US televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose multimillion-dollar ministry and huge audience dwindled after a prostitution scandal, has died at the age of 90.
His death was announced on Tuesday on his public Facebook page. A cause was not immediately given, although he had been in ill health.
The Louisiana native was best known for being a captivating Pentecostal preacher with a massive following before being caught on camera with a sex worker in New Orleans in 1988, one of a string of major TV preachers brought down in the 1980s and 1990s by sex scandals.
He continued preaching for decades, but with a reduced audience.
RM Block
Mr Swaggart encapsulated his downfall in a tearful 1988 sermon in which he wept and apologised but made no reference to his connection to a prostitute.
“I have sinned against you,” he 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 programme including not preaching for a full year.
He 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.
Mr 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, Mr Swaggart said he first heard the call of God at the age of eight. The voice gave him goosebumps and made his hair tingle, he said.
“Everything seemed different after that day in front of the Arcade Theatre,” 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 oilfields until he was 23. He then moved entirely into his ministry: preaching, playing piano and singing gospel songs at Assemblies of God revivals and camp meetings.
He started a radio show and a magazine, and then moved into TV 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 Centre in Baton Rouge, where his sermons moved listeners to speak in tongues and stand up as if possessed by the Holy Spirit.
Mr 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 dollars in 1986.
His Baton Rouge complex still includes a worship centre and broadcasting and recording facilities.
His downfall came in the late 1980s as other prominent preachers faced similar scandals. Mr Swaggart said publicly that his earnings were damaged in 1987 by the sex scandal surrounding rival televangelist Jim Bakker and a former church secretary at Mr Bakker’s PTL ministry organisation.
The following year, Mr Swaggart was photographed at a hotel with Debra Murphree, an admitted prostitute who told reporters 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 Mr Swaggart’s career apparently stemmed from his rivalry with preacher Marvin Gorman, whom Mr Swaggart had accused of sexual misdeeds. Mr Gorman hired the photographer who captured Mr Swaggart and Ms Murphree on film.
Mr Swaggart later paid Mr Gorman $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit over the sexual allegations against Mr Gorman.
More trouble came in 1991 when police in California detained Mr Swaggart with another sex worker. The evangelist was charged with driving on the wrong side of the road and driving an unregistered Jaguar.
His companion, Rosemary Garcia, said he became nervous when he saw the police car and wove when he tried to stuff pornographic magazines under a car seat.
He was later mocked by the late TV comic Phil Hartman, who impersonated him on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
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.
“There’s been no greater example of a good and faithful servant than my father. No ifs, ands and buts about it. A man who lived his life for the cause of Christ,” Donnie Swaggart said in a video message.
His radio station broadcast church services and gospel music to 21 states, and the ministry developed a worldwide audience on the internet.
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,” Mr Swaggart said, to laughter from the congregation. He later apologised.
He made few public appearances outside his church, except 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, Mr Swaggart shared memories at the memorial service for Lewis, his cousin. The pair had released The Boys From Ferriday, a gospel album, earlier that year. – AP
