by Randall S. Frederick

Chapter 1

Jimmy Lee Swaggart was born to sharecroppers. Or moonshiners. Or traveling musicians. The details, repeated to the point of legend, changed over the years based on the audience or his sermon topic. Each version is true, up to a point. The Swaggarts were notorious for their liquor, violence, poverty, and lust for life. It is also true that Jimmy’s parents, Willie “Sun” and Minnie Bell, were musicians who found popularity and predictability in gospel music. Like many other couples in the South, they farmed land that would never be their own; the music and alcohol were a relief after working in the summer heat and, as the couple began to establish a family, they found they could not bring their children with them into music halls where fighting was as constant at night as the sun was the following day.

The small town of Ferriday is located in the crook of Louisiana’s boot, the shape partitioned from the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. It remains today much as it has since the state was admitted into the Union in 1812. Cotton, farming, and trapping are the primary sources of revenue, there is still an overwhelmingly Black population, and there is still a disproportionately high number of citizens living below poverty. In 2010, Ferriday had the 15th-lowest median household income in the United States and a population of just over 1,000. Life remains hard there, in other words, as it does for many towns at the border. Most people are just passing through and the ones who stay, with nothing to live for, are just waiting to die. Trying to distract from cultural stagnation, the town claims to have produced more famous people per square mile than any other in America. This statement intrigued author Elaine Dundy, who explored both celebrities and townsfolk in her book, Ferriday, Louisiana, published by E. P. Dutton in 1991; like so many other pieces of Swaggart’s biography, it ultimately proved to be a false claim. Only three people have ever made it out of Ferriday and became famous. Coincidentally, all three are cousins who left at the same time for the same reasons and same purposes.

Jimmy was born to fiddle player and Pentecostal preacher Willie “Sun” Leon (“Son”, if the story bends toward the Christological) Swaggart. His mother, Minnie Bell Herron, was the daughter of sharecropper William Herron. The Herrons, Gilleys, Lewises, Swaggarts, and other extended family members had a complex network of interrelationships. Incest was common, as it is for many families with co-occurring issues like poverty, mental illness, and substance abuse. Cousins, in-laws, and other relatives married one another, often learning about sexuality through “practice” with near relatives, consensually as often as not. Singer Jerry Lee Lewis, for instance, infamously married his thirteen-year-old first cousin Myra Gale Lewis Williams when he was twenty-two. Marriages were agreed to without regard for conventional rules of behavior and society. Even Jimmy’s parents were related by marriage, as W.L.’s maternal uncle, Elmo Lewis, was married to Minnie’s sister, Mamie. 

Reflecting changing mores of the time, a young Jimmy Swaggart managed to break from this dynamic when he was seventeen. In 1952, he married Frances Anderson, who he was not related to through blood or marriage. The couple met while Jimmy was playing at a nearby Assemblies of God church in Wisner, Louisiana, where Frances’ father was the pastor. Frances was fifteen when the two married. Young and untalented, she instead became demanding and harsh. By then, Jimmy’s parents had traded their lives as traveling musicians for bars and honkey-tonks to become traveling musicians inside of churches. Jimmy, still young and inexperienced, followed suit. 

In 1952, America was still shaking off the disorienting impact of World War II. That year, America ratified a peace treaty with Japan and formally ended their occupation with the Treaty of San Francisco. Having advanced to the Presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, President President Truman’s first official term as President came to an end. He decided not to run for re-election. Nuclear tests were still being conducted in Nevada, as America continued to perfect its arsenal for what would become the Cold War. In July of that year, there were multiple sightings of UFOs over Washington D.C. Jets scrambled and took to the air, only for the crafts to disappear and then once again reappear when American fighter planes had been grounded. In September, film legend Charlie Chaplin sailed to England to do press for his latest film, Limelight. The day after he boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth, United States Attorney General James P. McGranery revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit and stated that he would have to submit to an interview concerning his political views and moral behavior to re-enter the U.S. In Suburbia, the Nuclear Age had become the Cold War but in the dusty fields of Ferriday, the fears of apocalypse, nation rising against nation to engulf the world in chaos, charismatic leaders ascending to work evil once more among God’s chosen people were all-encompassing.

For Pentecostals, this anxiety fixated on eschatology or the theological study of “the end times.” Within theological study, there are a myriad of foci. Some individuals focus on soteriology or the study of salvation. Others, particularly Pentecostals, the focus is on pneumatology or study of God’s Spirit in the life of believers, particularly as it regards “fruit” (the evidence of changed character, such kindness and patience) and “gifts” (manifestations of the divine, such as healing and ability to prayer in a non-native language, circumventing intention and the restlessness of one’s mind). Believers who subscribe to a belief of God’s Spirit in their lives count among these “gifts” the gift of prophecy, or an ability to predict the future. In the Bible, there are many examples of important characters who mysteriously know what will happen. Some present an ability to see far into the future, well after their own lifetimes. 

In other ancient stories, prophecies often have a dual interpretation. In the Greco-Roman plays, prophecies often end in misfortune. Every member of the House of Oedipus, for example, misunderstands a prophecy made about a child who will marry his mother. These misunderstandings lead to a wide-ranging series of miscalculations which set the stage for a concluding tragedy where the title character stabs out his own eyes. Prophecy, in the minds of the ancient world, carries a dual meaning. The self-evident interpretation is almost always wrong, but its misunderstanding is also what makes it ultimately true. Oedipus is blissfully unaware of the prophecy that surrounds him until the final act. His mother, Jocasta, believes her firstborn son – Oedipus – to be dead. Her first husband, the King of Thebes, had his son killed once the fated prophecy about Oedipus marrying his mother was made. Laius, the King of Thebes, takes the prophecy literally and had the child killed. However, in the fullness of time, this is discovered not to have happened. The boy was given to a shepherd, but when it came time to kill the child, the shepherd found himself unable to commit the heinous act. He leaves the boy to die on a hillside. In the mind of King Laius, his queen Jocasta, and the entirety of the court and throughout all of Thebes, the prophecy was taken literally and prevented although this was not so. Oedipus will eventually supplant his father, the King, and assume his father’s wife Jocasta as his own, thus fulfilling the prophecy. When this series of events is revealed to everyone, Oedipus plucks out his own eyes in madness. In almost every case throughout Greco-Roman literature, the prophecy comes to pass but not in the way it was understood.

Pentecostals recognize this. Or at least they do in ways that seem appropriate to them. If prophecy is a spiritual gift given to believers by the Spirit of God, it should taken seriously and soberly. Loose interpretations are unacceptable. After all, the God of the Bible is not capricious, negligent, or loose in their demands. The believer must not take laws and divine utterances, even if they are misunderstood, lightly because to do so makes light of God Himself, humiliates and even profanes God’s self. And God will not be mocked.

