by Randall S. Frederick

Self-invention is one of the defining qualities of Americans. Since the first settlements began to appear along the Eastern seaboard, the people of this country have defined themselves in terms of the narratives they construct around them. The popular myth of settlers arriving at Plymouth Rock and peacefully engaging in a bounteous feast with the First Peoples is almost entirely false. Even knowing this, Americans continue to educate their children with colorful cut-outs of smiling Whites and red-skinned Natives, hoping that the lessons of peace, equality, and abundance with enough for all will take hold and rectify centuries of injustice. When a narrative’s inaccuracies are exposed, rather than confront the “alternative truths”, Americans prefer to build upon them further. Plymouth Rock, which was never the first settlement in America, instead becomes the first Christian settlement in America. As for the French and Indian War, the “savages” were being exploited by the “dirty” French and a righteous, godly people rose to “liberate” them and defend this “holy” land. The history books of Texas and Louisiana and Florida depict the horrors of African enslavement on this continent before the Civil War as “domestic laborers” to protect the false belief of the Lost Cause and State’s Rights. The Lost Cause and various other mythologies used to enshrine White Supremacy have been exposed as anachronistic, false, outright deceptive, not supported by documents or other means of corroboration time and time again, but each exposure only rallies the ignorant to double-down on the narratives they prefer.

Jimmy Swaggart, as a preacher, as a radio and television evangelist, as a recording artist, as a pastor, as an author, as anything approaching success would not have reached the heights of fame he reached without Frances Anderson. This claim is unimpeachable. From the moment the two met in 1952, she was his metaphorical backbone as well as his central nervous system. She believed in him, for him, with him, and kept him disciplined and in shape literally as well as figuratively. While Jimmy Swaggart has had competing narratives swirl around him for decades  – righteous, angry, sinner, easy to laugh, friend, driven, pervert, compassionate, driven, lazy, zealous, critical, lachrymose – at the core, Frances was his guiding star. As he said repeatedly over the years, he would have died without her in his life. At his lowest, she was his champion and reason to live. At his highest, she was the only one who understood what he came from and what he was capable of still. Part of her belief in Jimmy came from intuition. She felt, she knew, that he was different. He was special.

Frances had, presumably, first heard about Jimmy through Sun’s preaching. Though he was a hard father toward his son, Sun loved Jimmy dearly. Much of his frustration came about because he believed so much in the boy, remembered Jimmy’s early call to ministry. Sun wanted to see him fulfill that call, not see it wither away like so many of Sun’s dreams had once he got too old to believe in himself. Jimmy was miserable and Sun could tell. Everyone could. Sun would convince him to get out of town, to travel with him and play music. Even Jerry Lee agreed to do it, so what was so wrong about asking Jimmy to come along? The boy had talent and he would lose it if he sat around long enough. Sun knew his son wanted something more than Ferriday had to offer. He related, probably more than anyone could. He knew his son’s pain intimately as his own. And Sun knew, as had been the case for him, that the longer Jimmy refused the call of God, the more he would continue to suffer. Sure, Sun finally got saved and spoke in tongues and began to minister, but he had lost so much time. He wanted more for Jimmy. After all, Sun knew about Jimmy’s other visions, the ones that were not as public as Jimmy’s oracle to the congregation there in Ferriday, the one about bombs in Japan. Other visions and dreams were about the boy in ministry, traveling the world. In another one, the boy had seen a spinning globe right outside their home. Wasn’t that proof enough that Jimmy needed to get out and make something of himself already?

He didn’t push Jimmy to date, though. Prayers and punishment had not straightened the boy out, and a relationship surely wouldn’t help Jimmy. Shoving the boy off on someone else, making him someone else’s problem, was something of a punishment. If anything, Jimmy was becoming more childish instead of growing up. He had quit school a few years earlier, but continued going so that he didn’t have to admit his “laziness” or another “failure” to his father. Sun knew, though. Everyone did once Jimmy began working at his grandfather’s grocery store during the school hours, to say nothing of how cavorting with Jerry Lee had eroded the boy’s manners and morals. Jimmy knew that his parents knew, resentful that they hadn’t confronted him and made him do the right thing, too focused on “God” and building churches to force Jimmy to finish his education. But Sun wanted his son to own up to what he had done, the wreckage he was making of his pitiful life. Frustration and resentment brewed in the silence between them, creating a divide that would last the rest of their lives and which caused Jimmy’s sullenness to be reshaped into an explosive temper. In short, Jimmy was not a prize to be won in Sun’s sermons. He was the rebellious prodigal, if anything. Minnie Bell didn’t want to contradict her husband, so she did her best to stay out of it. But Jeanette loved her brother, believed in him, and felt differently. Her encouragement finally roused Jimmy’s curiosity enough to at least visit Wisner, to walk through church doors again if only to see who this girl she kept talking about. 

