Now It's Jimmy's Turn

By Richard N. Ostling

It was, without question, the most dramatic sermon ever aired on television. There stood Jimmy Swaggart, 52, the king of evangelistic video, ready to confront the ugly rumors that were encircling his busy, buzzing gospel conglomerate. As he approached the pulpit, the octagonal Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, La., was packed for the occasion with 8,000 worshipers, 1,000 of them standees, while followers nationwide watched the weekly telecast. This day there was to be none of Swaggart's trademark piano riffing or gospel singing, none of his jig stepping, strutting or shouting. Clad in a severe suit, the TV evangelist waited quietly, then began to speak.

"I do not call it a mistake, a mendacity. I call it sin . . . I have no one but myself to blame," he intoned. As he continued, his voice sometimes fell to a hoarse whisper, sometimes cracked with emotion. He embarked upon an extemporaneous litany, begging forgiveness in sequence from Wife Frances (who nodded and smiled tightly), from Son Donnie (who mouthed the words "I love you"), from pastors and missionaries of his denomination, from fellow TV evangelists across the land and from his followers around the world.

Then, finally, he spoke directly to "my Savior, my Redeemer . . . I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore." After a reading of Psalm 51, David's masterpiece of poetic contrition, the extraordinary performance was over. Parishioners wept with abandon, some of them prostrate on the floor. Frances and Jimmy's friends hugged him and led him away. Shortly afterward the preacher disappeared into his luxurious 14-acre estate.

At no point did Swaggart utter a word about what his sin was. But the entire world was already learning about sexual indiscretions committed over an extended period by this specialist in denouncing sins of the flesh. Swaggart stood accused of strange, secret involvements with prostitutes in sleazy motels. His own church body acted after being confronted with incriminating photographs.

Swaggart's tearful confession came at a perilous moment, not only for him but for the raucous world of TV evangelism, which was still stumbling toward recovery after a disastrous 1987. Oral Roberts kicked off last year's proceedings by announcing to an incredulous public a divine mandate to raise $8 million, or God would "call me home." Then it was Jim and Tammy Bakker and the revelation of Jim's payment of $265,000 in ministry funds to cover up sexual straying. Next came the revelations of the Bakkers' morass of financial mismanagement and personal aggrandizement at PTL. Suddenly watching evangelists became a national pastime; the place to catch them was as likely to be on the evening news or Nightline as in the electronic pulpit.

The strife continued. Bakker handed over control of PTL to Jerry Falwell only to turn against him and charge that the Virginia Fundamentalist had duped him in order to grab his empire. PTL filed for bankruptcy. Falwell escaped from the mess last October, calling it the "Watergate of evangelical Christianity." But even as Falwell abandoned politics a month later, Pat ; Robertson jumped in, leaving his Christian Broadcasting Network to get along without his strong presence. Left personally unscathed in all the turmoil were more churchly TV preachers such as Billy Graham and Robert Schuller.

Was Swaggart's Sunday sermon a sincere moment of contrition or a piece of theater carefully calibrated to salvage his ministry and its yearly intake of $150 million. Or perhaps both? God only knew. However, there was no shortage of scoffers, for Swaggart had fashioned himself into the most hated of the TV preachers. He smoldered with resentment against the proud, the well born and the intellectual. He had attacked Roman Catholicism for "damning the deceived souls of multitudinous millions," and Jews, attributing their sufferings to "rejection of Christ." With equal venom, he spewed accusations against fellow conservative Protestants.

A throwback to the fire-and-brimstone preachers of old, Swaggart was ever attacking sin, especially sexual immorality and such manifestations as rock 'n' roll, through which First Cousin and Childhood Chum Jerry Lee Lewis had won fame. Pornography, another pet target, constituted a form of "addiction," he proclaimed. Those who sell it "represent the worst our great nation has to offer, the scum on an otherwise tranquil pond."