W.L. and Minnie Bell “were married in the heart of the Great Depression of the 1930s” as Swaggart frames it. “Work was almost nonexistent, and there was no government safety net. People had to somehow earn a few dollars to put food on the table, or they simply went hungry” (Amazing Grace 15). What Swaggart overlooks is the demeaning ways in which those few dollars were earned. Women often traded their bodies and men often engaged in criminal activity. Widespread illiteracy was only compounded by poverty and hardscrabble living. Throughout Louisiana, many families were unable to speak English. Poverty was widespread for hundreds of reasons even before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the expansive decade of the Great Depression, stretching from 1929-39. This was the life into which Swaggart was born, whether he tells the story honestly or mythologizes. Which he does, quite liberally. He claims, for instance, that while his father was an active bootlegger of whiskey along with Jerry Lee Lewis’s father, “there was never a drop of alcohol of any nature in our house.” He admits that “this was the time of Prohibition, meaning that it was going against the law to make and sell alcohol in any fashion, still, millions of gallons were being brewed each day all over the nation… my mother and dad did not drink at all, but to put food on the table, they were involved in this unlawful activity” (16).

The poverty of the family, their low estate, is underscored in Swaggart’s retelling. It was not merely a poverty of finances, but of assistance, of circumstance, of education, and of the spirit. “Both my mother and dad were born into homes that did not know God. In fact, my dad was 25 years old before he ever saw a Bible, before he ever heard a single gospel song, and before he ever darkened the door of a church. According to my mother’s own words, she had only been to a couple of funerals in a church, and that was the extent of her spiritual knowledge” (15-16). These two individuals, moonshiners and bootleggers, found one another in a family of moonshiners and bootleggers but never tasted their product. Not even for quality assurance. These two lifelong teetotalers remained sober throughout their lives, despite the entire family being depicted as alcoholics and their meager income dependent on alcohol. Even if Swaggart’s sanitized retelling was credible, there are tells. His father “darkened the door” of a church in his mid-twenties. He ran with a dangerous sort. Minnie Bell right there with him, delivering swill and running an illegal business. 

Shortly before Jimmy was born, government agents descended on the town of Ferriday. Poverty was widespread, but the community continued to plod along, seemingly outside the local economy. Revenue agents showed up at their doors, armed with shotguns, demanding an explanation. W.L. and Minnie Bell were among those who were handcuffed until one of the revenue agents allowed W.L. and Minnie Bell to leave. In Swaggart’s version of the story, “the Lord… moved upon that agent for him to do what he did.” He believes that “the Lord knew what would take place several years from that day” with Jimmy and his ministry. It is far more likely that W.L. and Minnie Bell were informants, that they had been picked up previously and gave up their associates for their own freedom. But Pentecostal belief in the presence and forethought of God frames this as a miracle, the first of many associated with Jimmy’s version of his own life. After all, “it all started even before I was born” (17). Jimmy was born a month later on March 15, 1935, and other miracles followed him throughout childhood. When he was two, the small family traveled to pick cotton at “a particular place where they could pick cotton.” The specific place is unclear, though he is detailed enough to know “they were earning 75 cents per 100 pounds of cotton” (18). One night, his father woke up with “a vision, even though he did not know at all what a vision was. In the vision, he saw me on the floor playing with some little toys that I had there.” He called out to Jimmy, believing him to be playing on the floor when the newborn was instead still asleep in the bed between his parents. “The next morning, my dad learned that someone had broken into each cabin on either side of where my parents were staying and had robbed and murdered the occupants. They found, as well, that the lock on the door to our cabin was almost disjointed. In other words, it was my dad’s shouting at me that had stopped those murderers from coming in. They, no doubt, would have killed both my parents and me. Now at the time, my mother and dad did not know the Lord whatsoever. However, the Lord knew that about three years later, they would give their hearts to Christ, and so He intervened at that time to save the lives of my parents” and, more importantly, “my life also” (18). Those knowledgeable of stories in the Bible will surely frame this as a testament to Jimmy’s future work on behalf of God. Like Moses and Jesus before him, Jimmy narrowly escaped death as an infant because God had great intentions for him.

Raised by two sinners and a decidedly unhealthy extended family, Jimmy’s specialness may have been debatable. There was little, beyond the miraculous signs witnessed only by his mother and father, to hint at his future. By 1943, Jimmy’s parents had beaten a work ethic into the boy. For the rest of his life, he would claim that the greatest sin in the world is laziness. Hard work was the only means of survival in America as families eked out a meager living with rationed food and sweat of their brows. That year, the fledgling Assemblies of God struggled to make a future for themselves alongside their members. They had encouraged their members to do what they could to spread the Gospel of hope and power to the hopeless and powerless. 

Betty and Leona Sumrall, missionaries for the AoG, felt the call of God to build a church the previous year. Mother and daughter tried making their way to Mobile, Alabama; between 1940 and 1943, over 89,000 people moved into Mobile to work for war effort industries. Mobile was one of eighteen U.S. cities producing Liberty ships at its Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company to support the war effort by producing ships faster than the German U-boats could sink them. Building an Assemblies of God church there made sense, at least to them. Things were booming in Mobile. There was a steady and reliable base of money, people, and an eagerness for religion and purpose in the midst of war. 

Betty felt called by the Lord to be in the ministry years before, but she had married a man who was hostile to God (later on, he became a traveling evangelist). She and her daughter traveled together, believing that God had called them to do something greater than continue to endure abuse and hostility to their faith. To their confusion, after they set out to Mobile, they came to believe they were missing something. Frustrated, they sat down in their hotel room with a map open and asked God to show them where He wanted them to go to start a church. God picked Ferriday, Louisiana. They didn’t know the town, didn’t know anyone there, and it made absolutely no sense to them. Until the hotel and the map, they had never even heard of the town. Most people hadn’t. There was nothing to know. Nevertheless, they both felt called to the town for some reason. In prayer, the two kept feeling “called” to minister there and bring the Pentecostal message to a literal backwoods nothing bordertown.

