Swaggart: The Unauthorised Biography of an American Evangelist
By Ann Rowe Seaman
Continuum. 438 pages. £16.99 (hardback)
ISBN 0 8264 1117 7
Ann Seaman painstakingly records Jimmy Swaggart's rise from humble origins in rural Louisiana to a ministry that reached 500,000,000 people, and his public disgrace and its aftermath. Hers is a generous, sympathetic approach.
When the ministry was at its height, she points out, every letter was answered and every plea for help was referred to a trained counsellor, whether or not it contained money. She emphasises the Swaggart family's good (and costly) relationship with the black community: Sammy Davis Jr. 'was sure they were called nigger lovers'. God 'flowed through' Jimmy, she notes at one point. Time and time again she affirms his better side: 'Most of the humorous, affectionate things he did to make people feel a sense of belonging never got on television.'
Sexual repression
Her description of his fall is consequently all the more convincing. She is unsparing in her description of the sexual repression she attributes to the Assemblies of God among whom Jerry grew up. She makes a brilliant case for rock 'n' roll as the 'evil twin' of Pentecostalism, notably in the career of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, Swaggart's first cousin, and tells both stories in a terrible parallel. But more than that, she describes a ministry that became a monster: for example, it was only with the greatest reluctance that Swaggart decided to allow donations by credit card (he thought it wasn't good for the giver), but the thriving ministry (and his wife, superbly drawn here) demanded it.
Why did Swaggart fall? Seaman argues that he came to believe God was telling him what he wanted God to tell him. She sympathetically describes his early calling, but perceptively quotes William Martin: '(One) starts to say, 'God told me this. God told me that.' And the next step (is) . . . 'I think what God meant to say was . . . '.' She understands very well how one can stray from a vocation. At the end, Swaggart tried to tough it out in court, rewriting the history of his sins: but he had long lost touch with moral reality. Seaman comments: 'The outright license his church gave people to attribute every whim to God pretty much drowned out his real, true spirituality.' Like James Hogg's Justified Sinner he was able to keep his adultery and addiction to pornography in a compartment separate from his public ministry.
All this Ann Seaman understands and expounds magnificently. My reservation is that I wonder if she understands what a call of God is as well as she understands its corruption. She rightly criticises Swaggart for 'trivialising' God when he prayed for the car he wanted, and she memorably describes certain hymns as turning the Son of God into 'something like Santa's chief elf'. But I wondered how she would describe answered prayer in the way most EN readers would talk about it.
No accountability
Ultimately this is the story of people who should never have been where they were. There is no biblical model for the kind of empire Swaggart ruled; the biblical models of accountability didn't work in it. He fell from a platform he had only partly built himself. The author records one or two fellow-Christians who attempted to counsel him, but Swaggart was flying too high for that kind of counselling. 'Jimmy staked out an extreme position and judged everyone from it and then fell himself.' Part of the blame must lie with those who let him follow that path.
Of course it would be naive to think that a book like this gives you the 'truth' of the Swaggart story. What it does give you is the historical setting in which it happened, a sensitive and realistic study of the psychological states involved, and an application of these factors to Jimmy Swaggart's case. Such reading is sobering and, perhaps, a warning. Recommended.