Would the tireless accuser himself ever be caught in compromising circumstances? Aware of the close scrutiny under which prominent preachers live, he observed only nine months ago that for him sexual straying was impossible. His wife Frances, he told TIME, "is with me all the time. She goes to every crusade we go to. And if she doesn't go, I have several people who go with me. I'm never alone. I'm never by myself."

Swaggart played sexual inquisitor when moral accusations arose against Bakker and Swaggart's Louisiana rival Marvin Gorman, both ministers in Swaggart's Pentecostalist denomination, the Assemblies of God. When each was defrocked, he proclaimed good riddance.

Now, to the astonishment of all, it was Jimmy's turn.

The Swaggart scandal began to unfold on Feb. 18, three days before his climactic confession service, when the evangelist and his entourage rushed by private jet to Springfield, Mo., for a secret meeting with church leaders at Assemblies of God headquarters. It was a sorry moment for the denomination, which had seen attendance jump by 23.3% between 1979 and 1985. Adherents now number 2.1 million in the U.S., 16.4 million worldwide. Swaggart has been the group's most electrifying TV preacher and road revivalist, and his ministry has expanded lavishly overseas, providing $10.4 million of the denomination's 1987 mission budget.

It was no crisis of Swaggart's conscience that brought peril to this empire. The evangelist confronted his sin only because Assemblies' leaders had been provided with sordid information. Their chief evidence was incriminating photos taken last fall outside New Orleans at a down-at-the-heels motel called the Travel Inn. The pictures showed a prostitute welcoming a series of men; Swaggart was seen both entering and leaving her room. According to a person present at the ten-hour session in Springfield, Swaggart confessed that he had battled an obsession with pornography since his youth and had been a periodic backslider. He stated that on the night the photos were shot, the woman had taken her clothes off and fondled herself, but he insisted that they did not have sexual intercourse.

After Swaggart's sermonic confession, a prostitute named Debra Murphree turned up in West Palm Beach, Fla., and claimed to be the woman in the photos. Interviewed by WVUE-TV of New Orleans, she said she had had a yearlong series of motel meetings with Swaggart, during which no intercourse had occurred. She added that she customarily posed naked for him, and on one occasion, he asked her to wear a dress but no underwear and drive around with him. The world- renowned man of God was "kind of perverted to talk about the kinds of things they talked about," she said. "I wouldn't want him around my children."

The Washington Post picked up stories that Swaggart would often cruise the New Orleans motel strip in his Lincoln Town Car, sometimes rigged out in such disguises as hats, sunglasses and headbands. At motels, sources said, he always registered in the woman's name. Some media accounts were vague; most were unsubstantiated.

If Swaggart's secret life was anything near as florid as it appears to have been, it was almost inevitable that it would come to the notice of Gorman, the pastor of a humble church in a warehouse located only four miles away. Gorman had been reduced to this lowly estate because of the Assemblies, defrocking for adultery, which Swaggart had engineered. Before that, Gorman had been the toast of Pentecostalist New Orleans.

Gorman has been suing Swaggart and Assemblies officials for $25 million over the defrocking. He hired a private detective, who apparently shadowed Swaggart as he lurked on the motel strip. Photographs were taken of Swaggart and the woman outside the Travel Inn. (The air had been let out of the evangelist's tires to delay his departure.) Gorman then confronted his nemesis. Some sort of negotiations ensued between the two men, but apparently they broke down, and the damning photos landed in the Springfield offices of the Assemblies of God.

The Gorman case provides the Assemblies of God with an awkward precedent as it ponders what to do about Swaggart. After Swaggart demanded that leaders of the denomination's Louisiana district act, he summoned Gorman to his home in Baton Rouge for a confrontation. Swaggart insisted that Gorman be given no special treatment just because he ran a big church. Gorman was immediately defrocked.

Then came the Bakker mess, first the revelation of the PTL leader's adultery and then of his hush-money payments and mismanagement. The avenging angel took wing again. Swaggart passed word to denominational leaders of an impending Charlotte Observer report on the hush money and pressed for a cleanup. He declared the scandal to be a "cancer that needs to be excised from the body of Christ."