When Betty and Leona arrived in Ferriday, they secured a lot where they planned on having tent revivals. That was always the first step. First the revival, next the church, then move on. By Jimmy’s reckoning, it was that first day the mother and daughter arrived when they were spotted by his Uncle Lee, the local millionaire. “My uncle Lee (in whose house I was born) was in his pickup truck and he saw these two women trying to clear the lot with their bare hands. My uncle was a millionaire many times over and was possibly the richest man in the parish. He owned thousands of acres of land. Owned hundreds of head of cattle, and had oil wells and gas wells on his property. He was very well-to-do, but to look at him, it seemed as if he were in poverty. I never saw him in a suit of clothes in my life, until he was buried” (Amazing Grace 19-20). Lee stopped by with his truck as Betty and Leona were cleaning the lot with their bare hands and stretching the revival tent to ask who they were and what they intended. In Ferriday, everyone knew one another. These two women were strangers. Prostitutes or Pentecostals, he asked them what they were doing. Their answer surprised him enough to leave them alone. They replied back saying that God sent them and that He would provide.

People started flocking to their meetings and Jimmy’s uncle came to believe that, as the first person they met there, he had a part to play in their work. He donated the money that would eventually be used for the building of the First Assembly of God church of Ferriday, which was the first AoG church in town. But the Swaggarts didn’t live in Ferriday anymore.

Jimmy’s parents had played music for dances on weekends until the day they decided to attend their first church service in 1939. Jimmy was four at the time. Whatever their experience of church and their attempts to “get right” for their son, it didn’t stick. They remained unconvinced and continued farming work, traveling, and road shows with their music. W.L. felt that giving his life to God would bring demands he wasn’t ready to commit to, a change of life that would compel him to stop running moonshine and other illegal activities. Prohibition may have been repealed, but the South had enacted new laws to continue the practice. Women’s Leagues and churches had been active opponents to alcohol and the ways of life that had sprung up with the vice. W.L. rather enjoyed remaining a scofflaw and did not want to settle down into miserable adulthood as he had seen everyone else in Ferriday do by his age. He was restless. A hard worker. He had ideas. Jesus would only cause trouble, make him give up the life he wanted to build for himself and his family. 

In 1940, W.L. and Minnie Bell decided to leave Ferriday and strike out for Texas. They wanted to start a produce business, they said, and have a chance at making more money. While Uncle Lee may have been wealthy, even “a millionaire many times over,” his wealth never benefited the rest of the family. Jimmy maintained throughout the decades that he was born into poverty, his entire family had been. Theirs was a life of hard work and suffering, at least until Ann Rowe Seaman’s biography of him in 1998. Seaman’s biography was built from family interviews and those left behind in Ferriday who were all too eager to poke holes in Swaggart’s exaggerated stories. Perhaps he didn’t want to expose the family to criticism, to blame them or begrudge them. Perhaps, like W.L., Jimmy felt that an individual had to make it on their own. His stories about growing up in poverty, the son of sharecroppers and itinerant musicians, were a reflection of this attitude. It was not until his autobiography, Amazing Grace (2018), that this story would change.

Clinical psychologist Robin S. Rosenberg addresses origin stories in her book Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care (2013). She writes in the book that origin stories are the frame through which we see and understand others. Whenever something happens, good or bad, we ask someone “What happened?” because the origin point, how things started, helps us understand the story that follows. In other words,

“An origin story explains who someone is and what’s made the person that way, what the person cares about and why. Each of us implicitly or explicitly has in our minds our own origin story that explains to ourselves and to others who we are. In fact, we may have different versions of the story that we tell, depending on our audience and why we’re telling our origin story… We may have a hard time compiling the pieces of our lives to create an origin story. In my therapy practice, sometimes my clients and I do the work to piece together the important events in their lives to help them understand their origin stories, though we do not explicitly label them as such. The process of putting together their origin stories helps them figure out ‘who they are’ and ‘who they want to become.’ 

“Our origin stories can be more than explanations of who we’ve become. Origin stories are often tales about transformation, stories in which a pivotal event or set of events sets us on a particular path in life. Pivotal events can be positive, joyous, hard-won, or lucky: meeting the ‘right’ partner, landing a job that creates new meaning and challenges in life, winning the lottery. Other pivotal events may not be so positive, at least not initially: family strife, loss of a friend or family member, significant illness, financial stress, or being victimized. Regardless of whether a pivotal event is positive or negative, these events are often transformative” (Rosenberg 1-2).

Robin S. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick (2013), pgs 1-2.

Rosenberg writes that in her practice, it is often helpful to patients to understand origin stories through popular media. This allows them to process concepts more easily, as it gives them distance from their own lives. Origin stories introduce readers and viewers to primary characters and care about them; a superhero character, for example, has to be interesting and relatable before they get their powers. Audiences need to understand them, even minimally, to better understand their own transformation, growth, development, and pathos. There is also a need to see how the transformation takes place, to better understand the contrast between the Before and the After.

“Why have origin stories at all? After all, Batman had adventures in six issues before he had an origin story and Wolverine went without an origin story for decades. If we like a character, why isn’t it enough to know that he or she saves the day? We want to know why. Why he or she would put life and limb on the line repeatedly. We want to know his or her motives. Essentially, we want to get inside his or her head. In this sense, each of us is like a psychologist or detective. We are curious about what makes the character tick. We want to know what formed him or her into a hero and into someone super. 

“Origin stories satisfy our curiosity. Without an origin story we are forced to make guesses about the character’s motives, thoughts, feelings just as we would do with people in our lives whose origin stories we don’t know. We assume that the superhero’s ‘psychology’ is like our ‘psychology’ even if the superhero is an alien, demi-god, or other nonhuman. Though we can infer what makes the superhero tick, it is often more satisfying to know rather than guess” (4-5).

Ibid, pgs. 4-5.

Moses sees a burning bush on the mountain and follows it to discover God is wiling to be revealed. Moses assumes a spiritual power and resonance after this meeting. But we must first see Moses as the little baby, hidden away in the basket adrift on the river. The discovery of Moses, in some way, makes the discovery of God “make sense.” Even then, the audience still needs to see what happens between these two stories, the process by which a small baby matures into adulthood, meeting with God atop the mountain. This Moses, Middle Moses, is a transformation story. Moses has grown up inside the palace, is brash and entitled. His sense of justice is present. He is affected deeply when he witnesses the abuse of a Jewish slave by an Egyptian overseer. Though he is not the man we know he can become, the friend of God who will be holy enough to be given the law of God and present it to the liberated peoples. Moses is, instead, a murderer no better than the overseer who he has killed and buried. Moses, the lawgiver and law abider is revealed as a lawbreaker. He murders an Egyptian and in this way has become corrupted, no better than the one he overcomes. Instead of a triumphant holy man, he is brought low. It is well and good that he wants justice in the kingdom, but at what price? Is he to liberate the people of God with murder and violence? Even the enslaved people turn against him, shaming him for his actions. Moses hides himself from the oppressors as well as the oppressed, fleeing to the desert, forsaking his place at court, and giving up on the justice he was previously so righteously willing to pursue. He abandons the oppressed people in slavery. Because of all of this, rather than in spite of it, the call of God to return to Egypt and begin the liberation of the enslaved peoples feels weighted and all the more important. 