Mama and daddy had always complained about my appearance. I was a sloppy dresser. I wouldn’t comb my hair. Being almost like corn silk, it was difficult to comb and make stay… But immediately after seeing Frances Anderson, I decided it was time to start sprucing up. Jerry Lee, on the other hand, had always been the Beau Brummell of Ferriday. Now it was my turn. It didn’t take me long to get acquainted with Frances Anderson, and it wasn’t long before we were sitting in church together… Frances’ parents were against us dating but I was able to talk her mother into it. Her parents were concerned about her getting involved with me. They held a poor opinion of Pentecostals, though they went to church infrequently and knew very little about them (To Cross a River 63-64).

Frances’ uncle attended Sun’s church in Wisner, which was how she and Jimmy came to meet one another. Like Jeanette, he saw the potential for something important between the two and would tease Frances that she was “going to wind up marrying that preacher’s son.” Frances wasn’t so sure. Jimmy’s temper made her afraid at times, reminding her too much of the home she wanted to leave. He was rebellious to everyone – her parents as well as his own. He gambled. His cousin was wild. He was poor, from a poor family, and couldn’t even manage to finish high school. After three months of seeing one another, Jimmy bought a marriage license. She was 15 to his 17, so Jimmy had to lie on the paperwork. Another strike against him. Frances told him “she didn’t know if she could live with me and all my problems. Yet, we still talked about getting married, as if we were being guided by some unseen force” (65). When they told their parents, Minnie Bell asked if they knew what they were doing. She didn’t think Jimmy was mature enough to get married and would have known that marriage at such an early age would limit both of them in ways they could not yet understand. Sun’s concern was how Jimmy would support someone else on his pitiful wages at the grocery store. 

“The world’s too big for me not to be able to make a living,” I cockily answered. They were not convinced. In fact, daddy refused to marry us because Frances’ parents wouldn’t give their consent. We had no choice but to ask a local Baptist pastor, whose daughter was a friend, to perform the ceremony. I borrowed mama’s ring one Friday night and we were married in a quiet home ceremony. Afterwards I took Frances home and I went to mine.

The next day I went out to explain the situation to Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Frances’ mother was the only one home and I briefly explained that we had gotten married the night before. The room was deathly silent as I spoke. To say she was upset was putting it mildly. All her plans for Frances finishing school and going on to college had been torpedoed by one wild son of a Pentecostal preacher.

Frances and I moved in temporarily with mama and daddy until I could find work. It was a frustrating time. At night, when daddy held devotions for the family, I refused to go. People in the church were constantly asking me to play the piano and that made things worse. The one time in my life when I should have been the happiest, I was the most miserable (65-66).

Frances’ reservations may have been more extensive than Jimmy admitted in the authorized biography written by Lamb, To Cross a River (1977), or his own autobiography, Amazing Grace (2018). In her sprawling biography, Swaggart (1999), Anne Rowe Seaman interviewed several members of the Swaggart, Gilley, and Lewis families. Jimmy and Jerry Lee were not merely stealing bottles from their uncle and returning the bottles for loose change. Even Jimmy’s turn toward stealing baling wire, urging Jerry Lee they could find an eventual use for it was a highly redacted version of those events. The two, “along with several other boys… stole hubcaps and took batteries in cars; Jerry Lee was caught stealing a gun and was suspected of stealing a motorbike.” The two broke into homes and local stores, they “stole jewelry and watches from places like Rexall Drug and the newly opened Hollis Jewelry on Louisiana Avenue.” Some of Jimmy’s initial crimes were out of boredom, but as he got older and more experienced, it was a way to “work through his father’s miserliness” and develop a nest egg for himself, to welcome himself into adulthood (104). His father and mother, though they may have been good Christians, did not expressly stop Jimmy from continuing his criminal activities because the additional money was welcome in the home. Jimmy’s sullenness, his refusal to go to church, the resentment and smirking disgust toward his parents was more than rebellion. He was sharpening his critique of hypocritical religion, those who averted their eyes from willful, intentional sin if it benefitted them. Even if he no longer attended church and had begun to question his own salvation, the ways that he continued to disappoint God, his parents, and now sometimes Frances, he believed people should at least be honest about it and stop pretending. Things were not alright. Evidently. Everyone else could see that. Why pretend? Why lie about it? 

By the time Jimmy met Frances, he may very well have found someone he thought was beautiful, but together with this, he found someone who was willing to call him out on his bullshit. Who was brave enough to tell him what he was doing was wrong – even if it was fun, even if he got away with it, even if it was profitable. Frances was a hard woman, even as a child bride. She would have known, while Jimmy presented his childhood as poor and pitiable stuck in the backwoods of Ferriday, that he often took rides with Jerry Lee along Highway 61, the “Blues Highway.” 

