The Jimmy Swaggart Scandals

What happened

Jimmy Swaggart (b. 1935) had built, by the mid-1980s, the highest-revenue televangelism operation in the United States. The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast and A Study in the Word programmes were syndicated across approximately 2,000 stations in 145 countries; Jimmy Swaggart Ministries operated a Baton Rouge campus including the Family Worship Center, the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College, and substantial broadcast and publishing infrastructure. Estimated annual revenue at the peak was approximately $142 million (1986).

Swaggart had publicly attacked rival televangelists in 1986 and 1987 — notably Marvin Gorman, an Assemblies of God minister whom Swaggart had reported to the denomination's leadership for an extramarital affair in 1986 (resulting in Gorman's defrocking) and Jim Bakker, whom Swaggart denounced publicly after the PTL disclosures of March 1987 as "a cancer in the body of Christ."

In October 1987, Gorman — having retained a private investigator — produced surveillance photographs of Swaggart with a prostitute, Debra Murphree, at a motel on Airline Highway in suburban New Orleans. The Assemblies of God denominational leadership received the photographs. After several months of internal negotiation, in February 1988 Swaggart was confronted publicly. On 21 February 1988 he delivered the now-famous "I have sinned against You" televised confession at the Family Worship Center, in which he acknowledged unspecified moral failure without naming the conduct.

The Assemblies of God Presbytery imposed a one-year disciplinary suspension from preaching. Swaggart refused to comply with the full term — he returned to the pulpit after three months — and was consequently defrocked by the Assemblies of God in April 1988, severing the denominational relationship he had held throughout his career.

The 1991 disclosure

On 11 October 1991, Swaggart was stopped by a California Highway Patrol officer in Indio, California, after his vehicle was observed driving erratically. The passenger in the vehicle was a prostitute, Rosemary Garcia. The 1991 incident was reported nationally and prompted a second institutional contraction of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries — revenue had already collapsed approximately 80 per cent from the 1986 peak after the 1988 disclosure; the 1991 disclosure terminated most remaining major-network broadcast contracts.

In his subsequent televised message Swaggart addressed his congregation: "The Lord told me it's flat none of your business."

IRS and institutional consequences

Jimmy Swaggart Ministries lost its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in 1988 after the IRS determined that the ministry had operated in part for the personal benefit of Jimmy Swaggart and members of his immediate family. The ministry subsequently restructured under a separate corporate entity, the Family Worship Center, which retained tax-exempt status; Swaggart's personal entity Jimmy Swaggart Ministries paid the tax assessment and continued operations.

Swaggart was named, along with five other prosperity-gospel televangelists, in the 2007–2011 Senate Finance Committee inquiry initiated by Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).

Significance

The Swaggart 1988 disclosure, coming twelve months after the Bakker / PTL disclosure of March 1987, established the late-1980s televangelism scandals as a generational phenomenon rather than an individual case. The combination of the PTL federal fraud conviction (1989), the Swaggart denominational defrocking (1988), and the IRS tax-exempt revocation produced the institutional environment in which the subsequent Grassley Senate investigation became politically possible.

Sources

• Charlotte Observer, Memphis Commercial Appeal, and New Orleans Times-Picayune contemporaneous reporting, February–April 1988.
• Internal Revenue Service determination on Jimmy Swaggart Ministries tax-exempt status, 1988.
• Ann Rowe Seaman, Swaggart: The Unauthorized Biography of an American Evangelist (Continuum, 1999).
• Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Board of Equalization of California, 493 U.S. 378 (1990) — collateral Supreme Court case on California sales-tax application to religious publications.
• Senate Committee on Finance, materials of the Grassley inquiry into six televangelists, 2007–2011.