With Swaggart, leaders of the Louisiana district of the Assemblies of God last week showed considerably more solicitude. Meeting the day after Swaggart's sermon, they judged his repentance genuine and prescribed a three- month suspension from preaching, except for commitments already made to preach abroad. As part of a two-year process of "rehabilitation," including supervision by clergy, Swaggart would have to step down as co-pastor of the Baton Rouge church for the three months. Left open was the question of Swaggart's TV shows.

The slap-on-the-wrist penance package infuriated many national Assemblies leaders and church folk in general, who clogged the Springfield switchboard with calls protesting the special treatment. After all, until church law was changed in 1973, a clergyman who made such a confession would have been expelled for two years, though most left for good. Even under today's more lenient rules, it is unprecedented for an Assemblies minister caught in a sex scandal to be barred from the pulpit for less than a year. Headquarters was also perturbed that the Louisiana district had announced its plan publicly rather than proposing it privately to Springfield. At week's end the national leadership bounced the case back to Louisiana for another, and presumably tougher, go-around.

Whatever Swaggart's ecclesiastical fate, laborers in TV evangelism, who stand to suffer yet more diminution of public esteem, emphasize that his sin does not remotely compare with Bakker's. Says Mark DeMoss, spokesman at PTL after Bakker resigned: "Last year's episode involved a lot of financial wrongdoing directly related to contributions. If Bakker had merely been accused of an affair with Jessica Hahn, he'd still be at PTL."

Since the PTL affair, Swaggart, like many of his TV colleagues, has had to face sharply declining revenues. He doubled his organization's line of credit to $20 million, though a spokesman insists that indebtedness is minor compared with the assets of $112 million or more. Some cash will fund completion of $12.2 million worth of construction at the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College and an adjacent theological seminary that is supposed to open next fall. For Swaggart, the period of exile is likely to prove comfortable, since the nondenominational board that pays him is dominated by family members and friends in the clergy.

Further afield, many Swaggart fans appeared eager to forgive, if not to forget. Said Mavis Peterson, a retiree in Springfield who has watched the evangelist's shows for a decade: "Brother Swaggart is an imperfect human being, but the Bible says those who love the Lord and seek the truth shall have their sins forgiven if they repent." Still, there is doubt whether Swaggart will ever again have the same level of revival stardom or draw such big TV and in-person audiences in the U.S. and overseas.

There are at the moment plenty of fire-breathing Swaggart videotapes on the shelf to fill a three-month or one-year void on TV. However, PTL cable decided last week to continue the daily show only if Swaggart does not preside, and Robertson's CBN said it would run the Sunday worship hour only if Swaggart did not preach. Secular stations, however, may be happy to run old Swaggart tapes, so long as the payments arrive on time.

CBN and the renovated PTL cannot afford to take any chances with their images. As the Bakkers' escapades showed, the sins of one preacher will be laid upon another. Swaggart's downfall will add to the broad-brush contempt that many are heaping on the evangelical and Pentecostalist religions, even though the video brigade is but a small part of these movements. It was ironical that a Broadway-bound play, based on Elmer Gantry, opened in Washington.

Though much is unclear about Swaggart's prospects, the preacher wrote in his magazine last month that God had given him an important glimpse of the future through a dream vision. In it, Jimmy and Frances attend a large meeting, where an Assemblies of God stage show is being promoted with magazines that contain obscene pictures in their centerfolds. Jimmy cries out in protest but is ignored. He bows to weep, and when he looks up again, the auditorium is empty. The floor is littered with debris, which Jimmy starts to collect. When someone asks him what he is doing, the evangelist responds, "I am trying to clean up the church. I am trying to clean up the church." Perhaps, at last, cleanup time has really come around.

With reporting by Laura Claverie/New Orleans and Barbara Dolan/Chicago