Infamous televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s death isn’t the end… how scandal-ridden ‘man of God’ paved the way for a sinister new breed of celebrity preachers

When it came to preaching the Word of the Lord, fire-and-brimstone televangelist Jimmy Swaggart didn’t care who he offended in his mission to persuade millions to let Jesus into their life.

‘Don’t try to bargain with Jesus – he’s a Jew,’ he roared from his Louisiana pulpit. Catholicism was a ‘false cult,’ and Jews had brought the Holocaust on themselves by rejecting Christ.

He reportedly called the Prophet Muhammad a ‘sex deviant’ and a ‘pervert’ and warned any gay man who ‘looks at me like that’ that he’d kill them.

Swaggart died aged 90 on Tuesday after having a heart attack at his Baton Rouge home two weeks earlier.

His official Facebook page announced that ‘Brother Swaggart has finished his earthly race and entered into the presence of His Savior, Jesus Christ.’

‘Satan,’ he liked to say at the start of his sermons, ‘you’re in for a whupping.’

But he reserved his most sustained contempt and his fiercest whuppings for fellow men of God who had transgressed with women.

When, in 1987, rival televangelist star Jim Bakker was revealed to have indulged in ‘unnatural sex’ with a 21-year-old church secretary whom he had then attempted to pay off, Swaggart was one of his chief accusers.

Swaggart died aged 90 on Tuesday after having a heart attack at his Baton Rouge home two weeks earlier.

When it came to preaching the Word of the Lord, the fire-and-brimstone televangelist Swaggart (pictured in 1987) didn’t care who he offended in his mission to persuade millions to let Jesus into their life.

‘Satan,’ he liked to say at the start of his sermons, ‘you’re in for a whupping.’

He later denounced Bakker on Larry King Live as ‘a cancer’ on ‘the body of Christ’ that had to be excised, adding: ‘It’s painful, a surgical procedure, but it was necessary.’

The supremely sanctimonious Swaggart had a year earlier played a large role in the defrocking of another fellow pastor, Marvin Gorman, who preached with him at the Assemblies of God, (a huge, international, US-based Pentecostal Christian denomination).

Visiting the married Gorman at his bayou mansion, Swaggart point blank accused him of committing adultery with several women.

Swaggart claimed he was doing his brother preacher a kindness, six weeks later sending him a letter which read: ‘We want you to know we love you and are continuing to pray for you.’

Gorman, who went bankrupt and was stripped of his religious obligations, eventually admitted to having a single tryst with a church member. ‘It was an act of attempted intercourse, but I was overcome with guilt,’ he said.

As with Bakker, (who would later serve prison time for an unrelated fraud), critics accused Swaggart of cynically ruining his competitors so he could take over their huge congregations.

But Swaggart insisted that his righteous indignation was entirely justified as his own morality was spotless. He’d only kissed one woman in his life and that was his wife, he said.

And so, one can only imagine the disappointment of his congregation, who poured $150 million a year into his ministry, when Swaggart went on TV in 1988 and admitted – tears trickling down his face – that he had ‘sinned.’

Sinned against God and against his wife, he said solemnly, although most of his flock had already seen the evidence of the sinning, which had chiefly been done with a prostitute with whom he’d been photographed at a seedy love motel in Metairie just outside New Orleans.

Swaggart’s sins might never have been exposed if he hadn’t pursued pastor Gorman for the alleged weaknesses of his flesh.

Gorman sought revenge and, sensing that Swaggart had his own skeletons, hired a private detective to see what he could dig up.

In October 1987, the detective rang to say Swaggart was in a motel room with a sex worker, adding that he’d thoughtfully let the tires down on the Reverend’s car, so Gorman had time to catch his nemesis in flagrante delicto.

Instead, Gorman arrived at the motel – which carried a sign at the entrance saying ‘positively no refunds after 15 minutes’ – to find Swaggart on his knees in the parking lot, desperately trying to fix the spare wheel on his vehicle so he could get away.