Highway 61’s hotels had become notorious brothels after the repeal of Prohibition. It connected New Orleans to Baton Rouge before moving upwards to Ferriday before working up the Eastern borders of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. A short twenty-minute drive along U.S. 425 on their way to 61 would bring the boys through Natchez, Mississippi, where Miss Nellie Jackson, the “Madam of Natchez”, oversaw a house full of girls. It was not unknown to Jerry Lee and Jimmy; allegedly, one of their relatives worked there as a young girl and Nellie Jackson presented one of the Gilleys with a wedding gift in the 1940s. Curiously, Highway 61 would play a prominent role in Jimmy’s life at the end of the Eighties. The section of US 61 from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is known to locals as Airline Highway. Although the road fronts the former terminal of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and passes near Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, the name originally referred to the highway’s straight route in contrast to that of the winding Jefferson Highway, which paralleled the Mississippi River. Legend has it that former Louisiana Governor Huey Long advocated the construction of the “airline” highway to provide him with a quick means of access from the capitol building in Baton Rouge to the bars and other pleasure establishments in New Orleans. In 1987, On Airline Highway in Jefferson Parish in 1987, Baton Rouge televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was discovered exiting the Travel Inn, located on Airline Highway in Jefferson Parish, after seeing a prostitute. This incident increased the area’s reputation as a locale of “seedy motels”. Partly because of that reputation, the section in Jefferson Parish was later renamed Airline Drive. 

As for Jimmy’s self-professed voracious appetite for reading, visiting the school library to continue his education with magazines and comicbooks after he had stopped attending, it is highly probable that he became with National Geographic which regularly published photographs of bare-breasted ‘natives’, even possibly discovered nudist magazines along with the other “rot and filth” he would come to rail against in his sermons. Jerry Lee’s travels and Jimmy’s proximity to U.S. 61, the boys surely would have discovered

“Tijuana Bibles”, little booklets of drawings of popular cartoon characters engaged in various sex acts – Maggie and Jiggs, Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, Lil’ Abner and Daisy Mae, Nancy and Sluggo (and Aunt Fritzi), Archie and Veronica. Legitimate places to actually learn about sex were virtually nonexistent. Parents spoke in disapproving code and kids guessed among themselves the meaning…

“I wouldn’t want this attributed to me,” said a family member, “but Jimmy and Jerry Lee went to one of those houses of ill repute [ in Natchez] when they were about 13 or 14.” Whether the boys did anything or just got cooed over by the women was not known (Seaman 105, 107). 

There was something to this last bit. What reading material Jimmy would have picked up, perused, become accustomed to is speculative. It is almost certain, considering the wide circulation of the magazine and the colonial mindset Jimmy expressed in his crusades during the Eighties that he was familiar with National Geographic. Tijuana Bibles were incredibly likely. If his anonymous family members are to be believed, the entire family – yes, including Jimmy – frequented prostitutes. During the Holy Wars in the late 1980s, fellow televangelists Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson (who was running for President at the time and trying desperately to disassociate himself from his fellow televangelists) shared that Swaggart had confessed to them at different times that, yes, his first sexual experiences had been with prostitutes when he was a young boy. Oral Roberts claimed that Swaggart had tearfully admitted he had been traumatized by the experience, that it had forever marked him and remained a source of shame. When Swaggart was discovered in New Orleans with a prostitute and again in California years later, there was a pattern of sin, to borrow the Apostle Paul’s language in Second Corinthians, “confirmed by the mouth of two or three witnesses.” The public’s judgement against Swaggart may have been harsh, but it was not arbitrary. “One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established,” according to Deuteronomy 19. 

As Seaman tells it, Swaggart was “a Pentecostal boy [who] still had to find outlets for sexual arousal.” He was constrained by his family, his faith, and his sense of calling. Marriage and the promised sexual convenience it offered, forming his own family on his own terms – one who would not abandon him like his parents had done, and the immediate feeling of having reached a milestone, any milestone after he had dropped out of school, would have proven overwhelming. 

With the money he made working at the grocery, Jimmy would often spend his evenings at Red’s Pool Hall or playing piano with Jerry Lee. He learned to gamble on slot machines at his aunt Eva’s cafe, where he took meals each night when his parents abandoned him for ministry. He was pretty good at placing bets at the pool hall too, but all of this – gambling, sin, thievery, worldly music with smoking and drinking at the periphery – was the kind of world Frances would have wanted to avoid, having grown up in an ungodly, alcoholic home like hers. She would have seen something in Jimmy, namely that for all his tough talk and life of crime after sundown, he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t like Jerry Lee, for whom violence and breaking the law came naturally. Jerry Lee had to work hard, so terribly hard at being good. Jimmy was the other side of the mirror, one for whom goodness came naturally. He had to work at it, really struggle, to do anything bad to someone else. And even when he did, he would become apologetic, cry, find a way to make restitution. One day, while Jimmy and his cousins were hanging around downtown, they witnessed the barber who cut their hair get into a fight with a customer. It wasn’t uncommon for people in a small town like theirs to get angry with one another, to begin shouting. This day though, things went further than usual. The barber tried to stab the patron, who fled down the street. The cousins stood by while the barber caught up to the patron and killed him right there, in front of God and everybody. The trauma of witnessing this event produced two very different reactions. Jerry Lee chuckled that the patron probably deserved it. Jimmy became silent, withdrew into himself, and went home. He cried for the rest of the night.

