His 1984 autobiography proclaimed, "There are no skeletons in the Swaggart closet," but recounted a warning from a longtime friend. He mailed 7 million fund-raising letters a day, raised $135 million annually in contributions, and used the money to build schools, churches and his own Bible college, while providing a lavish lifestyle for his family.
#Jimmy swaggart music no word but holy tv#
The Lord instructed him to begin a TV ministry in 1973.īy 1986, his TV shows reached 510 million people in 145 countries, and his complex in Baton Rouge made him one of the city's largest employers. God, he says, has spoken repeatedly to him since he was 8 years old. Jimmy Lee Swaggart, born poor near the Mississippi River in Ferriday, La., started preaching on the revival circuit in 1958 with his wife, Frances, and a beat-up Plymouth. "If you look hard enough, you'll find something good about me and say it."Īt least, Swaggart adds, he has the ability to survive. And frankly, I don't want to hear it," he says. "You can find things about me you don't like. But his sermon offers a reply to his critics. Swaggart refused to be interviewed for this article. Pride goes before destruction and the haughty spirit before the fall. "It's very hard for people who have as much prominence as he and I did in the church to stay humble. "The whole story is tragic," says Gorman over breakfast in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, in what he says is his first newspaper interview in nine years. Marvin Gorman, has re-emerged, driving a Toyota, doing tent revivals and generally providing a humbler contrast. In a book to be published next month, Hunter Lundy, the attorney who exposed Swaggart's fondness for prostitutes, suggests strongly that the minister was also a pedophile. "We've moved past that."Īvoiding the past may prove impossible. "We don't discuss the past because we don't live in the past," says his son Donnie, 44, a vice president in Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. And he still lives in the same gated mansion. He remains, he says, an "old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher." He still preaches that Jews and Catholics are going to hell, and he still assails - without a hint of irony or compromise - homosexuality, pornography, psychology and, yes, prostitution and hypocrisy. His only public concession to falling popularity is his use of public-access channels (More popular cable outlets largely shun him) to broadcast his message to 250 TV markets at odd hours. But Swaggart still preaches the same message from the same place, his 200-acre complex in Baton Rouge, La. Like Jim Bakker and Oral Roberts, Swaggart, 63, has lost much of his flock and his financial empire, which once enjoyed annual revenues of $150 million. Decorating the stadium-sized, mostly vacant parking lot at the worship center are signs for a shuttle bus that long ago stopped running. Outside, the 100-plus flagpoles that once carried the banners of every country where his sermons were broadcast stand unused. To his left and right, huge curtains block off seats and disguise the fact that his 7,000-seat Family Worship Center on Bluebonnet Road now attracts only 500 to Sunday services. Ten years later, everywhere Swaggart looks, his eyes see the damage caused by his indiscretion in a New Orleans motel room.
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