As Rosenberg explains, “The best origin stories feel psychologically ‘right.’ Upon hearing, reading, or seeing them, we say ‘aha, now I understand’… we feel that we ‘get’ that person [or character] now” (5). With insight, we are able to know who the person intuitively without further exposition. The origin story is, perhaps, more revealing the accumulated total of what follows. We are able to forgive because we know how far they have come. Origin stories illuminate what motivates someone, the “why” of their activity, even “lead us to wonder how we would have been transformed by the same events” (5).

As Rosenberg explains, audiences want to be able to project something of themselves onto the blank canvas of a character, to embody the protagonists or “heroes” we are passively experiencing. This embodied liminal helps us subjectively work through the challenges of our own relationships, even parasocial ones like politicians (who are often evil) or celebrities (who are good, but sometimes do or say difficult things). Once we are “inside his or her head” we need to feel comfortable there, anchored by something that is relatable and once we are, it becomes difficult to disentangle ourselves from the avatar we have created in our mind. When they fail or experience a setback, we feel it too. When they ascend, we feel thrilled both for them and with them. However, as recent studies into social media and the nature of celebrity point out, parasocial interactions are one-sided. Originally put forth by Horton and Wohl (1956), this concept of parasocial interaction refers to a media user’s (or individual in an audience) reaction to a media performer. A sense of conversational give-and-take often emerges during viewing and is strongest when the media performer bodily addresses the viewer through the camera. Televangelists, building upon the religious traditions of sermonic discourse and call-and-response preaching are often the object of a parasocial interaction, whether positive or negative. A viewer who sees a televangelist soliciting money may feel disgust and contempt, even having a verbal reaction to the televangelist as though they are there in the room with the viewer. Another viewer, particularly one who watches political news, may develop conspiratorial views towards a politician or celebrity. It is more typical that a viewer, a “fan”, develops the parasocial interaction into a parasocial relationship which becomes a fertile space for imaginative thinking and exploitation. As Horton and Wohl describe it, the parasocial relationship is a more enduring relationship that a media user forms with a mediated performer. While parasocial interaction is restricted to infrequent events or “episodes”, a parasocial relationship extends beyond a single or infrequent “episode.” Televangelists often profit from their “partners”, “friends”, and “co-laborers” by developing parasocial relationships and grooming media users to believe a true relationship exists when it does not through the illusion of friendship, intimacy, and identification. Subsequent studies on parasocial relationships have consistently shown that media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, both positive and negative. They are able to influence and inform the way that users/viewers perceive certain topics like religion, politics, and culture, even shaping the purchasing habits and political behavior of their “friends.”

Swaggart’s successes as well as his failures interplay with what Rosenberg puts forward. In the Seventies and Eighties, sobered by World War II, and then the Korean and Vietnam War, many Americans felt a need to “put aside childish things” and no longer felt the parasocial thrill of relating to characters on their television or in their movies. They may have still loved Lucy, but she no longer alleviated their anxieties in a new landscape. They instead lived through the experiences of “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H, whose gallow humor was more appropriate to the violence of the evening news. God was no longer the doting and benevolent father in the sky, one who loved all people, red and yellow, black and white, all precious in His sight. They needed a new hero. For one class of American, the Pentecostal, the swift emergence of celebrities like Aimee Semple McPherson, Rex Humbard, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart must have felt thrilling. They identified with these ministers of the Gospel, these prophetic figures who spoke for God. Finally, someone like them, who believed what they did and were willing to be ridiculed alongside them, colaborers in suffering for Christ to forge a way forward and make it safe for future generations of Pentecostals to be outspoken about their “radical” beliefs! Oral Roberts, who was the public face of faith healing and ridicule of Pentecostalism, even appeared in season four of the hit variety show Hee Haw in 1973. Finally, they cried, Pentecostalism was becoming mainstream, was being brought into American homes, played on the radio during the daily commute to work. Pentecostalism was being normalized.

Unlike these other ministers who emphasized positivity and happiness, wealth and success, constant upward mobility, Swaggart was a sobering corrective. He told it like it was, and didn’t “put on airs.” He still knew where he came from, little Ferriday, Louisiana. He was raised by two hardworking sharecroppers at the end of a dusty road. This was his origin story, one of humble beginnings and hard work. That his parents were hard workers, reliant only on themselves, seems a reliable bit of information. Why they could not, for instance, borrow money from Uncle Lee or work it off somehow remains a mystery. Perhaps it is a testament to their hard living. Perhaps to Willie’s stubbornness, the demands he placed upon himself to make it in the world on his own and never be reliant on anyone else. According to Jimmy, the Swaggarts “thought they were going to Texas to start a business, but, in reality, they were running from the Lord.” It took a measure of grit to deny and defy God, how much easier it must have been to merely buck a fellow human. Off the family went to Texas, determined to make a way where there was none.

In Texas, Minnie Bell caught pneumonia, which was fatal at the time. After all of the miracles God had provided for them, all of the ways He had tried to get their attention before, He denied their prayers for healing and health of the newborn Donnie. As they would frame it later, they had remained hard-heartened to God, refused His divine will until the death of their second child, who was only three months old when he passed. After the burial of Donnie, defeated and terribly depressed, the Swaggart returned to Ferriday. Their hometown was remarkably different, jumping and shouting as the new church, an Assemblies of God built by the Sumralls and funded by their family, was in the midst of a revival under the newly installed pastor, Tom Holcomb. He was preaching about something the Swaggarts had never had before – hope.

Their salvation would not come immediately. W.L. still had reservations, things he wanted to do, things that he was sure Jesus would tell him to stop doing. But they found a shared grief in the Holcombs, who had lost a child of their own and also to pneumonia. Unlike W.L. and Minnie Bell, the Holcombs were not bitter towards or mistrusting of God. In them, the Swaggarts saw something different and remarkable. Minnie Bell became pregnant again with their third child, a daughter who they named Jeanette. They moved to Texas again, chasing government contracts in December of 1941, this time to the providentially named city of Temple. “It was a madhouse,” Jimmy recalled. “Thousands of people had moved to Temple because of the high wages being paid defense workers. The schools were unprepared to handle such a load. For several weeks there was a shortage of desks and I, along with many others, had to sit on the floor.”