Jimmy’s reluctance to share any of these details in Lamb’s biography of him, and especially his own autobiography, are not surprising. Frances always took a strong hand in shaping the narrative around her husband. She was his wall, his protector, and his strongest advocate. She knew his predilictions and weaknesses. She knew, long before Oral Roberts or any of his fellow televangelists, long before the missionaries and ministers who relied on Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, what Jimmy’s disposition toward sin looked and sounded like. She knew what was at stake here. To fulfill the call of God on Jimmy’s life, on Frances’s life, on their lives together, they would need to build an impenetrable fortress. From him, Frances needed hard work leading to success and, her ultimate goal, financial security. There was a reason she wanted to study accounting at college, after all. It was not to be an intellectual exercise with imagined fortunes. She wanted to be protected from the devastation her family and the parents of her friends recounted to her of the Great Depression. She wanted more than the hand to mouth life she had been born into, a life of travel and opportunity, something more than the world around her had to offer. If Jimmy did what she told him to, she would provide the rigidness and intense schedule he needed to fulfill his own dreams of saving the world and singing. All he had to do was show up, to preach, to sing, to do what she told him to do. That was it. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome and tall along with being a talented musician. These qualities would carry him far – look at Jerry Lee! – but what Jimmy needed to succeed where Jerry Lee had failed was discipline. Jimmy needed someone to protect him from himself, especially after witnessing the wreckage Jerry Lee made of things. Self-destruction took many forms, but Jimmy – like his father – was prone to squandering, wasting his energy on lost causes. All of his talents would be left to squander, just like his father, without someone like Frances. In return for her protection and handling  all of the details Jimmy was terrible at managing, Frances wanted a way out of North Louisiana. She wanted the protection of a secure life, where finances were no longer an issue, where alcohol and abuse and hard living and disappointment could be left behind for something meaningful. She wanted to know, really know, that Jimmy would do what she told him to do. Would he let her manage him? Would his ego allow for that? The obvious fact remains that once Jimmy’s parents abandoned him to pursue their ministry, he searched for someone to mother him. Someone who would allow him to continue making mistakes, but would still confront him about them. Someone who would protect him, or at least recognize the scared little boy in a man’s body he had become.

Jimmy had drifted away, but he was set up to come back. His parents and grandmother had cultivated a habit of isolation in him by insisting that he set himself apart from his peers at a young age. He had a way of dealing with pornography, masturbation, and the guilt they caused – splitting them off and giving them a room of their own in his head. He’d had a secret life for years, starting with his forbidden trips to Nannie’s and his nighttime thefts with Jerry Lee. Now he was an unsupervised young teen in a rough, raw town. Everything was in place for the development of a self-feeding obsession with sex (107).

Frances’ reluctance to marry Jimmy compelled him to change. Though she may have been diminutive in stature, Frances legitimately scared him; when she expressed her doubts, Jimmy changed. She was a demanding taskmaster, but he saw the fruit of her labor so he set his ego aside to become who she wanted him to be. It was an effect that no one and no thing else could bring about. Not even God, it turned out. 

God called us for world evangelism when I was eight years of age. At that time, I didn’t really know what world evangelism was. All I knew was missionaries, and I didn’t know much about them. But God gave me a dream when I was about ten years old. In that dream, I found myself standing out in front of our house up in northeast Louisiana. I looked to my right, and I saw a replica of the globe, about the size of a basketball, and I knew it was this planet, Earth, suspended in space. It turned, slowly, and I could see the continents on it. As I looked, it did not seem strange to me that this thing was just hanging in space with nothing to hold it up.

Then, all of a sudden, I saw a figure standing under it, a little bit off to the side, looking up at the globe. Instantly, I knew the figure was Satan, but somehow there was no fear. I looked at him as he stood staring at the replica of Earth. Then he turned, looked at me, and said, “You will not do it. I will stop you.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. What did he mean? At the time, I didn’t know, but since then I have come to know exactly what he meant. Satan turned back and looked at the globe again for a period of time. Then he turned back at me and said the same identical words again: “You will not do it. I will stop you.”