Swaggart’s sins might never have been exposed if he hadn’t pursued pastor Gorman for the alleged weaknesses of his flesh. (Pictured: Swaggart in 1987).

Sex worker Debra Murphree (pictured) confirmed his claim that they did not have sex, saying she’d instead lain on the bed posing in various pornographic positions that had apparently fascinated Swaggart since he was a child.

The Sunday after his confession to the elders, Swaggart stood before his own congregation at his main church, the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, which could accommodate 7,000 worshippers, and, tearfully grasping a Bible, he told them how he had erred with Murphree.

Swaggart pleaded for mercy and tried to bribe Gorman with positions in his organization, eventually promising to confess to his elders at the Assemblies of God.

He never did so, and four months later Gorman went to them himself at their Missouri headquarters. He arrived armed with unedifying photos of Swaggart, dressed in a tracksuit and baseball cap, entering a room below a neon sign that read: ‘Adult movies, waterbed rent by the hour.’

When the elders demanded to see him, Swaggart flew in on his private plane and his only words to waiting reporters were ‘Praise the Lord.’

He admitted his sins to his elders in private, although the prostitute, Debra Murphree, a 28-year-old mother-of-three, was not so discrete.

She confirmed his claim that they did not have sex, saying she’d instead lain on the bed posing in various pornographic positions that had apparently fascinated Swaggart since he was a child.

Debra said he’d hired her several times, explaining: ‘He just liked to watch naked women.’

She went on: ‘To me, I think he’s kind of perverted talking about some of the things that we talked about in the rooms. You know, I wouldn’t want him around my children.’

The Sunday after his confession to the elders, Swaggart stood before his own congregation at his main church, the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, which could accommodate 7,000 worshippers, and, tearfully grasping a Bible, he told them how he had erred with Murphree.

‘I have sinned against You, my Lord. And I would ask that Your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain, until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore,’ he said in the now infamous speech.

Turning to his wife, Frances, who was near him, he told her: ‘I have sinned against you and I beg your forgiveness.’

The US media – at least the part that wasn’t in thrall to the Bible Belt – had a field day. Television stations endlessly replayed clips of Swaggart denouncing Jim Bakker and insisting that the only kisses he’d ever exchanged with a woman had been with his wife.

His church elders suspended him from his ministry for three months, but – unfortunately for the penitent preacher – other women spoke out to say he’d also picked them up from the same place where he’d found Debra Murphree.

One said she’d recognized the evangelist when he pulled up in an expensive car, but he denied he was Swaggart and swiftly drove away.

Swaggart was ultimately defrocked and his ministerial license revoked after he defied an extended ban by church officials and started preaching again.

He successfully set up his own ministry but, one October night in 1991, was stopped by police in Indio, California, for driving a white Jaguar on the wrong side of the road. He had a sex worker named Rosemary Garcia in the passenger seat.

‘He asked me for sex. I mean, that’s why he stopped me. That’s what I do. I’m a prostitute,’ she later explained to journalists.

She claimed Swaggart had been unnerved by seeing a police car behind him and had tried to hide his pornographic magazines under the seat, causing his Jaguar to swerve on to the wrong side of the road.

Swaggart had by now given up pretending to be remorseful and this time told his new congregation: ‘The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.’

Swaggart was ultimately defrocked and his ministerial license revoked after he defied an extended ban by church officials and started preaching again.

Swaggart gained notoriety as a televangelist and once met President Ronald Reagan.

His ignominious fall from grace was certainly humiliating, taken as proof by his critics that this controversial brand of Christian mission was a shameless money grab practiced by people who were showmen first and pastors second.

Reportedly mindful of Christ’s teachings about how a sinner could be forgiven ‘seventy times seven,’ he didn’t seem to care anymore how many scandals he notched up.