Whatever their new income, it was not enough for the Swaggarts. Climbing out of crippling poverty did not address the emptiness they felt or give them a sense of rootedness. Perhaps muscle memory, the fear of losing another child, wore on them and their relationship with one another. They were, after all, the only people they knew in Temple and even then it wasn’t enough. The family returned to Ferriday, this time to a larger house on Tyler Road, “for keeps” W.L. assured his son. Once again, the Assemblies of God church there in Ferriday was in revival, this time with Vincent Roccaforte, a young evangelist who claimed his mother had been miraculously healed of cancer. Roccaforte died in May of 1980. The weekly magazine for the Assemblies of God that August recalled Roccaforte as “an ordained minister affiliated with the South Texas District, formerly pastored in New Iberia, La. He served as secretary-treasurer of the Louisiana District 1952-60. He also served as an evangelist. He was associate pastor at Lindale Assembly in Houston, Tex., at the time of his death. He is survived by his wife Ervia.” What was not recorded was that Roccaforte grew up Catholic. He spoke out against the religion regularly, planting the seed of anti-Catholicism that would be emphasized and, at times, define Swaggart’s ministry. 

If origin stories matter, if they set the tone for what is to follow or even frame details in particular ways, then Roccaforte’s ministry would, without any conscious intention of doing so, frame Swaggart’s self-concept as a Reformer. In 1942, Roccaforte’s rejection of Catholicism in the heart of Louisiana, at that time an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic state, would create in Swaggart an anti-cultural strain compounded by Southern tradition, by Pentecostalism like the kind his grandmother came to embody, and further still by the heights of celebrity that Jimmy was ascending to within Evangelicalism. Jimmy Swaggart, over the course of a lifetime, was many things. He embodied the victories of America, its ethos as much as its pathos. Whatever his eventual success and wealth would become, he would remain a poor boy living at the end of a dusty road because this is how his fans, his fellow believers, would come to know him. Origin stories, by necessity, must become permanent to be identifiable. They become the mold into which subsequent, more pliable stories must fit.

1942 was an important year for the family. The Swaggarts returned to Ferriday, “for keeps”, and it was in light of the war effort, of nationalism masquerading as patriotism, suspicion of outsiders like Germans and Asians and Catholics that W.L. and Minnie Bell Swaggart would step inside the little church once again and finally say “yes” to Christ. By then, Betty and Leona had left. The two would build other churches in other places. Betty’s other child, Lester, would join them in ministry.  Leona went on to tour the United States with her brother Lester before he was called to become a world missionary with Howard Carter in the mid-1930s. He would become another Assemblies of God minister and go on to found LeSEA Ministries and its humanitarian arm LeSEA Global Feed the Hungry, World Harvest Radio International, and World Harvest Bible College. Evangelist Billy Graham would count Lester Sumrall among one of his best friends, one of the only other ministers during his lifetime who understood the demands of travel and the expectations placed upon one who presumed to speak for God. People, they came to understand, wanted perfection from their religious leaders. 

Coming home from World War II, returning veterans demanded different answers from their clergy. Judaism, for example, was redefined across the world by Jewish communities. Jews in Europe, America, and Eurasia were particularly affected in light of the Holocaust. God, if such an entity existed to oversee the cosmos, had failed. Or sided with the wrong people, with the Holocaust as evidence that even God was morally compromised. If God was morally compromised, the survival of the Jewish people was a testament to the will of humans who perhaps were not the terrible, awful, wicked, “sinful” creatures described in Scripture. Such considerations were not limited to Jewish theology or even religious discourse. Philosophically, all sides of World War II were able to make a compelling case both for and against genocide, for and against the traditional roles of men and women in society, for and against governmental oversight and war, for intercultural dialogue and understanding, whatall. World War II was a watershed in human understanding. The guardrails of tradition, what could be and should be, had been removed out of necessity. In this new world of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the banality of evil, and the darkness exposed in the human heart (yes, even now after all of the progress we had made), humans either felt the weight of uncertainty or moved forward with a new definition for every conceivable part of life. These new definitions were often clean, if simplistic. Purchasing goods from the supermarket was a matter of personal choice. Which detergent worked best for you, for your life? The ambiguity and uncertainty could feel heady and powerful if you chose to ignore the ethical and moral questions tugging just outside the frame of the advertisement. Aunt Jemima’s pancakes and syrup, for example, presented an obscene version of the Antebellum South where black mammies doted upon blond-haired white children. Clothing and dish detergents shined and polished your foodwares and made your threads pop, but the toll of wearing and ingesting chemicals across a lifetime would not be revealed for decades. Cancer rates mysteriously began to climb. Cigarettes were sold as medicinal supplements to a healthy lifestyle. Cancer rates continued to climb. It was a testament to the power of persuasion that Edward Bernays had been warning about since before the War, what he warned about even as he began marketing cigarettes to women as an alternative to sweets, and which he continued to warn about until his death in 1995. From cancer.

America’s religious outlook was grim. The core tenets of religious communities was subject to revision, refusal, and reinterpretation. Everything felt subjective. The illusion of freedom, what should have felt hopeful and encouraging in light of the idea that anything was possible was laid bare. The reality was that much of what remained was underwhelming and many Americans felt constrained, rather than liberated in this new global environment.

Jimmy attended the Assemblies of God church in Ferriday with his parents. W.L. “walked the aisle” to Roccaforte’s invitations of salvation. Surprised by this and still wanting to experience a change herself, Minnie Bell followed her husband. W.L.’s acceptance of Jesus was so remarkable that even W.L.’s parents responded to the altar call. Both families, the elder and junior Swaggart households, were saved that evening. Jimmy would later claim, “Everything changed. Mama and daddy no longer fought. Our home was happy and peaceful. I couldn’t have been happier.” 

A year later, now eight years old, Jimmy had been enjoying the stories of Sunday School. His favorite story was that of David and Goliath, the young boy who bested, felled, and killed a giant with nothing more than a slingshot. It was a fantastic story Jimmy would call back to throughout his life, even try to emulate – at least metaphorically. As a child, the stories were not metaphors just yet. They were real and convincing to the boy. As theologian Karl Barth would write, theology and the concepts of Christianity often “convincingly” appear “as an element of real human life. In spite of all our warnings, it might still seem to be an abstract scheme” to some “or an hypostasis” (an underlying reality, but without substance). As Barth writes in Evangelical Theology (1963), 

If anyone should not find himself astonished and filled with wonder when he becomes involved in one way or another with theology, he would be well advised to consider once more, from a certain remoteness and without prejudice, what is involved in this undertaking. The same holds true for anyone who should have accomplished the feat of no longer being astonished, instead of becoming continually more astonished all the time that he concerns himself with this subject. When he reconsiders the subject, however, such a man might find that astonishment wells up within him anew, or perhaps even for the first time. And this time such wonder might not desert him but might rather become increasingly powerful in him.