I came to learn through the years that God had given us a commission for world evangelism, to touch this world for Christ. (“The Lord of the Harvest.” The Evangelist, Feb. 2020)

Jimmy often used the plural to refer to Frances and himself. To his mind, she was as much a part of his ministry as he was. From the beginning, she was there with him offering thoughts and opinions offstage, noting what worked and where he made mistakes. She worked the congregations and crowds for him, promoting his albums and selling them from the trunk of their car. She ran defense against his critics or those who insinuated Jimmy was the lesser-talented cousin, promoting him and offering just enough behinds-the-scenes insight into the family to keep people curious. Women were an important part of Pentecostalism’s early success and Frances was encouraged regularly by her family as well as Jimmy’s to see her husband’s ministry as her own. As Frances recalled,

Growing up, we always had men pastors, but it was the women we remember as the ones touching God through the power of prayer; the ones who couldn’t wait to tell somebody about the Lord; the ones always bubbling over with excitement in the Lord; and the ones who could get you down on your knees praying before you even knew what happened. I’m thinking of my husband’s grandmother, who was a woman preacher when women preachers were rare; and her sister, Mickey Gilley’s mother, Irene. These women were always talking about the Lord and did so with such joy.

We also remember Sister McGoughlin—a tremendous Christian who had a difficult time at home with an unsaved husband, but no one knew about that because she, like these other women I mentioned, never complained about anything. They didn’t talk about themselves or gossip about others. They simply loved the Lord, believed Him with unfeigned faith, and influenced an entire generation of believers (Facebook, 24 July 2023).

After the birth of their son Donnie, Frances raised the child and taught him from the front seat of the car when they traveled. She oversaw Jimmy’s schedule, booking him at churches and revivals, rallies and meetings. She handled sales and finances in general, signing all the checks, booking his next appearance, screening calls, making sure he ran and exercised, that he ate healthy. She booked the studio for his next recording, ordered new pianos, oversaw logistics as the ministry expanded, conducted informal research to see where they needed to go on the air next, implementing long-term strategies to make sure her husband was the biggest name in Evangelicalism. She kept her husband disciplined and focused, alert and successful. He was only able to fulfill the call of God on his life, he recognized, because she willed it into being. Jimmy preached. He sang. He showed up when she said to show up. He did what he told her to do and accepted her harshness  as part of the trade they had made. While both may have paid lip service to the Spirit of God as the fire and fuel to their ministry, if there was ever an engine to the forward movement Jimmy’s life began to take once they met, Frances was it. She made everything that he would become possible and brought it to life.

In another world, one where Frances never saw his potential and began the process of refining him, Jimmy would have stayed in Ferriday. He would have become hard and bitter, eventually cracked like everyone else. He might have turned to the bottle like Jerry Lee, finally gotten frustrated with his failed life. He might have begun to play the honky-tonks against his better judgment. He might have done his best to be good and married a pastor’s daughter like Jerry Lee had done, someone other than Frances. Maybe it would have lasted longer than Jerry Lee’s first marriage to Dorothy Barton. Jimmy was not the vicious abuser that his cousin was, controlling others through violence and intimidation. He was too sensitive for that. But like Jerry Lee, a marriage to anyone other than Frances would have eventually ended. 

In this life though, in this world, he did marry Frances. Once she laid claim to him, his life was decided. Women always had an important role in Swaggart’s life, every step of the way for good or for ill. Every critical point of his life, from salvation (at the insistence of his mother) to being filled with the Holy Spirit and speaking on tongues (with the encouragement and patience of his grandmother) to marriage (Frances) to the birth of his music career (Frances nudging then demanding Jimmy record something) to his moral failures (Debra Murphee, the New Orleans prostitute) to lawsuits (brought about because Frances refused to compromise) to the rebirth of his ministry (again, Frances) has been brought about through a woman.

It was with this in the shadowed corners of their minds that they married and began their lives together. Divorce was never an option; the only way forward was together. The two were married in 1952 and shortly thereafter Jimmy left the grocery store for something more lucrative, but far dirtier. He took a job as a swamper on a dragline, an unskilled assistant who did odd jobs. Basically, whatever needed done. Dirt and grime were the marks of hard work and while Jimmy had done his best to avoid such work for the first seventeen years of his life, Frances urged him on.

With so much change in Jimmy’s life and now Frances’ constant need for structure and order, it was inevitable that Jimmy would circle back to his place in ministry. Without irony, history had already begun repeating itself in a new generation. In January 1953, Vincent Roccaforte – the same evangelist who had convinced Sun and Minnie Bell to receive salvation years earlier – visited Wisner and, as he had done before with Jimmy’s parents, did his best to now convince Jimmy to answer the call to salvation, the call to ministry, to open his heart and answer God. Jimmy, every bit his father’s son, rejected anything having to do with God. To Jimmy’s mind, getting saved would just be an inconvenience. If he got saved, “I would have to go to church every time the doors opened. I would have to quit shooting pool. I would have to give up the movies. I would have to give up some of my ideas for making money. I might even have to go to the youth rallies” which were popular at the time through the ministry of evangelist Billy Graham. “The last was the worst of all. I hated those meetings” (67). 

