Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America

5. Confession and Religion: Jimmy Swaggart’s Secular Confession

On February 21, 1988, Jimmy Swaggart publicly confessed to the more than eight thousand people crowded into his Baton Rouge Family Worship Center. The confession was, by all accounts, quite a spectacle. The Houston Chronicle reports that Swaggart wept throughout the entirety of his nearly thirty-minute confession, during which he was interrupted ten times for standing ovations.1 Between ovations, Swaggart’s confession apparently mesmerized the thousands of onlookers. The Washington Post recorded that a “hush fell over the sanctuary as stunned onlookers, some speaking in tongues, wept and then shouted support. Men bowed their heads and cried, and women dabbed at running mascara with tissues from boxes thoughtfully scattered about.”2 When it was over, Swaggart’s wife, Frances, members of his board, and hundreds of congregants gathered on the stage in what the San Francisco Chronicle termed a “giant huddle of hugging.”3 Long after Swaggart was gone and the huggers dispersed, many congregants remained, kneeling at their pews praying, or lying prostrate on the floor, crying.4 Time magazine called it “without question, the most dramatic sermon ever aired on television.”5 The rhetorician Quentin J. Schultze labeled it “one of the most masterful programs of all time, perhaps even the single most effective televisual performance of any American evangelist.”6 Likewise, Michael J. Giuliano argued that the confession was instrumental in Swaggart’s unprecedented return to power. Reversing the precedents of Jim Bakker and Marvin Gorman, televangelists whose recent scandals had led to their defrocking, Swaggart emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed. 5 confession and religion: jimmy swaggart’s secular confession And, Giuliano concludes, until three years later when a California police officer pulled Swaggart over only to find him accompanied by a local prostitute and volumes of pornography, Swaggart was “clearly headed back to the top of the religious television ratings.”7 As effective as the speech may have been, the eight thousand teary-eyed worshippers could not possibly have known the particular events that brought Swaggart to his Baton Rouge stage that February morning. He had certainly broken the tenets of the creed he professed, but it was not contrition that motivated his confession. Swaggart was being blackmailed by the acrosstown pastor Marvin Gorman. Two years earlier, Swaggart had humiliated Gorman by publicizing his infidelities and orchestrating his termination. Now Gorman was getting his revenge. Armed with pictures of an escorted Swaggart entering and leaving a pay-by-the-hour motel, Gorman demanded that Swaggart speak openly of his sexual addiction. After Gorman rejected Swaggart’s counteroffer of church jobs for his family, Swaggart agreed to Gorman’s terms: he would publicly confess his sexual addiction. But he did not keep his promise. After four months of inactivity, Gorman expedited Swaggart’s confession by flying the incriminating photos to the Springfield, Missouri, Assemblies of God headquarters. The following Sunday, Swaggart delivered the now-famous “Apology” sermon, in which he claimed that although his “sin was done in secret,” the Lord desired that it be revealed before the “whole world.”8 Although the Lord (and Gorman) may well have desired disclosure, the Assemblies of God preferred discretion. As I will demonstrate, the Assemblies of God and Jimmy Swaggart Ministries combined in the execution of what the Boston Globe would later refer to as a protracted “silence campaign .”9 It seems that the entire denomination—at local, state, and national levels—was determined to conceal the details of Swaggart’s secret pleasures. Although it is impossible to know precisely why the denomination was so committed to protecting Swaggart’s secrets, it is not difficult to speculate. Swaggart was an essential part of the church’s financial viability. He singlehandedly raised more money than any other televangelist of the time and, without this fund-raising, it is unclear whether Jimmy Swaggart Ministries would have remained solvent. Finally, from the perspective of the church, because Jimmy Swaggart Ministries brought Christianity to five hundred million viewers worldwide, every financial loss was also a spiritual loss.10 As the Swaggart hagiographers Charles and Lynda Fontaine put it, as a result of Swaggart’s financial losses, “thousands of lost people around the world are not hearing the gospel even once and are going to hell.”11 120 confessional crises and cultural politics Swaggart was thus in a fix. On the one hand, he faced the photo-armed Marvin Gorman, who was demanding a public confession. On the other...