(Reuters) -Jimmy Swaggart, who was one of America’s most influential televangelists in the 1980s before an affair with a prostitute brought his career crashing down, has died at the age of 90.
Jimmy Swaggart Ministries confirmed his death on Facebook and his family thanked medical staff at Baton Rouge General Medical Center in Louisiana. It did not share details of the cause of death.
In his heyday as a fundamentalist Pentecostal preacher, Swaggart had an estimated global audience of 200 million. Then came the prostitute scandal in 1988. With tears gushing down his cheeks, Swaggart admitted to his congregation that he had sinned – without providing details – and begged forgiveness.
Swaggart, born March 15, 1935, grew up in the rough-and-tumble and racially segregated Louisiana backwater of Ferriday with two cousins who also would become famous – rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley.
As a boy, Swaggart was surrounded by the fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal version of Christianity he would later take to the airwaves. His father, a grocer and a tough disciplinarian, preached himself from time to time and Swaggart was only 9 when he claimed he was first “called” to the ministry.
“You will preach my Gospel all over the world. You will even take it to Africa,” was the command that Swaggart said God gave him.
Swaggart dropped out of school, chopped cotton and hauled gravel for a living. At the age of 17 he married 15-year-old Frances Anderson after a three-month courtship.
He watched as preachers such as Oral Roberts scooped up souls and cash with huge revival meetings in tents.
A tall, muscular man with chiseled features, Swaggart was an imposing figure as he began his own career preaching on street corners and at rural Pentecostal meetings, filled with singing, hand-waving and speaking in tongues.
By 1969 he was successful enough to start “The Camp Hour Meeting,” a radio broadcast, and his star rose higher when he took his sermons to television in 1973.
An arch-conservative who sometimes criticized Catholics and Jews, Swaggart became a force in the early days of the U.S. religious right in the 1980s – a movement seeking to redraw public policy along biblical lines.
He took his preaching to Africa as well as Latin America, becoming a celebrity in unlikely places such as the South African township of Soweto.
The New York Times said Swaggart’s relationship with a prostitute in New Orleans was revealed by Marvin Gorman, a rival preacher who provided incriminating photographs and said Swaggart had unjustly accused him of a series of adulterous affairs.
In February 1988, a weeping Swaggart stood before the congregation at his Baton Rouge Family Worship Center and begged for forgiveness.
Swaggart was defrocked by the Assemblies of God national organization for refusing to accept its punishment of suspension.
In 1991, he was stopped for a traffic violation by police in Indio, California, with a prostitute in his car. He said he would step down from his ministry but changed his mind and told his congregation that “the Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”
Before his downfall, Swaggart frequently lashed out at pornography and behavior he portrayed as sexual immorality. He was heavily criticized in 2004 after saying on his television show that if a gay man ever made a sexual advance on him, “I’m going to kill him and tell God he died” – a comment he later said was a joke.
Swaggart’s influence waned considerably after the scandals. His ministry survived in a much diminished form, but he still appeared on cable television from time to time.
Swaggart and Frances, who stuck with him through his scandals, had one child, Donnie, who took a key role in the ministry.
(Reporting by Bill Trott; additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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