Jimmy walked out into the center aisle, he walked to the front of the church, and he said that he felt tremendous relief finally agreeing to salvation all over again as a young adult. But as soon as he turned away from the altar and returned to the church pew, he regretted what he had done. He began to think of ways he could continue to live life on his own terms. He may have made another break for it, taken another decade wandering through the wilderness of youth were it not for Frances. In this life, in this world, Jimmy became what his young wife required. He cut his hair, showered after every day of labor, and walked the aisle. He got saved anyway.

A large part of this reluctance to get saved had nothing to do with selfishness or the confidence of youth. Jimmy had set aside his early zeal for God and the ministry not because it was dull, but because it was too exciting. As a boy in Ferriday, he grew up ashamed of his parents and even his beloved grandmother. 

His grandfather felt the woman was legitimately crazy, after all, and when Sun and Minnie Bell were baptized in the Holy Spirit as well, began shouting and dancing like Sun’s mother had done, the town began to notice. The entire family was crazy, that was a given, but the Swaggarts had adopted a religion that attracted the whispered judgement of a Southern town. His family as much as his religion had only brought shame and further ridicule that an adult Jimmy wanted to avoid. Giving his life to God would only repeat the process, repeat the history that his self-centered life wanted to avoid. 

The old-fashioned Pentecostal way was not understood by the world. They thought we were crazy. They thought we were out of our minds. They called us holy rollers, kooks, fanatics. You listening to me? We were looked down on. Wrong side of the tracks. When I was eight years old, nine years old, I would say, “God, why aren’t my parents Baptists? Why aren’t they Methodists? Presbyterian? Lutheran? Anything but what I am!” because when I went in school, they would ask, “What religion?” 

I would say Assembly of God, what we happened to belong to. “Never heard of that.” They would always make some remark. “What?!” They never said that to a Baptist kid. “What is that?!” she would say – always women teachers, they didn’t have many men. 

“Well, it’s -” I’m eight years old, nine years old, what am I going to say? “It’s church.”

“What kind?” I would never answer and they would always answer for me, “Ohhh! Holy roller!” 

I would get so embarrassed. I would get so embarrassed as a kid. At our church, you never knew what was gonna happen… I was raised in that. [And] many a night, [I would] come in after midnight, drunk in the Holy Ghost, speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gave the utterance and the power of God all over me (Campmeeting sermon, 2 July 1987).

Accepting Roccaforte’s call to salvation, as his parents had done years before, was far more complicated than it appears in hindsight. Decades after the fact, it seems inevitable. Jimmy’s rebellion was an attempt to act out, express frustration, but he would always return to God; of course one of the most famous Christian evangelists of the Twentieth Century would get saved. It was always going to be the case. Except salvation, or the call to salvation anyway, is terribly complicated. For the Evangelical, merely saying the words “I do” at the altar of salvation is enough to secure an amazing life of joy, victory, and success in this life and the next, an eternal life free from complication or challenge. Accepting salvation, like marriage, is a joyous event with promised blessings, plural, forever after. No problem can ever arise that would threaten the life of love, joy, peace, and happiness that a believer experiences.

Life does not work like that, though. While Jimmy was often cast as a simple bumpkin from the backwoods of Nothing, Nowhere, he was very intelligent who measured all the angles. It was a skill that made him good at shooting pool. He knew this message was false. All he had to do was look around at his own family. For all the hollow promises that his father, mother, and grandmother so loudly proclaimed there were the unanswered prayers of his Uncle Elmo and Aunt “Mamie” Lewis concerning Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee’s rebellion was no rebellion at all. It was who he was, until the end. It was a reaction to the life he had been born into, taking action to find a way out rather than – as had been the case with so many of their family members – languish away into miserable bitterness with the false promises of religion. Jimmy, even as a boy, knew that the promises of eternal joy and relief from daily misery made by visiting evangelists and even the pastor of the First Assembly of God in Ferriday were flatulence. Hadn’t any of these good people read the Bible, like he had? Jesus died. Paul was beaten near to death. John was a political prisoner in exile. David’s family turned against him. The apostles made mistakes and had just as many failures to their name as successes. Salvation made no promise of peace and happiness, to the contrary it promised suffering. Marriage, like salvation, was a hard row to plow and Jimmy had always avoided the field when he could. It would take an act of God to get him saved because the pantomime theater of hollow religioisity held no interest for him. Jimmy was not avoiding God. He was avoiding himself. His family. His future. His destiny. Getting married and repeating the mistakes he had observed in the unhappiness of the people around him. He was avoiding the inevitable, multi-directional criticism that walking the aisle would bring into his life. The decision to get saved, which seems clear and defined and simple in a provincial way after the fact, held no promise of security or stability and he was sharp enough to see that. To the contrary, at least in Jimmy’s estimation, salvation necessitated the upheaval of one’s entire life. Even then, there were no guarantees. 

