Jimmy Swaggart, passionate televangelist ousted by scandal, dies at 90

The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died Tuesday. He was 90.

His death was announced by Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, in Baton Rouge. It provided no other details. Swaggart had been placed in intensive care at a hospital after suffering a heart attack June 15, his son, Donnie Swaggart, who is also a preacher, told a prayer service that morning at the family’s ministry.

“Without a miracle,” he was quoted as saying, “his time is short.”

Swaggart’s voice and passion carried him to fame and riches that he could scarcely have dreamed of in his small-town boyhood. At its peak in the mid-1980s, Jimmy Swaggart Worldwide Ministries had a television presence in more than 140 countries and, along with its Bible college, took in up to $500,000 a day from donations and sales of Bible courses, gospel music and merchandise.

In his prime, Swaggart strode the stage like a bear, his voice thundering with emotion, dropping to a near-whisper, then rising again, sometimes to the accompaniment of tears — his own as well as those of his followers — as he spoke of his love for God and his disdain for the devil.

“Satan, you’re in for a whupping!” was a typical Swaggart warmup.

But Satan may have sometimes won a round. In October 1987, Swaggart was photographed entering a New Orleans motel with a woman. In a later television interview, the woman said she and Swaggart had several encounters, describing them as “pornographic” but as not involving intercourse.

Early the next year, the Assemblies of God, the huge Pentecostal organization under whose auspices Swaggart ministered, suspended him from preaching for a year and ordered him to undergo rehabilitation.

Swaggart responded in February 1988 with an extraordinary, tear-gushing mea culpa to some 7,000 followers at his World Faith Center in Baton Rouge. Turning first to his wife, Frances, he said, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.”

As some listeners wept, Swaggart went on: “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain.”

Some in the audience were so moved by the confession that they fell to their knees, praying in tongues, an indication to Pentecostals of possession by the Holy Spirit.

The Assemblies of God defrocked Swaggart in 1988 after he disobeyed its one-year suspension by taking the pulpit again after about three months. He said he regretted parting from the Assemblies but insisted that to refrain from preaching for a year would have ruined his television ministry.

He continued to preach independently. But donations dropped off, and while he still earned enough for him and his family to live comfortably, he never regained the influence he had enjoyed.

Scandal struck again in October 1991, when Swaggart, who was in California on business, was pulled over by police in a red-light section of the city of Indio for driving erratically. In his company was a prostitute. She later said Swaggart had become alarmed on seeing a police vehicle behind him and had tried to hide his pornographic magazines under the seat, causing his car to swerve.

This time, he was less remorseful. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” he told a stunned audience at his Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge. Soon afterward, Donnie Swaggart said his father would seek medical and spiritual help.

Jimmy Lee Swaggart was born in eastern Louisiana, in the small town of Ferriday, on March 15, 1935, to Willie and Minnie Bell (Herron) Swaggart. His father was a grocer, a slap-and-strap disciplinarian and an occasional preacher at an Assemblies of God church. Both parents became evangelicals.

The family was shattered when Jimmy Lee’s baby brother died of pneumonia, and the parents fought often. Swaggart recalled how he had been influenced by his grandmother, who he said had studied the Bible incessantly, and how he loved going to church because his parents didn’t fight there.

As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Lewis.

Country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to Swaggart and Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Tosches wrote.

On Oct. 10, 1952, Jimmy Swaggart married Frances Anderson. He was 17 and she was 15. A year later, their son, Donnie, was born.

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

Decades after the scandals, his hair thinning and going white, Swaggart was still preaching of God’s goodness, Satan’s trickery and man’s frailty.

“God is patient with us,” he said in a televised service at the Family Worship Center in 2014. “Thank God for that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.