The spellbinding sin-busting preacher, Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, died yesterday after suffering a heart attack several weeks ago.
I'm not here to praise him or damn him. He lived as a perfect example of the truth behind the saying about there being two sides to everyone and everything.
You probably know his story: a guy from rural Ferriday, Louisiana, who grew up with cousins Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis brought the show-biz glitz and glitter that Mickey and Jerry Lee excelled at to the church pulpit, and found great success.
But while he inveighed about worldly temptations, he succumbed to them.
“Satan, you’re in for a whupping!” he would howl before his congregation, until the day in October 1987, when Swaggart, who posed for countless pictures in his day, had his picture taken entering a sleazeball New Orleans motel with a woman.
So, he was suspended from preaching by his organization, the Assemblies of God, and in a scene seen thousands of times since, he delivered a teary mea culpa to his audience, and turned to his wife with, “Oh, I have sinned against you, and I beg your forgiveness.”
Swaggart had accused another evangelist, Marvin Gorman, of being a serial adulterer. Gorman then hired a private eye to dog Swaggart to see what he did in private. Gorman also sued Swaggart for defamation, and won a $10 million judgement.
All this was bad for business, and in his line of work, when the donations drop off, you wind up with an older model private jet, and last year's Lexus.
And in October 1991, Reverend Swaggart was surprised to find a prostitute in the front seat of his car, and also shocked to see a police car trailing him - so shocked that trying to hide his pornographic magazine under that seat caused him to swerve out of his lane, which caused the police officer to pull him over and charge him with violating several Commandments.
And this time, he was much less contrite, telling a packed church in Baton Rouge, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business."
The congregation soon made it their business to take from other preachers.
I'm hardly in a position to tell religious leaders how to run their lives, but getting caught time and time again with his draws down, and then deriding other faiths as "false" was not a good look for Jimmy.
And the ultimate irony was that he was always raising hell with cousin Jerry Lee for chasing women, while he himself chased women and fought Hell.
He can answer for his mistakes, as will we all, and who knows? Along the way, maybe he led some souls to The Way.
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