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The Lord instructed him to begin a TV ministry in 1973.īy 1986, his TV shows reached 510 million people in 145 countries.
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God, he says, has spoken repeatedly to him since he was 8. Jimmy Lee Swaggart, born poor near the Mississippi River in Ferriday, La., started preaching on the revival circuit in 1958 with his wife, Frances. "If you look hard enough, you'll find something good about me and say it."Īt least, Swaggart adds, he has the ability to survive. And frankly, I don't want to hear it," he says. "You can find things about me you don't like. But his sermon offers a reply to his critics. Swaggart refused to be interviewed for this article. Marvin Gorman, has re-emerged, driving a Toyota, doing tent revivals and generally posing a humbler contrast. In a book set to be published next month, Hunter Lundy, the attorney who exposed Swaggart's fondness for prostitutes, suggests strongly that the minister was also a pedophile. "We've moved past that."Īvoiding the past might prove impossible. "We don't discuss the past because we don't live in the past," says his son Donnie, 44, a vice president in Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. And he still lives in the same gated mansion. He remains, he says, an "old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher." He still preaches that Jews and Catholics are going to hell, and he still assails - without a hint of irony or compromise - homosexuality, pornography, psychology and, yes, prostitution and hypocrisy. His only public concession to falling popularity is his use of public-access channels (more popular cable outlets largely shun him) to broadcast his message to 250 TV markets at odd hours of the week. But Swaggart still preaches the same message from the same place, his 200-acre complex in Baton Rouge. Like Jim Bakker and Oral Roberts, Swaggart, 63, has lost much of his flock and his financial empire, which once enjoyed annual revenues of $150 million. Decorating the stadium-sized, mostly vacant parking lot at the worship center are signs for a shuttle bus that long ago stopped running. Outside, the 100-plus poles that once carried the flags of every country where his sermons were broadcast stand unused. To his left and right, huge curtains block off seats and disguise the fact that his 7,000-seat Family Worship Center on Bluebonnet Road now attracts only 500 people to Sunday services.
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Ten years later, everywhere Swaggart looks, his eyes see the damage caused by his indiscretion in a New Orleans motel room. The tears resemble those that fell from Swaggart's face in 1988, when the televangelist, caught with a prostitute, told his congregation, "I have sinned, my Lord." "I know we have sinned, but Jesus, please, please help him." "Jesus will heal you because he can heal you," says Swaggart, weeping again. And he lays hands on a partially paralyzed young man. Seven times, he abruptly breaks into tears. "Praise Jesus!" he says, launching a spellbinding two-hour sermon, which he interrupts twice to record 30-second promotional spots for the TV version. Jimmy Swaggart plays a scale on his grand piano and slides off the bench to grab the microphone. `I HAVE SINNED, my Lord.' A decade after he was caught with a prostitute, the televangelist has lost much of his flock and financial empire.īATON ROUGE, La.