Jimmy Swaggart & Brash USA Christianity

Pentecostal evangelist Jimmy Swaggart who just died age 90 is not recognizable to persons under age 50. But he was a leading televangelist of the 1980s at the peak of televangelism’s power. His global audience included hundreds of millions. Like a meteor, he brilliantly streaked across the sky until he crashed in scandal. But his fame, even if aborted, illustrated the rise of global Pentecostalism and the rumbling energy of American Christianity.

Swaggart was described by CBS anchor Dan Rather as the country’s greatest speaker. He strode, marched, kicked and wept his way across the stage, Bible, and microphone in hand. His hair was melon blonde, and his voice was rich and emotive. Like his celebrity cousins, rock and roller Jerry Lee Lewis and country music star Mickey Gilley, Swaggart sang and played the piano beautifully. He attained the largest weekly Christian television audience by getting onto state broadcasting channels in even Muslim and communist countries. Networks, even if hostile to Christianity, apparently were mesmerized by his talents. And as communism crumbled, he offered a dazzling alternative, with electric preaching, music, and altar calls.

USA televangelism began to implode with the predictable fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker in 1987, with the revelation that Jim had paid off a woman with whom he had trysted, amid a web of financial and sexual misconduct. Their PTL Club, far more garish than Swaggart’s broadcast, and including an amusement park resort in North Carolina, had also reached millions, extolling the prosperity Gospel, with lavish clothing and thick makeup, boasting of riches as signs of divine blessing. Swaggart had long condemned the Bakkers for their theological aberrations and grandiose self-indulgence.

Swaggart styled himself as a truth teller. He challenged theological heterodoxy among fellow Pentecostals, especially its propensity to lapse into therapeutic techniques, while also aiming his fire ecumenically. Catholics were rife with idolatry. John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination had led millions to hell. He condemned Presbyterian broadcaster James Kennedy, who believed the stars were providential instruments, for dabbling in astrology and the occult. Baptists wrongly extolled once saved, always saved. Baptizers of babies were unbiblical. Churches that failed to embrace the Holy Spirit’s gifts, such as speaking in tongues, were dead. He bemoaned churches that resembled funeral homes. A church attuned to the Holy Spirit meant shouting, arms in the air, tears, kneeling at the altar, and sometimes divine healings. He lamented Christian talk show hosts, who had replaced old fashioned preachers.

Arising from poverty and refusing music deals that would have easily enriched him like his famous musician cousins, Swaggart built his Louisiana church and broadcasting network into an empire of many tens of millions of dollars. His global reach was, his supporters surmised, God’s last great harvest before the Second Coming. Swaggart, unlike the Bakkers and others, was not smarmy but boldly masculine, like a preacher of old.

Not frequently political, Swaggart aligned with the rising Religious Right of the 1980s. Liberalism was “first cousin of communism.” He condemned abortion and homosexuality. The Soviet Union, led by “war lords,” was the “charnel house of the damned.” He was pro-Israel but insisted eternal salvation was only through Christ. He befriended Republican politicians, meeting Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and with overseas leaders. His visit with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom Pentecostals largely supported, was friendly, prompting Swaggart to write a supportive column. Swaggart’s ministry funded hunger relief and schools throughout the Third World.

Swaggart was a Dispensationalist and believed in the End Times. But he was also an optimist. Pro-abortion laws in America would end. Communism would fall. The next generation belonged to Jesus Christ. God would postpone judgement if nations turned to Him.

In 1988, fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, whose presidential ambitions Swaggart had condemned, believing preachers should not become politicians, flew in his private plane to visit Swaggart. Robertson persuaded Swaggart that he was a Christian businessman, not a cleric, therefore winning Swaggart’s support. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, which included Swaggart, Robertson and the Bakkers, was a growing segment of the Religious Right.

Although not as conspicuous as the Bakkers in his consumption, Swaggart and his wife Frances, who married as teenagers, had a mansion and lived very well in Baton Rouge. He explained that he relied on the profits from his millions of dollars in music sales, not directly from his ministry. Frances, always carefully coiffed and articulate if not as warm as her husband, often spoke during Swaggart’s broadcasts.

Swaggart’s empire, with receipts of over $150 million annually, fell suddenly in 1989 when he was found with a prostitute in a Baton Rouge motel, caught by a rival preacher whose adultery Swaggart had challenged. Swaggart’s denomination, the Assemblies of God, put him on a disciplinary probation, which he initially accepted, admitting to decades of sexual struggles, but later rejected when it was prolonged. Instead, he effusively and tearfully on television admitted he had sinned, and then he resumed his ministry. But his church emptied, the dollars shrank, the television contracts ended. He was again discovered with a prostitute in 1991, after which he offered no public apologies. He was still doing the Lord’s work. Swaggart embodied the growing rejection of denominations by increasingly individualistic American Christians. Before the internet, there was television ministry, which made denominations, and even physical church, seem inconsequential to many.

Not easily deterred, Swaggart continued his ministry until his final days, still preaching and singing in his ninth decade, with his son and grandson taking the lead. Swaggart and his wife sat on the stage supportively as they preached. He was the consummate religious entrepreneur, always seeking a new audience, never failing to entertain. As a young man, in high school and college, I personally enjoyed Swaggart, whose brashness and flash contrasted with the often milquetoast Mainline Protestantism to which I was accustomed. But his ministry was built on the charisma of one man, whose character was flawed.

Swaggart arose out of the bayous and humidity of Louisiana, electrified by Pentecostalism, blessed by enormous musical and oratorical gifts, possessed of persuasive powers and a businessman’s savvy. He was too large to submit to the authority of the others, believing he was God’s instrument, making his fall all but certain. But he exemplified the audacity of American Christianity, which never stands still, stumbling, but always focused on tomorrow.