Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who became a household name amassing an enormous following and multimillion-dollar ministry only to be undone by revelations of paying sex workers, has died. He was 90.
Swaggart died decades after his once vast audience dwindled and his name became a punchline on late-night television. His death was announced on Tuesday on his public Facebook page. A cause was not immediately given, although 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 sex worker 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 sex worker.
“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.
Swaggart’s messages stirred thousands of congregants and millions of TV viewers, making him a household name by the late 1980s. Contributors built Jimmy Swaggart Ministries into a business that made an estimated $142m in 1986.
His Baton Rouge, Louisiana, complex still includes a worship center and broadcasting and recording facilities.
Swaggart said publicly that his earnings were hurt in 1987 by the sex scandal surrounding rival televangelist Jim Bakker and a former church secretary at Bakker’s PTL ministry organization.