Pentecostalism made great claims to the miraculous, but Jesus assured his audiences that “Many will say to me on the day of judgement, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?’ And then will I turn to them and say, ‘I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity’” (Matthew 7). No part of the believer’s life can be left unexamined in salvation, no part conveniently overlooked to protect some secret sinful part of one’s life. Authentic salvation, the kind described by Jesus and Paul and the Apostles in scripture, the kind described by the Early Church Fathers, demanded and continues to demand far more than a pledge to commit. Salvation, like marriage, would eradicate one’s entire existence and replace it with something unknown. Pentecostalism, the religion Jimmy knew and had grown up with, had been languishing away in small towns like Ferriday in much the same way that marriage was eroding all across America. If it was going to mean anything, then it needed to be taken seriously. 

Kitty Calavita, author of Invitation to Law & Society (2016), offers a story about two of her friends who became engaged. Everything was lovestruck joy and platitudes until the couple got about the business of writing a prenuptial agreement. The contract apparently diminished their saucer-eyed adoration of one another.

The prenup and the stress it is causing my friends, and the contradictions of looking for poetic love through calculated selection, remind me of Max Weber’s (1954) theory that in modern capitalist societies, rationality permeates all realms of human activity, including those that were once the province of other motivations. Rationality, Weber wrote, increasingly displaces tradition, religion, emotion, and other such forces as a primary motivator for human behavior. It’s the clash between romance and rationality that makes the prenup so stressful and that limits the romantic potential of online dating services, with their photo galleries of available mates.

For Weber, as reason and calculation increasingly motivate all human activity with the advent of modern society, law too becomes more rational. What he meant by this is that modern law is driven by logic and calculation rather than by irrational forces like oracles, tradition, or emotion. In the process of rationalization, law becomes more functionally insulated from other institutions, such as religion or politics, and is therefore more “autonomous.”

None of this is a coincidence. Instead, for Weber (1958), rationlization emerged with Calvinism – specifically the Calvinist principle of predestination. Imagine for a moment that you are a Calvinist who believes you are predestined by God from before birth to be a chosen one or to be damned for eternity. If chosen, you will spend your life on Earth blessed and live in an afterlife at the hand of God; if not, you will have a miserable life and, worse, a miserable eternity. In Weber’s view, this late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Calvinist idea of predestination produced an intolerable level of anxiety. In part to alleviate that anxiety, Calvinists searched for signs of being chosen. In looking for signs, they produced the very signs of the chosen life – hard work an the accumulation of wealth – they were looking for. This hard work, accumulation of wealth, and the frugal lifestyle that were taken as signs (presumably subliminally, since God kept his decisions to himself) were compatible with the emegrnece of capitalism, and all of the above were accompanied and facilitated by a calculating, reasoning mentality. So, there is an “elective affinity,” to use Weber’s term, between Calvinism, capitalism, and rationality.

If marriage was what Paul said it was, a mystery only understood by the commitment to living life with someone else, then it needed to be entered into with sobriety and seriousness. Only then would the promises prove true. Marriage, like salvation, was a contract and Jimmy’s reluctance or the delayed response he gave the entire matter of salvation as a young man may be better appreciated as him reading the fine print. After all, he and Frances remained married for the rest of their lives. Both of the Swaggarts seem to have understood they would see shattering, shameful days at some point. Both were acquainted with poverty and felt that if their love was sufficient during financial hardship it would sustain them during abundance. Jimmy was, in his own words, not as convinced when it came time to enter into contract with God but he was far more rational than his critics gave him credit for being, doing his best to embody an ideal rather than hastily agreeing and fighting it forever after.

Jimmy walked the aisle and got saved. He was right. The matter did not end there. The following year, in October of 1954, the couple had a son, Donnie. He was named after the child Jimmy’s parents had lost years before. Jimmy was, in a way, reclaiming the past and bringing it into the future. It did not end there, either. A few years later in 1958, Jimmy left a steady paycheck behind as his father had done when he was still in high school. He became an evangelist; he and Frances began traveling the South so that he could preach and sing. He didn’t exactly see success. He was young and quickly found that while his prophecies about the nuclear bomb were legendary in Ferriday and nowhere else. New audiences did not appreciate the Swaggart family, how miraculous it was that God would speak through of their clan. Most were simply incredulous about God speaking through a child about nuclear war, of all things. Miracles were possible, but come on, let’s not get carried away with the unbelievable. Jimmy was moving into a new world entirely, the minister instead of the one being ministered to, the preacher rather than the parishioner. These new audiences may not have fully appreciated where he came from, but they did appreciate the stories he offered of his cousin. By then, Jerry Lee was an internationally recognized superstar. His exploits pushed the frontier of acceptable behavior. Was it true Jerry Lee had really married his cousin? Yes, Myra was a delightful woman. What about Jerry Lee’s drug use? Sadly, true and proof that Jerry Lee was in the grips of Satan. Did Jerry Lee go to church? No, sadly, Jerry Lee was too enamored with fame and fortune to repent and hear the voice of God anymore; Jerry was running from God and living in sin, something about which Jimmy knew a great deal and had overcome through the saving power of Jesus Christ. These stories, along with Jimmy’s accordian and piano playing, became a draw wherever he preached. He was, in many ways, as close as some people would ever come to the world of celebrity, doling out stories in bite-sized pieces curated to show the difference between the two men. 

