1 July 2025: The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.
Mr. Swaggart’s voice and passion carried him to fame and riches that he could scarcely have dreamed of in his small-town boyhood. At its peak in the mid-1980s, Jimmy Swaggart Worldwide Ministries had a television presence in more than 140 countries and, along with its Bible college, took in up to half a million dollars a day from donations and sales of Bible courses, gospel music and merchandise.In his prime, Mr. Swaggart strode the stage like a bear, his voice thundering with emotion, dropping to a near-whisper, then rising again, sometimes to the accompaniment of tears — his own as well as those of his followers — as he spoke of his love for God and his disdain for the Devil. “Satan, you’re in for a whupping!” was a typical Swaggart warm-up. But Satan may have sometimes won a round. In October 1987, Mr. Swaggart was photographed entering a hot-sheet New Orleans motel with a woman. In a later television interview, the woman said that she and Mr. Swaggart had several encounters, describing them as “pornographic” but as not involving intercourse. Early the next year, the Assemblies of God, the huge Pentecostal organization under whose auspices Mr. Swaggart ministered, suspended him from preaching for a year and ordered him to undergo rehabilitation. Mr. Swaggart responded in February 1988 with an extraordinary, tear-gushing mea culpa to some 7,000 followers at his World Faith Center in Baton Rouge. Turning first to his wife, Frances, he said, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.” As some listeners wept, Mr. Swaggart went on: “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain.”
He continued to preach independently. But donations dropped off, and while he still earned enough for him and his family to live very comfortably, he never regained the influence he had enjoyed. Scandal struck again in October 1991, when Mr. Swaggart, who was in California on business, was pulled over by the police in a red-light section of the city of Indio for driving erratically. In his company was a prostitute. She later said that Mr. Swaggart had become alarmed on seeing a police vehicle behind him and had tried to hide his pornographic magazines under the seat, causing his car to swerve. This time, he was less remorseful. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” he told a stunned audience at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge. Soon afterward, Donnie Swaggart said his father would seek medical and spiritual help.
And he could be a hypnotic speaker. “I don’t know of anyone in America, religious or secular, who can hold a crowd better,” William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who has studied the evangelical movement, told The New York Times in 1988. Mr. Martin said a friend who was a lawyer had told him, “I don’t believe a word he says, but I don’t know anyone in the world who’s better with a closing argument.”
Jimmy Lee Swaggart was born in eastern Louisiana, in the small town of Ferriday, on March 15, 1935, to Willie and Minnie Bell (Herron) Swaggart. His father was a grocer, a slap-and-strap disciplinarian and an occasional preacher at the local Assemblies of God church. Both parents became evangelicals. The family was shattered when Jimmy Lee’s baby brother died of pneumonia, and the parents fought often. Mr. Swaggart recalled how he had been influenced by his grandmother, who he said had studied the Bible incessantly, and how he loved going to church because his parents didn’t fight there.
As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis. The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.
On Oct. 10, 1952, Jimmy Swaggart married Frances Anderson. He was 17 and she was 15. A year later, their son, Donnie, was born. Convinced that God wanted him to preach, Mr. Swaggart traveled in a rundown car throughout rural Louisiana and later across the South, holding revival meetings. In his 1977 autobiography, “To Cross a River,” Mr. Swaggart wrote of staying in pastors’ homes and church basements. Mr. Swaggart’s wife helped run day-to-day operations of the family’s ministry, where Donnie Swaggart has followed in his father’s footsteps as a preacher. Mr. Swaggart is also survived by several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Decades after the scandals, his hair thinning and going white, Mr. Swaggart was still preaching of God’s goodness, Satan’s trickery and man’s frailty. “God is patient with us,” he said in a televised service at the Family Worship Center in 2014. “Thank God for that.”
Jimmy Swaggart was America's greatest preacher, an unmatched orator. While Billy Graham was dull as dishwasher, with all the charisma of a clam, Swaggart was a natural born story teller. Additionally he was an outstanding musician, a great keyboardist and a soul-stirring vocalist.
Of course, he will mostly be remembered for his scandalous fall. Caught twice with sex workers, he was branded a phony and a hypocrite. There is some merit to the charge of hypocrisy, as Swaggart had pointed his finger at Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker in the messy televangelism wars of the mid-to-late 1980s. But he was no phony. Nobody preached the gospel of Jesus better or with more conviction. If he wasn't anointed to preach the gospel, he was the greatest religious counterfeit of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Swaggart's fall highlights what remains the greatest failure of contemporary American Christianity: sinners are no longer welcome in church.
Somehow, the church founded by the Friend to sinners has become a habitat of self-righteous pew warmers who act as if Jesus sprinkles them with goody-two-shoes fairy dust as soon as they receive the faith of Christ. Pew warmers get *saved,* then immediately hide their sin, refusing to speak openly of their lusts, greed, hatreds, jealousies, etc. They know fingers will point, *discipline committees* will be formed if their sins are discovered.
What if Jimmy Swaggart could have taken to the pulpit and said to his congregation: I am fighting temptation, I have adulterous desires, I want to wallow in fornication. Pray for me, pray the Lord give me the strength to resist.
Nobody feels secure enough in contemporary churchianity to reveal their true ugly self. Their sin festers inside. Eventually they get sloppy in their deceits and get caught, perhaps they want to be caught, worn down by the charade, and then they are charged as a hypocrite and a phony. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. Phony? No. How can a sinner be called phony when they get caught sinning?
American Christians need to stop acting like they are not sinners. They are sinners covered by the Blood of the Lamb. Sinners worthy of eternal destruction, completely worthless without the Blood of the Lamb.
American Christianity needs to acknowledge sin, and once again become a friend to sinners. The greatest failing of Jimmy Swaggart was not his motel room perversions, but his reluctance, even after being caught with his pants down, to make his church a place where sinners could unburden their souls.
But let's not end the Jimmy Swaggart story there. Let's end it with him, even at age 89, at his best:
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