His fervent denunciations of pornography led some to wonder about his own sexual obsessions even before the hidden side of his private life came to light. The Swaggart Ministries enjoyed a lively revenue stream from the sale of his gospel recordings along with Bibles and religious texts, calendars, and Christmas cards and trinkets. However, he was clearly a pitchman with a large catalogue of merchandise. Swaggart was more careful than some of his rivals in the “electronic church” to document his finances. Swaggart’s fiery speaking style drew comparisons to the populism of Huey Long, but his messages were apocalyptic and appealed to an audience uncomfortable with a rapidly changing society. By 1975, his weekly telecasts were seen nationwide, and in 1980 he added a daily program. In 1962, he began preaching on radio across the South and purchased a small chain of stations. Broadcasting and astute marketing brought him success. His Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge began modestly, but by the 1970s had grown into a model for megachurches with a campus of buildings and more than a thousand congregants. In 1961, after more than half a decade of freelance preaching, Swaggart was ordained as an Assembly of God minister. Swaggart preached the gospel of biblical literalism according to his own interpretation. He moved easily between pulpit and piano and put on a rollicking, hand-clapping show as he exhorted sinners and excoriated Jews and Catholics, Hollywood and popular music, science and secularism. He was an unapologetic and unreconstructed advocate of “old-time religion” and performed in an emotionally fervid style strongly reminiscent of Billy Sunday and the tent revival meetings of an earlier age. Unlike most of the televangelists who became his colleagues and rivals in the 1970s and 1980s, Swaggart seldom sugarcoated his message or tailored his presentation to the expectations of late twentieth-century America. Swaggart embarked on a full-time ministry in rural Louisiana, often preaching from the back of a flatbed trailer. In 1952, he married Frances Anderson, who became his helpmate.
By age nine, he claimed to have spoken in tongues, and within a few years, when Willie Leon established his own church in Ferriday, Swaggart became the pianist. Pentecostalism dominated Swaggart’s life from early on. Swaggart would become a successful gospel singer, earning several gold records, but resolutely disdained secular music. Minnie Belle sang in the choir, and Swaggart’s cousins included rock and country stars Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley.
Music is crucial in the highly emotional services of Pentecostals, and Swaggart’s family was rife with talent. A Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God measures the faith of adherents by their possession of the Holy Spirit, whose manifestations include speaking in tongues. His father, Willie Leon “Son” Swaggart, was a fiddle player who worked for a bootlegger before being drawn with his wife, Minnie Belle Herron, to the Assemblies of God. Swaggart’s career has been in eclipse ever since.īorn in Ferriday, Louisiana, Swaggart grew up poor in a community without electricity and paved roads. Defrocked by his denomination, the Assemblies of God, he continued as a nondenominational preacher but was implicated in another sex scandal in 1991.
Swaggart’s reputation declined after a sexual scandal broke in 1988. With his access to Ronald Reagan’s White House and the international reach of the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, he was a leading figure in the political emergence of the Christian Right. At Swaggart’s peak in 1987, when he was preaching from the pulpit at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, Arbitron estimated his weekly U.S. audience at 2.1 million viewers. Swaggart is pictured here during one of his televised sermons in the 1980s.Ĭalled the “King of Honky Tonk Heaven” by Newsweek in 1982, Jimmy Swaggart was America’s most popular televangelist in the 1980s. Jimmy Swaggart is a Pentecostal pastor based in Baton Rouge. Jimmy Swaggart Called the "King of Honky Tonk Heaven" by Newsweek in 1982, Ferriday's Jimmy Swaggart was America's most popular televangelist in the 1980s.
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