When Jerry Lee’s fame began to recede, Jimmy had another cousin to insult. The self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Nightclub”, honky-tonk, bar, rodeo, and concert arena Gilley’s of Pasadena, Texas, was founded by none other than Jimmy and Jerry Lee’s first cousin, Mickey Gilley. In a Portland, Maine crusade meeting on 9 July 1983, Jimmy shared that he had just spent time with Mickey. He loved his cousin. He had even gone to Gilley’s with him, they had a meal. He loved his cousin. Loved him dearly. But, as Mickey put it, despite the success of his own recording career and now the nightclub, he knew what he was doing was wrong. 

“I don’t know why people come… It’s dirty. It’s obscene. It’s putrid,” [Mickey] laughed and he said, “But I know why they come. It’s a place for girls to pick up boys and boys to pick up girls.” What am I saying? I’m saying the design of country music today is just as bad as hard rock.

Mickey may not have been actively sinning by founding the nightclub, Jimmy explained, but he had built a location where others would – drinking, carousing, womanizing, fornicating. Where girls picked up boys and boys picked up girls. Mickey helped others sin by providing them with alcohol and good times. Yes, Jimmy had been there. Many times. It was very fun, he would admit. Sin was like that, giving you a good time for a little while. Yes, Jimmy had been there. He had seen the alcohol, knew how much they sold each night. That was fun too, he could imagine. It was also a waste, for strong drink made even the wise lose their senses. Wine was a mocker, strong drink a brawler, “and whoever is led astray by it is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1). Mickey, like Jerry Lee, was still a good man but the capture of sin was intense on their family. Mickey had traded his good values for cheap and easy fame in the shadow of Jerry Lee, had sold himself for riches with bar. Jerry Lee was conflicted, violently so. The headlines people in the congregations and audiences attending Jimmy’s meetings probably knew all about all of that. What they didn’t know was that Jerry Lee had a tender heart and always had. He hadn’t lost his money wastefully, he actually helped people. He bought pianos for some of the churches Jimmy visited. He paid for people’s meals and gave money to beggars when he was out on the road. Jerry Lee and Mickey were still good men, and they would overcome their temptations but their struggle was evidence of how strong sin could truly be. Jimmy’s cousins were sinners in need of a savior, just like everyone else.

It was important to frame these stories as though his cousins were struggling, in the travails of suffering their way through to salvation. It gave Jimmy distance from outright condemning the two men he felt were like brothers to him, from having to face the full consequences of his condemnation the next time he saw them. Beyond this, those who attended Jimmy’s revivals, guest preaching, audiences, conferences, and camp meetings could relate to the suffering Jimmy related. They, like Jerry Lee and Mickey, weren’t bad people. They were sinners just like everyone else. Jimmy, in these stories, was above all of that. He had overcome the temptations Satan put before him; he was not led astray by riches, by fame, by anything. Jimmy had single-mindedly and devotedly given his life to Jesus. He was, in other words, possessed by God. As St. Jerome wrote in 395 to Nepotian, “Now, he who in his own person is the Lord’s portion, or has the Lord for his portion, must so bear himself as to possess the Lord and to be possessed by Him.” Jimmy had, even during his rebellious young adulthood, done as much. He bore himself as someone who was set apart, refusing to take part in Jerry Lee’s debauchery and abuse. Given an opportunity to play nightclubs, a guaranteed way to make money and do something more than sweep floors at his father’s grocery, Jimmy again refused. Married to Frances, he returns to what he had felt he ws supposed to do since he was a child. He began to preach. St. Jerome’s ancient letter to Nepotian continues,

He who possesses the Lord, and who says with the prophet, The Lord is my portion, can hold to nothing beside the Lord. For if he hold to something beside the Lord, the Lord will not be his portion. Suppose, for instance, that he holds to gold or silver, or possessions or inlaid furniture; with such portions as these the Lord will not deign to be his portion.

The irony here is that Nepotian would come to exemplify reliance on well-placed and wealthy family members, even defining the practice. Nepotism, the term derived from Neoptian’s example, is the practice of giving unfair advantages to relatives or friends in a workplace or field, such as by giving them jobs, promotions, or other benefits. In that same letter to Nepotian, St. Jerome adds, “A clergyman who engages in business, and who rises from poverty to wealth, or from obscurity to a high position, avoid as you would the plague.” 

Even the ancient members of the church knew there was an inherent threat to the work of the minister. Dual responsibilities, to prophesy and profiteer, were a threat to the Church as much as those who forgot where they came from or became insulated with wealth. 

Continued in Chapter 8