Jimmy Swaggart, who shouted his sins after prostitute visit has died

This article was last updated on July 3, 2025

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Jimmy Swaggart, who shouted his sins after prostitute visit has died

The American TV dominee Jimmy Swaggart died last Tuesday at the age of 90. As a successful preacher, Swaggart built up a media empire, but lost a lot of credibility through sex scandals. In tears he confessed his sins towards God, his wife, the church and the American people.

As the son of a pastor, Jimmy Swaggart was born in a poor family in Louisiana. At a young age he made a name for himself within the Pentecostal movement, initially behind a pick-up truck, later on the radio and eventually via television, which came on the rise as an evangelization channel in the 70s.

The style of Swaggart was very suitable for the medium: he liked to play self -written inspiring songs on the piano, and then move back and forth over the altar as a tiger, uplifting the believers with hand gestures and rhetorical playing. A little show was in the family: he was a full cousin of rock ‘n’ roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis.

It all didn’t hurt him. He gained 20 million members for his cable TV channel and his monthly magazine The Evangelist reached 800,000 subscribers. In several countries, his organization managed to get a foothold.

Swaggart had a mega church built in Baton Rouge for thousands of believers, with a corresponding Bible College. Through his mail order company, people could buy Christian as T-shirts with religious texts, Bibles or a replica of Jesus’ Doornenkrans.

Swaggart preached an orthodox form of Protestantism. He rejected the Catholic Church as “a false religion”, according to him, Jews had called Millennia to “reject himself” about himself “by rejecting Jesus and he threatened with violence against homosexuals, followed by applause from his congregation. “If you have a problem with what I say, you talk to my boss.”

He also ran from leather against the moral decline of the US in his eyes, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, freer sexual morality and an image culture that was outright pornogration for him. “This is a gross, wild, rotten, malignant, wicked, obscene era,” he believed in 1988. According to him, a ban on sex before or next to marriage would solve it all.

It was remarkable that he did not reclaim to also read the Levites colleagues. When TV-dominee Jim Baker had to go through the dust because of an extra-marital affair, he called him “a cancer tumor to be cut out of the church”. About the practices of Evangelist Oral Robert, Swaggart said that he “ashamed of what is going on in the world of religious TV”.

Prostitute visit

Shortly thereafter, however, Swaggart had to do a fine himself. After a fight with another pastor, a private detective photos managed to take him when he left a hotel room with a prostitute. The woman said that he had her pose naked several times to get his convenience.

Without going into detail, Swaggart gave a repentant Mea Culpa in his church and asked for forgiveness. “I have sinned against you, my Lord. I ask that your loved one washes and cleans every stain,” he said with thick tears and vibrating lower lip, followed by a forgiving embrace of his wife.

It became a famous image from the 80s, symbol for the hypocritical sex preachers who could not adhere to their own regulations. With the satirical Jesus he knows me, Genesis rubbed me extra salt in the wounds for televangelists who focused too much on worldly: “Do what I say, not the way I do”.

Crocodile tears

Debra Murphree, the woman with whom Swaggart was caught, saw in any case Only crocodile tears. “Those are not real tears. He was reading everyone the lesson while he just did it himself.” She added that the faith billionaire was only critical: the man who had imagined as Billy initially only offered her a ten -piece for her services.

Swaggarts image suffered from the confession, but he just kept preaching. Even after he was caught in the company of a prostitute again in 1991: the police held him while he drove swinging in an unregistered Jaguar.

This time no public confessional followed. Against Media he took the incident with: “The Lord told me that it is not about you at all”.