Jimmy Swaggart – lying adulterer who sinned and cast ‘the first stone’

Jimmy Swaggart, a holier-than-thou television evangelist, was brought down by a sex scandal and gave a much-mocked tearful apology. He has died in the US, aged 90.

Jimmy Swaggart preaching in Los Angeles in 1987. Picture: Mark Avery/AP

When Jimmy Swaggart, a fire-and-brimstone American televangelist, denounced Marvin Gorman, his fellow pastor at the Assemblies of God, for adultery in 1986, he forgot Christ’s words in John’s Gospel: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

In October the following year, Gorman received a call from a private detective he had hired to follow Swaggart.

His nemesis was with a prostitute in a seedy motel room on the outskirts of New Orleans and the gumshoe had let down Swaggart’s car tyres to allow Gorman time to come over.

Gorman took his photographs to the Assemblies of God elders. They showed Swaggart, dressed in a tracksuit and baseball cap, entering a room below a sign: “Adult movies, waterbed – rent by the hour.” Summoned to meet the elders, Swaggart arrived in his private aircraft, his only words to reporters being: “Praise the Lord.”

Behind closed doors he admitted almost everything. Debra Murphree, a mother of three, confirmed his claim that they did not have sex. Instead, she described posing in lewd positions reminiscent of the pornography that had fascinated Swaggart since childhood.

“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,” she said.

In a world of holier-than-thou evangelists, Swaggart was the holiest, an implacable scourge of ungodliness and heresy. Deviation meant damnation; sin had to be rooted out before it could spread. Swaggart prophesied eternal damnation for the US congress, the Senate and the Supreme Court for condoning abortion; Catholics were bound by “superstition … heathenism … emptiness”; and no soul would enter the pearly gates “unless they are born of the blood of Jesus Christ”.

Swaggart, who has died aged 90 in Louisiana, the US state where he was born, was a formidable spectacle, roaring and ranting with spittle frothing from his mouth as he declaimed the Gospel in a rough bayou bark.

He described himself as “an old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher”. The thought of Satan’s pervasive evil caused him to perform an involuntary jig across the stage, appearing on the brink of ecstasy, the Elvis of the charlatans. Claiming to save souls was lucrative work, bringing in millions of dollars a year from the faithful, many of whom tithed their income.

The Sunday after his confession to the elders, Swaggart stood before his own congregation, Bible held aloft, tears rolling down his cheeks, and confessed his involvement with Murphree. Meanwhile, TV stations gleefully replayed clips of Swaggart denouncing Jim Bakker, another preacher whom Swaggart had brought down over a tryst with a 21-year-old church secretary, and boasting: “The only woman I have ever kissed is my wife.”

He was suspended from his ministry for three months, but then other women came forward to say that he had picked them up along the same sleazy strip.

One said she recognised him when he rolled up in his expensive car and wound down the window, though he had denied it was him, pressed the electronic window switch and glided away.

Church authorities extended his ban, but he defied them and returned to the pulpit after the original three months. He was defrocked and his ministerial licence revoked.

Swaggart set up his own ministry, once again deploying his remarkable powers of oratory to persuade the masses to accept Jesus into their lives and part with their dollars. However, his demons returned and one October night in 1991 he was spotted by police in Indio, California, driving a white Jaguar on the wrong side of the road. With him was Rosemary Garcia, another sex worker.

In 1994 he was stopped by police picking up yet another sex worker. Peggy Lipton, a 25-year-old street walker, said: “He’s very kinky. He likes perverted things done to him. He brings vegetables and other things with him in a shopping bag.”

Questioned by police, Swaggart insisted that he was “looking for parishioners”, adding: “I’m seeking to save souls.”

He was a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, the Great Balls of Fire singer. Jimmy Lee was almost as good a pianist. The pair were inseparable. Aged 17, Swaggart married 15-year-old Frances Anderson, only to be outdone in the child-bride stakes by Lewis, who married their 13-year-old cousin.

By 1979 Swaggart had a weekly radio program. Four years later he bought a bankrupt television station and by 1987 his rants were being seen in 146 countries.

Jimmy Lee Swaggart,TV evangelist. Born Ferriday, Louisiana, US, March 15, 1935; died Baton Rouge, Louisiana, July 1, aged 90.

The Times