Truth
Jimmy Swaggart, the Modern Saint
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 05 July 2002
Jimmy Swaggart
Jimmy Swaggart was a modern Christian. He was a morally vacant money grubber who built up an evangelical empire on TV with an audience of millions, whose purses and pockets were deep enough, and whose heads were empty enough, to give him $500,000 a day. Donations rolled in from the faithful, as well as royalties from his religious music records and publications. His cousin was the rock singer Jerry Lee Lewis, who carried on the local rural Louisiana bible belt custom of marrying under age girls—usually cousins. Caught between the revivalist fundamentalist Pentecostal evangelicals and Big Easy New Orleans rhythm and blues rocking and rolling, one cousin chose one direction and the other chose the other, and no one knows which chose which.
In 1987, Swaggart became a sort of worker priest—spending some time converting a New Orleans prostitute in her place of work—a motel room. Worse! He was photographed leaving.
Pentecostal religion, founded in the early 1900s, boomed after World War II. Healing revivals began blazing through the small towns and industrial communities of the South and Midwest. Charles L Harper writes:
Rapturous spirit-filled revivals could go on for weeks, in which people were encouraged to release all kinds of emotion and ecstasy. These included weeping, falling on the ground, leaping, dancing in states of transport, and speaking in incomprehensible tongues—giving Pentecostals the derogatory nickname “holy rollers.”
Among several charismatic denominations spreading the craze for revivalistic religion was “The Assemblies of God,” which ordained Jimmy Swaggart, one of a generation of preachers who, with the aid of radio and television, cast off their hometown parochialism and became powers of lucre in the Great Society. His evangelical empire grew exponentially. Rousing music, a sexy singing voice, and charismatic style attracted huge crowds, inluding millions of Catholics, even though Swaggart was unapologetically anti-Catholic! Charles Harper, again:
His headquarters in Baton Rouge included a huge auditorium, administrative offices, a sophisticated media center for editing video tapes, an enormous mail center that did so much business that it had its own zip code, a campground with trailer hookups for the visiting faithful, an elementary school, a high school, a college, and a payroll of over 1,500. Swaggart’s was among the competing empires of James Bakker (the PTL Club), Jerry Falwell (the Moral Majority), Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and others that grew and competed for money and audiences.
Opposite of Saintly
Anyone standing on a world sized pulpit and asking for millions of dollars a week can be expected to behave the way he preached. Swaggart was the opposite of saintly. An attorney and minister, who followed Swaggart’s career, said he took to pornography and prostitution and “began privately battling” with them. Not too hard though, as long as it could be kept quiet. He was openly right wing politically on every religious, social and moral issue. And, essentially, he alone was accountable for the use of the vast funds he generated.
In the 1970s, the evangelical bubble burst from its own leprous nature. The different Christian circuses were eyeing and spying on each other out of rivalry and envy. Then the scandals erupted in the major schools for saintliness in scandalism, about personal moral flaws—misuse of money, illicit sexuality, materialism. Jim Bakker and his wife and partner, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, all saw their empires ruined by their greed and immorality. Swaggart repented publicly:
I have sinned! I have sinned… Forgive me!
This was the plaintive confession and plea on TV with an audience of millions, partly skeptical, but partly still faithful! The empire was battered but began to revive a little with the dedication of those few faithful. Then the law and the press caught him at it again while on a trip to California. Saint Swaggart could not resist “converting” whores and harlots.
It is a remarkable tribute to the gullibility of Christians that Swaggart’s following remained, albeit seriously diminished. His own audiences were down, but the evangelical subculture thrived—still does! It is a political force that looms in the Republican Party, and in Congress as the Christian right, in issues about welfare reform, education, and abortion. With saints like Swaggart, Falwell, Bakker and Robertson, it is hard to see how the Christian right in America can command any respect at all. It is hard to believe that the holy rollers ever read beyond the monster called God in their Old Testaments.
The whole sordid story has been told by Anne Rowe Seaman in Swaggart: The Unauthorized Biography of an American Evangelist (1999). It can hardly be duller than reading the bible, so perhaps the holy rollers, the holy Joes and even the rock and rollers might read it to get a slight glimpse of what Christianity is supposed to be not!
