Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who became a household name amassing an enormous following and multimillion-dollar ministry only to be undone by his penchant for prostitutes, has died.
Swaggart died decades after his once vast audience dwindled and his name became a punchline on late night television. His death was announced Tuesday on his public Facebook page. A cause wasn’t immediately given, though at 90 he had been in poor health.
The Louisiana native was best known for being a captivating Pentecostal preacher with a massive following before being caught on camera with a prostitute in New Orleans in 1988, one of a string of successful TV preachers brought down in the 1980s and ’90s by sex scandals. He continued preaching for decades, but with a reduced audience.
Swaggart encapsulated his downfall in a tearful 1988 sermon, in which he wept and apologized but made no reference to his connection to a prostitute.
“I have sinned against you,” Swaggart told parishioners nationwide. “I beg you to forgive me.” He announced his resignation from the Assemblies of God later that year, shortly after the church said it was defrocking him for rejecting punishment it had ordered for “moral failure.”
The church had wanted him to undergo a two-year rehabilitation program, including not preaching for a full year. Swaggart said at the time that he knew dismissal was inevitable but insisted he had no choice but to separate from the church to save his ministry and Bible college.
From poverty and oil fields to a household name, Swaggart grew up poor, the son of a preacher, in a music-rich family. He excelled at piano and gospel music, playing and singing with talented cousins who took different paths: rock-‘n’-roller Jerry Lee Lewis and country singer Mickey Gilley.
In his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana, Swaggart said he first heard the call of God at age 8. The voice gave him goose bumps and made his hair tingle, he said.
“Everything seemed different after that day in front of the Arcade Theater,” he said in a 1985 interview with the Jacksonville Journal-Courier in Illinois. “I felt better inside. Almost like taking a bath.”
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