Jimmy Swaggart didn’t want to talk with me. He really didn’t want to talk with me.
I flew to Baton Rouge in 1998, ten years after his famous—infamous!—confession that he had sinned against various people, including the Almighty. I had never been a fan of the televangelists; they, all of them, struck me as more intent on lining their pockets than addressing the needs of the faithful.
So when the televangelist scandals unfolded in the late 1980s—Jim Bakker’s hush money to a (you can’t make this up) church secretary, Jim and Tammy Faye’s gilded lifestyle, Oral Roberts’s declaration that God had in effect taken him hostage and Swaggart’s voyeuristic forays in Louisiana motel rooms—I took a kind of perverse satisfaction that these charlatan preachers were finally held to account for their excesses.
But something else was happening as well. I was a newly appointed assistant professor at Columbia University in the late 1980s, having trained as a colonial historian in graduate school. Apparently because there were so few other options in New York City at the time, I kept getting calls from media asking me to explain evangelicalism and the televangelists.
I happily responded to those requests, but I quickly tired of the assumption that all evangelicals were either highly gullible or the moral equivalent of Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart. Having grown up in the evangelical subculture, I knew better, so I devised this crazy idea to travel the country and write about the varieties of grassroots evangelicalism.
I’d always intended to get back to colonial history, but as Robert Frost noted in “The Road Not Taken,” one path tends to lead to another and still another—“way leads on to way”—and I’ve never fully returned to colonial history.
Following the publication of “Mine Eye Have Seen the Glory” and the three-part PBS documentary based on the book, I wanted to keep up with evangelicalism, and so I began writing about further developments in the evangelical subculture—a Pentecostal congregation that affiliated with the Episcopal Church, for example, or the emergence of Hispanic evangelicalism.
The ten-year anniversary of Jimmy Swaggart’s fall from grace seemed like a good opportunity to look in on televangelism, so I headed to Baton Rouge.
Donnie Swaggart, Jimmy’s son, was none too happy to learn of my presence. “I don’t like the press,” he told me. “Just remember,” he continued, “blood is thicker than water. Do whatever you want to me, just don’t touch my parents or my kids. If you do, I’m coming after you, you understand?”
Donnie dispatched one of the ushers, a large man named Bill Wilson, to shadow me around Swaggart’s forlorn and nearly empty Family Life Center that morning, and I must confess that I rather enjoyed our game of cat-and-mouse. I dodged and weaved in my perambulations, but Wilson always caught up with me, frequently short of breath.
Wilson maintained a careful distance, but he shuffled nervously when I approached Swaggart in the receiving line following the morning service. After introducing myself, I asked Swaggart if we might talk sometime in the next couple of days. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you,” he said, shaking his head, adding that he had been burned by the media and had sworn off any further contact.
I was disappointed. Even in our brief exchange, I’d found Jimmy Swaggart, despite his faults, an enormously likeable person, and I wanted to learn more about him.
My opportunity came unexpectedly a few minutes later. After I left Swaggart’s compound, I decided to stop for lunch to review my notes. The hostess seated me next to a large table in the cavernous dining room. The table was headed by none other than Jimmy Swaggart. He recognized me and immediately insisted that I join them.
I protested that I had not followed him, that the seating was entirely coincidental, but he waved off my concerns with a hearty laugh. And there, together with Swaggart’s wife, his mother-in-law and a missionary family from South Africa, we had a long and lively conversation about faith and preaching, especially the preachers that had influenced him.
“Preaching is like an orchestra,” Swaggart told me. “You have to be loud one moment and quiet the next. You’ve got to keep the people’s attention. You’ve got to keep the people’s attention.”
I shall never forget my visit with Jimmy Swaggart. His sermons frequently drew a contrast between the darkness of sin and the light of divine grace. Over the long span of his remarkable career, he knew both—intimately.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
