photographed at a hotel with Debra Murphree, an admitted prostitute who told reporters that the two did not have sex but that the preacher had paid her to pose nude.
She later repeated the claim — and posed nude — for Penthouse magazine.
The surveillance photos that crippled Swaggart’s career apparently stemmed from his rivalry with preacher Marvin Gorman, who Swaggart had accused of sexual misdeeds. Gorman hired the photographer who captured Swaggart and Murphree on film. Swaggart later paid Gorman $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit over the sexual allegations against Gorman.
More trouble came in 1991, when police in California detained Swaggart with another prostitute. The evangelist was charged with driving on the wrong side of the road and driving an unregistered Jaguar. His companion, Rosemary Garcia, said Swaggart became nervous when he saw the police car and weaved when he tried to stuff pornographic magazines under a car seat.
Swaggart was later mocked by the late TV comic Phil Hartman, who impersonated him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Out of the public eye but still in the pulpit
The evangelist largely stayed out of the news in later years but remained in the pulpit at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, often joined by his son, Donnie, a fellow preacher. His radio station broadcast church services and gospel music to 21 states, and Swaggart’s ministry boasted a worldwide audience on the internet.
“My dad was a warrior. My dad was preacher. He didn’t want to be anything else except a preacher of the gospel,” Donnie Swaggart said in a video message shared on social media Tuesday following his father’s death. “That’s what he was put on this earth to do.”
The preacher caused another brief stir in 2004 with remarks about being “looked at” amorously by a gay man.
“And I’m going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I’m going to kill him and tell God he died,” Jimmy Swaggart said, to laughter from the congregation. He later apologized.
Swaggart made few public appearances outside his church, save for singing “Amazing Grace” at the 2005 funeral of Louisiana Secretary of State Fox McKeithen, a prominent name in state politics for decades.
In 2022, he shared memories at the memorial service for Lewis, his cousin and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. The pair had released “The Boys From Ferriday,” a gospel album, earlier that year.
Donnie Swaggart said he promised his father that “I will continue the work” — distributing Bibles, sharing the gospel and “proclaiming the message of Christ.”
Swaggart is survived by his wife, Frances, son Donnie, daughter-in-law Debbie, grandson Gabriel, daughter Jill, granddaughter Jennifer, son-in-law Clif, son Matt, daughter-in-law Joanna and nine great-grandchildren.