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (1963)

Almost a year had gone by since Jimmy’s family had walked the aisle. The family, now closer through the shared experience, could not help but wonder why the young boy had not been saved yet. Young Jimmy Swaggart was continually astonished by the stories of the Bible. They rivaled the cinema for him, a place he visited each weekend. Saturday matinees were one kind of church, Sunday School the next day another. The expectation pressed upon him, especially from his mother and grandmother who were certain there was something unique about the boy. 

There wasn’t much to do in Ferriday outside of listening to his family members sing, play music, go to church, or go to the movies. After W.L., Minnie Bell, and the elder Swaggarts got saved, the family didn’t miss a service. Jimmy claimed “I don’t recall anything about church before that time, and yet, we were in every single service. We didn’t miss any, irrespective of the weather, etc. If the church doors were open, my mother and dad felt they had to be there” (Amazing Grace 29). 

During the week, Jimmy would visit his grandfather, William Henry, who had become the local chief of police in Ferriday during an especially hard period. “Before he had taken the job, you could hardly walk down the street without getting a beer bottle laid against your head. The mayor, in fact, hard hired several police chiefs before, but the drunks, bullies, and ‘case hards’ had run them off.” Drunkenness and theft, products of moonshine and widespread economic depression, were rampant and the climate wasn’t helped much by the near proximity of Fort Polk located in Alexandria just fifty miles away. Servicemen eager to get off base and out of town, beyond the reach of their C.O., made Ferriday with its bars and women desirous of a man in uniform into a popular hangout. “Pa” would prove a constant for the town, his intensity compelling even rowdy soldiers to come to their senses, for the ten years he served in the post. Often accompanying his grandfather, Jimmy struggled to avoid becoming the type of person he saw being sorted out by the older man and it would not be an stretch to notice that drunkards, rowdy honky-tonks, and weekend indiscretions by married women would become the caricatures of imagined sin he would refer to in the decades ahead in his sermons and teachings.

When he wasn’t riding along with his grandfather, Jimmy would visit with his grandmother Ada, who had become something of an oddity after she had attended a Church of God camp meeting in Snake Ridge. “Before she became a Christian, Nannie was like the rest of the Swaggarts. She enjoyed drinking, smoking and even a little gambling. But at the age of forty-five, a dramatic change occurred in her life.” After the campmeeting, “she was totally different. She had received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and was speaking in tongues. Not only that, but she was delightfully happy, bubbly. And the cigarette habit, which she hadn’t been able to shake despite her conversion, was gone.” To the family’s frustration, in her zeal, Ada kept talking about the experience. She wouldn’t stop sharing about how God had changed her life, what had been revealed to her, how important speaking in tongues was to her spiritual development. Didn’t they want the same? Didn’t they want more of God in their lives too? It was off-putting how disconnected Ada was from the rest of the family, from a people who had learned to accept the hard, unforgiving way of life they had been allotted.

Unlike the other branches of Christianity like the Methodists or their Southern Baptist neighbors, Pentecostals continue to believe miracles occur and frequently. God is not remote and distant to the Pentecostal but indwells them through the Holy Spirit. And while most Christians, generally and vaguely with casual indifference, accept that miracles sometimes and might happen, hypothetically and even then subjectively, there is a broad and well-marked difference between how mainline denominations understand miracles and how Pentecostals understand miracles. Pentecostals have a wide expectation and acceptance of miracles that set them apart. Because God is so near, they are compelled to pray more frequently, more passionately, to petition God for one’s daily bread as well as to politically to inaugurate a new “kingdom” or way of life here “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” 

For most of the Twentieth Century, the American Church looked down on the theological ignorance of these “holy rollers” and “pennycossals.” Most Pentecostals, at least in America, point to one of two origin points for the unique beliefs. They either refer to Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas or the Azusa Street Revival of Los Angeles, California.

Pentecostalism is a charismatic religious movement that gave rise to a number of Protestant churches in the United States in the 20th century and that is unique in its belief that all Christians should seek a post-conversion religious experience called “baptism with the Holy Spirit.” Recalling the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the first Christians in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, this experience appears to have been common in the Christian movement during its first generations.

The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is believed to be accompanied by a sign, usually the gift of tongues. This “speaking in tongues” occurs as glossolalia (speech in an unknown language) or xenoglossy (speech in a language known to others but not the speaker). Speaking in tongues is considered one of the gifts of the Spirit described by St. Paul the Apostle (1 Corinthians 12), and Pentecostals believe that those baptized by the Holy Spirit may receive other supernatural gifts that purportedly existed in the early church, such as the ability to prophesy; to heal; to interpret speaking in tongues; to receive dreams, visions, and words of wisdom; to perform miracles and exorcisms (casting out demons); and even to raise people from the dead. Faith healing is an important part of the Pentecostal tradition, which reflects patterns of faith and practice characteristic of the Baptist and Methodist-Holiness churches—the Protestant denominations from which most of the first generation of Pentecostals came. Like them, Pentecostals emphasize conversion, moral rigor, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. However, Pentecostals never formed a single organization; instead, individual congregations came together to found the various denominations that constitute the movement today.

Although Pentecostals trace their origin to the Apostles, the modern-day Pentecostal movement has its roots in the late 19th century, a time of mounting indifference to traditional religion. Denominations that were known for revivalistic fervor became subdued. Emotional modes of religious expression—enthusiastic congregational singing, spontaneous testimonies, prayer in unison, and extemporaneous sermons on simple biblical themes by lay preachers—gave way to ordered formal worship services that were conducted by “reverends,” ministers trained in homiletics (preaching skills), who were influenced by higher biblical criticism. Lecture centers and elegant sanctuaries replaced camp meetings and crude wood-frame tabernacles. As the large popular Protestant denominations became the churches of the upper middle class, people of limited means began to feel out of place. They yearned to return to a “heart religion” that would satisfy their spiritual desires and their emotional, psychological, and physical needs. Pentecostalism, like its precursor the Holiness movement, was based on the belief that a second work of grace following conversion would “sanctify” Christians and remove the desire to sin. This second work, loosely defined as the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” (although not yet understood as divine manifestations of healings and speaking in tongues but instead a sense of inner peace and purity, themselves evidence of the absence of sin), fulfilled these needs for churchgoers and nonchurchgoers alike. Moreover, Pentecostal churches, though open to all levels of society, spoke to the special needs of the disaffected, whatever their level of understanding.

