American Pentecostal televangelist who became the most popular hellfire preacher of the 1980s. He died on July 1st 2025, aged 90.
Swaggart grew up in Ferriday, Louisiana. His father was a part-time preacher in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, as well as a part-time grocer, trapper and bootlegger. He felt the call of the Holy Spirit at the age of eight, outside the Arcade Theatre in Ferriday. He was a first cousin of the rock 'n' roll star Jerry Lee Lewis.
Swaggart began preaching from the street and from flatbed trucks, criss-crossing the American South in an ancient Plymouth in the 1950s and making perhaps $30 a week. At the peak of his ministry in 1986 he was on more than 3,000 American local TV stations and transmitted to 140 countries. Income from donations and merchandise reached $500,000 a day. Every Sunday 7,500 people packed his Family Worship Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and 100,000-seater stadiums were filled to capacity on tour.
Swaggart became a billionaire. His possessions included two Lincoln Town Cars, a private jet, an estate of 200 acres and a plantation-style house of 9,000 square feet, along with a gold Rolex encrusted with diamonds and a Jacuzzi with solid gold taps in the shape of swans.
In the late 1980s Swaggart was found to have been visiting a woman in a motel along Airline Highway outside New Orleans. A rival preacher employed a private detective to photograph him. In February 1988 he made a tearful televised confession before his congregation. In 1991 he was caught in a car with a prostitute in California. He was suspended from the Assemblies of God and forbidden to preach, though he soon defied that order. Donations fell away, his ministry shrank and his private jet had to be sold. He went on preaching independently, on far fewer channels, until the end of his life.
The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.