In 1994 he was stopped by police trying to pick up another prostitute, this time in Baton Rouge. The press once again flooded the scene, and 25-year-old Peggy Lipton obligingly came up with the goods.

‘He’s very kinky. He likes perverted things done to him,’ she told stunned journalists. ‘He brings vegetables and other things with him in a shopping bag.’

Swaggart had a novel explanation, telling police that he was ‘looking for parishioners’ and adding: ‘I’m seeking to save souls.’

He was saving souls from an early age. Born in 1935 to a disciplinarian sharecropper father in the small town of Ferriday, Louisiana, Swaggart’s cousin was the rock ‘n’ roll star Jerry Lee Lewis.

In 1943, when he was eight, he told his mother a shaft of light had descended upon him, and he’d started ‘speaking in tongues.’ He said he loved going to church because his parents didn’t fight there.

After dropping out of school, he married 15-year-old Frances Anderson when he was 17 – although he was trumped by Lewis who married their 13-year-old cousin. A year after marrying, Swaggart and Frances had a son, Don.

They lived in a trailer, and he worked as an oil company mechanic in Ferriday while also gaining experience as a wandering preacher.

As his reputation grew, his ‘revival meetings’ filled stadiums and arenas.

He founded his Family Worship Center in the late 1960s and began his television ministry in 1975. Before long, his message was reaching many millions.

In 1979, he had a weekly radio program and four years later he bought a bankrupt TV station.

By the mid-1980s, Swaggart’s daily TV show, ‘A Study in the Word,’ was not only aired in all 50 states, but dubbed into 15 foreign languages for overseas broadcasts.

He traveled the world in a personal Gulf Stream jet and was able to spend $20 million building a state-of-art production facility in Baton Rouge in 1983.

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. Swaggart is also survived by several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Sadly, for Swaggart and his scandal-plagued ministry – which almost miraculously still survives today – memories of his godliness were long ago replaced in the public mind by less saintly recollections of his serial encounters with sex workers.

His ignominious fall from grace was certainly humiliating, taken as proof by his critics that this controversial brand of Christian mission was a shameless money grab practiced by people who were showmen first and pastors second.

Astonishingly, for all the notoriety the televangelists earned, the business of monetizing Christianity remains in rude health to this day.

Nowadays it’s megachurches, (roughly defined as churches with at least 2,000-strong congregations) which operate through social media rather than TV and target celebrity recruits, that are drawing accusations of having too strong a profit motive.

And, in the grand tradition of the televangelists, these pastors have their sexual foibles, too.

Astonishingly, for all the notoriety the televangelists earned, the business of monetizing Christianity remains in rude health to this day. (Pictured: Swaggart in 1988).

In 2022, Hillsong’s global leader, Brian Houston (pictured), with a reported net worth of $10 million, stepped down following allegations of inappropriate behavior with two women.

In 2020, head pastor in New York, Carl Lentz (pictured left), who was Justin Bieber’s (pictured right) spiritual mentor, came clean about his own history of adultery.

The Australian-based Hillsong megachurch, which courted young people and once boasted Justin and Hailey Bieber, Selena Gomez, and Kendall and Kylie Jenner as congregants, was recently beset by scandals over abuse and corruption.

In 2022, its global leader, Brian Houston, with a reported net worth of $10 million, stepped down following allegations of inappropriate behavior with two women.

At the time the church’s global revenue was reported to be approximately $100million.

Undeterred, Houston and his wife Bobbie have since launched a new online ministry ‘Jesus Followers.’

Not that he was the first Hillsong minister to be mired in scandal.

In 2020, head pastor in New York, Carl Lentz, who was Bieber’s spiritual mentor, came clean about his own history of adultery.

He was forced to leave after it emerged that he had been cheating on his wife, Laura, with fashion designer, Ranin Karim, as well as the family nanny, fellow church member, Leona Kimes.

All of which perhaps just goes to prove the truth of a principle that Swaggart personified; the more pious the Man of God, the more he has to hide.