Notwithstanding the charismatic outbursts in some 19th-century Protestant churches, the watershed of contemporary Pentecostalism came in the early 20th century at Bethel Bible College, a small religious school in Topeka, Kansas. The college’s director, Charles Fox Parham, one of many ministers who was influenced by the Holiness movement, believed that the complacent, worldly, and coldly formalistic church needed to be revived by another outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He instructed his students—many of whom already were ministers—to pray, fast, study the Scriptures, and, like the Apostles, await the blessings of the Holy Spirit. On January 1, 1901, Agnes Oznam became the first of Parham’s students to speak in an unknown tongue. Others soon had the same experience, and Parham claimed that glossolalia was the “initial evidence” that one had been truly baptized with the Holy Spirit. Parham and his students understood these recurrences of Pentecost prophetically, interpreting them as signs of the imminence of the last days, or End Times. Imbued with this sense of urgency, they set out on an evangelical mission.

Their initial efforts were unsuccessful, and the movement nearly collapsed as it encountered disbelief and ridicule. In 1903 its fortunes were revived when Parham returned to the practice of faith healing. Borrowed from several Holiness churches, notably the Christian and Missionary Alliance, faith healing became a hallmark of Pentecostalism. Parham was the first in a long line of Pentecostal evangelists (Mary B. Woodworth-Etter, Charles Price, Aimee Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Benny Hinn) who taught that Christ’s atonement can provide deliverance from sickness and is, therefore, accessible to all who have the requisite faith. Attracting new converts, the movement enjoyed success in the American South and Southwest, especially in Texas, Alabama, and Florida. In Texas alone, 25,000 people had embraced the Pentecostal faith by 1905, according to Parham. Kansas and Missouri also became hotbeds of Pentecostalism.

Wider national and international expansion, however, resulted from the Azusa Street revival that began in 1906 at the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Its leader, William Seymour, a one-eyed Holiness church pastor and former member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had been exposed to Parham’s teachings at a Bible school in Houston, Texas. Under Seymour’s guidance, the old frame building on Azusa Street became a great spiritual center that for many years attracted rich and poor, Blacks, whites, and Latinos, as well as many preachers whose own ministry had become staid.

Spiritually energized and convinced that they had been charismatically endowed, scores of men and women from Azusa and other Pentecostal churches began extolling the reality of speaking in tongues. Pentecostal Christians were linked only by an amorphous “spiritual union,” in part because no thought was given to forming a separate “Pentecostal” branch of the Christian church. As members of the historic Protestant churches embraced Pentecostal beliefs and practices, they did so without any intention of withdrawing from their own churches. They merely wanted to be agents of reform and revival, helping to rid their churches of formalism and worldliness. They strove to transform their congregations into Spirit-filled communities like those described in the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles. Moreover, they fully expected the prophetically promised “latter rain” (from the Book of Joel, an outpouring of the Spirit of God before the final judgment) to fall upon their churches and make them wholly Pentecostal.

One branch of Pentecostalism is the Assemblies of God, the one mother and daughter Sumrall were missions for when they built the church in Ferriday. The denomination is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, South America, Australia, and Africa. It was formed in 1914 by a union of several small Pentecostal groups at Hot Springs, Arkansas. The council of some 120 pastors and evangelists who effected this union among diverse regional associations adopted a simple type of polity that was an admixture of Congregational and Presbyterian elements. The council elected an Executive Presbytery to serve as the central administrative group; this organ was empowered to execute the mandates given it by the General Council and to act for the council in all matters that affected its interest when it was not in session.

Despite their slow but steady expanse into American religious experience, most Americans remain unaware of the specific beliefs of their “AoG” neighbors. Except for a pronouncement that “the Holy inspired Scriptures are the all-sufficient rule for faith and practice…and we shall not add to or take from them,” that first General Council postponed action on the matter of a definitive doctrinal statement. The lack of a doctrinal statement was not the enthusiastic welcoming of difference on minor details to the Gospel, but instead an angry compromise between furious aspiring theologians who could not even agree on the nature, extent, type, or substance of the crucifixion, the central event of Christianity. Some believed speaking in tongues was the singular evidence of God’s presence in the life of a believer, others that it was only the initial evidence, another that it was optional and not at all indicative of one’s spiritual life or closeness to God, only to have another interject and insist that tongues needed to be downplayed as a “second work of grace” after salvation only to have the entire conference begin a new debate over the term “second work.” The initial meeting was hotly contentious and the Fundamental Truths were as far as the founders were able to go in their confederacy. The Truths were loose, lacking the specificity necessary to define the new denomination and to differentiate it from the expanding multitude of other options at the start of the Twentieth Century. In practice, the Assemblies of God became ubiquitous, a civil religion united with the mainstream commonly held tenets of Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and Methodism. This was an intentional choice by the Presbytery of the Assemblies, to emphasize individuals as “good” and “nice” rather than what their members really were – loud, dramatic, and ecstatic. 

Outwardly, the denomination emphasized public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies as members of civil religion even as, privately and ecclesiastically, they adopted their Statement of Fundamental Truths. The document demonstrated that the Assemblies of God were Trinitarian (believing in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and Arminian (accepting the doctrines of grace and free will as espoused by the 16th–17th-century Dutch theologian Arminius). They also subscribed to two ordinances (baptism by total immersion in water and the Lord’s Supper), held a view of sanctification (becoming holy) that may be described as “progressive,” or gradual rather than “instantaneous” in regard to moral purity, and were strongly premillennial, believing in the doctrine of Christ’s Second Advent before the 1,000-year reign of Christ and his saints. There was not much to differentiate them from the other mainline denominations except that this emphasis on the “Second Advent” within a “premillennial” timeline of events belied an apocalyptic worldview, one which necessitates the destruction of the world by Jesus (and, implicitly, by believers like Assemblies of God members) to institute God’s Kingdom on Earth. 

From the outset, the Assemblies of God has been intensely mission-conscious. In addition to extensive foreign missions, the denomination conducts a diversified program of home missions among foreign-language groups in America’s urban centers, on Indian reservations, in prisons, and among the deaf and the blind. The denomination operates the Gospel Publishing House in Springfield, Missouri, two colleges of arts and science—Evangel University (also in Springfield) and Vanguard University of Southern California (Costa Mesa)—and a number of regional Bible institutes. But in 1943, none of this had come about just yet. The young denomination was still struggling to dignify itself and its members. Evangel University was not founded until 1955 and did not receive accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (now known as the Higher Learning Commission) until 1965. The Assemblies of God, along with Pentecostalism’s many sub-denominations and splinterings, endured several hurdles to becoming a part of the American religious experience. Mainline denominations like Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Baptists even now continue to smirk with condescending patience toward their brothers and sisters in Christ. It would take almost a century before they were accepted into mainstream America, emphasizing on strange tongues, prophecies, and the miraculous. If these experiences were so central to the Pentecostal experience, why hadn’t the denomination said as much when they were founded? Why did they spend over half a century downplaying the miraculous? Curiously, many Americans in the late Seventies were ready, even eager to hear about the supernatural within a Christian context.

