University of Virginia Library

Jimmy Swaggert

Jimmy Swaggart, cousin of rock musician Jerry Lee Lewis and country-western guru Mickey Gilley, puts on a rollicking, if not rocking, musical show. Jimmy belts out good-time, hand clapping gospel songs at the piano and sings with great feeling. He is backed up by a Nashville-style band, and even a skeptical viewer is likely to get caught up in the infectious rhythms.

Music has been good to Jimmy. Gold records, symbols of recording success, adorn his office walls, and the sale of Jimmy

Swaggart records and tapes accounts for a good chunk of the Jimmy Swaggart Evangelistic Association's income. He is the only evangelist we encountered with a vigorous sales as well as solicitation program. He pitches his records, tapes, Bibles, and study course with seriousness and aplomb. Viewers who get on the Swaggart mailing list are asked to contribute to a variety of causes—feeding children in India, buying TV time, building churches in Africa, and so forth. They also get the chance to buy eight-track tapes or cassettes of "Jimmy Swaggart's Greatest Hits. "

Swaggart is a Louisiana moonshiner's son and a high school dropout. But the Assemblies of God are more impressed by commitment than education, and Jimmy is an ordained minister of that church. He supposedly has been speaking in tongues since the age of nine. He does not do so on his program, but he vigorously defends this "baptism of the Holy Spirit" and has lashed out at those who criticize the practice, particularly mainline churches, saying that some of them are dead because they don't have the gift.

Jimmy is an old-fashioned camp-meeting preacher. His sermons are impassioned. He patrols the platform restlessly while speaking, and his intensity may lead him to shout one moment and whisper pleadingly the next. He is urgent because he believes Jesus is coming soon and we may have little time in which to get ready.

His organization owns eight radio stations, and he buys time for his radio program on several hundred more. His TV show is syndicated on 222 TV stations, as well as on many cable systems.

He believes in at least a certain amount of financial disclosure. He claims that his organization was the first, even before Billy Graham's, to offer an audited financial statement to anyone who requests it.