Various ministries had tried to bring Pentecostalism and Pentecostal beliefs into the mainstream. They had been willing to suffer and experience ridicule for what they and their fellow Pentecostals believed to be true. Oral Roberts used radio and television specials, but could never escape his early ministry of tent revivals where he would lay hands on the sick, children crippled by polio or born that way. Roberts took a then-progressive approach to ministry. He was a white man who did not hesitate to touch colored people, even in the segregated South. He did not allow two healing lines, one for whites and another for people of color. While Roberts was able to build a large ministry, his greatest contribution to Pentecostalism was the constant pleading for money. Roberts claimed God had “revealed” a special message to him. According to Oral Roberts, the entire created order operated on the principle of “seed-faith.” Farmers would plant seeds and simply believe that a crop would grow for harvest. Couples – always married, of course – would have sex and could trust that they would have a child. Despite no visible evidence, a believer could trust that when they gave money to God (or, more directly, Oral Roberts), that God would reward them. It was a hard message for a generation raised during the Depression, but Roberts insisted this was why seed-faith made so much sense: they had survived because of previous “seeds” sown. Their survival was a testament to seed-faith; if believers wanted a big blessing, then they needed to “sow” a big donation to his ministry. God would never just give the believer something, would not bless them, unless they had first shown they were willing to make a sacrifice. The teaching was never doctrinally balanced. There was never a verifiable equation to understand God’s doings in the world. Sowing a small seed, making a small investment, could yield results, yet Roberts continued to insist that the believer needed to “make sacrifices”, always in the form of money. 

According to Oral Roberts, his ministry began when God spoke to him and he was healed of both tuberculosis and stuttering. In 1947, he conducted his first healing service in downtown Enid, Oklahoma where his healing ministry was launched. He then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he began to hold tent meetings until the 1950s, expanding his ministry through literature and the launching of his television ministry, before founding Oral Roberts University in 1963. While Roberts claimed the school was God’s doing, it was named after himself. 

Whatever authenticity there may have been in the original revelation to Oral Roberts, subsequent ministries – including that of his own son, Richard Roberts – would be defined by the constant calls for money, for cash, for checks, for credit cards, for donations, for wills and trusts, if they wanted God “to move” and “bless” them. Rex Humbard, Charles Capps, John Osteen and his son Joel, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, Creflo Dollar, and Joyce Meyer would all face serious scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission and Internal Revenue Service for soliciting money that, while ostensibly for the purposes of furthering God’s Kingdom, were found to support their opulent lifestyles. In the case of Richard Roberts and his wife, Lindsay, there were multiple violations. Richard had “inherited” the university and his father’s ministry, the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. In October 2007, three former professors filed a lawsuit against Oral Roberts University and named the entire ORU Board of Regents, Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, Roberts, his wife and several university administrators as co-defendants. As a part of the suit, additional allegations were made including university resources were illegally used by Roberts to help a mayoral candidate’s election campaign; Roberts misappropriated university funds for a daughter’s trip to the Bahamas; was maintaining a stable of horses at university expense for the exclusive use of his children; used university staff to do his daughters’ homework; remodeled his university-owned residence 11 times in 14 years; allowed the university to be billed for damage inflicted by his children to a university-owned golf cart; and personally acquired a Mercedes and a Lexus through ministry donations. The suit pointed out that in 2007, Richard was entitled to $12,952,755, but had spent $14,966,687 leaving a deficit of $-2,013,932. Publicly showing the accounting work, it was revealed that Richard “earned” $477,122 a year as president and CEO while his wife Lindsay “earned” $196,818 a year as executive vice president. Curiously, Oral Roberts earned $161,872 a year as trustee despite making no public appearances and serving in no ministerial capacity. A month after the initial filing, a wrongful termination lawsuit was filed against the university by a former ORU accountant, Trent Huddleston, who was employed for less than one year. Huddleston claimed he had been ordered to help Roberts and his wife “cook the books” by misclassifying over $120,000 in funds, allegedly spent by the university on remodeling the university home that Roberts lived in. 

For Pentecostals in the Forties and Fifties though, the original teaching of Seed-Faith made sense. It was based on an agrarian way of life, was practical and familiar to fieldworkers and farmers who could see the impact of Roberts’ ministry in their lives. Roberts continually reminded his supporters that he wanted something better for the next generation. He sent them vials of anointing oil and prayer cloths as “points of contact.” When Oral Roberts University was founded, it was the fulfillment of his promise to build a university where God would be honored.

Every Saturday of his childhood, Jimmy would go to the movies. One Saturday in the summer of 1943, while standing in line to buy a ticket, “all of a sudden, the Spirit of God spoke to my heart and said, ‘Don’t go into this place. Give your heart to Me. You are a chosen vessel to be used exclusively in My service.” The pressure to become something remarkable, a chosen vessel for God, had become so overwhelming that the boy could no longer enjoy his weekly escape. 

Jimmy returned home that summer afternoon, having abandoned the matinee to answer the call of God. He promptly informed his mother that he was saved now just like the rest of the Swaggart family. God had even called him, told him that he was special. God had given her what she had prayed for, what the entire family had wanted for the last year. Jimmy had even given up his beloved matinee, a true sacrifice from one so innocent. 

This origin story, the one presented by Swaggart, is important because it speaks directly to the disenfranchisement many Americans felt coming out of World War II. If Rosenberg’s assertions about the parasocial relationship are valid – and by all appearances across multiple fandoms from music to television to comics, stand-up comedy, fashion, and celebrity culture will attest, it is – then Swaggart’s ability to identify with the disenfranchised, to speak for them and express their anger, their cynicism and demand for capitalized Truth is embodied in the seedbed of Swaggart’s stories. He is a nobody, forgotten by those in power at the end of a dirty road in a backwoods town. He wasn’t born into privilege or wealth, although it was there at the periphery just out of reach. His parents did not benefit from the largesse of extended family. When he was old enough, Swaggart was similarly unable to benefit from the wealth of his near cousin, one who was “more like a brother than anything else” to him. Even when his chance at freedom came in the form of a promised contract with “the world” at Sun Records, Swaggart refused. His character would not allow compromise. In interviews, one can feel the pieces of his origin stories expressed, the contempt palpable and justified.

Continued in Chapter 2