Praying and weeping

Jimmy Swaggart tripped up on his progress to Heaven

America’s most popular hellfire preacher of the 1980s died on July 1st, aged 90

Jul 10, 2025 03:13 PM

HE HAD BEEN there before. Ever since 1978—when in vision he stood at the portals of glory on the glassy sea, with the cherubim singing “Holy, Holy, Holy”; when he saw God sitting on the throne, and at His right hand his personal Redeemer, Jesus Christ—he knew things would not be straightforward. The scene was familiar, for it was there in Revelation, plain as day; but his feelings shocked him. He didn’t shout “Hallelujah!”, or fling up his arms in adoration and praise. He wasn’t overcome with gladness. Instead, his body shook until he fell to the ground.

What did he fear? And why? Few people in their lifetimes could have harvested more souls to be saved by the Blood of the Lamb. At the peak of his ministry in 1986 he was on more than 3,000 American local TV stations as well as cable, and transmitted to 140 countries. Dozens of his books were sold. Income from donations and merchandise was $500,000 a day. Every Sunday 7,500 souls packed his Family Worship Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and 100,000-seater stadiums were filled to capacity as he toured up and down the land. They came to watch him dance, and shout, and whisper, and weep; sing gospel songs at the piano in his ringing baritone; fall to his knees, speak in tongues. The Holy Spirit laid such burdens on his heart that it also filled the congregation, til they cried out and were slain with him. Even faithless onlookers, the secular humanists and the news media on their toboggan slide to Hell, said no one could hold a crowd as he could.

In an age of televangelists, he stood out. He was not one of those pompadoured pretty boys who called themselves preachers. He spoke the plain truth of the Bible to people who had turned their itching ears away (II Timothy, 4:4). Poverty brought him from the backwoods, preaching God’s word in the street and from flatbed trucks. In an ancient Plymouth he criss-crossed the South in the 1950s, making perhaps $30 a week, finding beds where he could. He anointed the sick with oil. If, after many devoted years, he had become a billionaire, with two Lincoln Town Cars, a private jet, an estate of 200 acres and a plantation-style house of 9,000 square feet; if he wore a gold Rolex encrusted with diamonds and had, in his master bedroom, a Jacuzzi with solid gold taps in the shape of swans, this was God’s reward for his faithfulness.

He had been at the service of the Holy Spirit since he was eight years old, when He spoke to him outside the Arcade Theatre in Ferriday, Louisiana as he waited to see a movie. The Spirit told him not to go in, and made the machine jam when he tried to pay. His father was already a part-time preacher in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, as well as a part-time grocer, trapper and bootlegger. As for him, he prepared for his calling by living cleanly; as well as praying hard for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, whose life was a mess of drinking and cheating but who, with his “Great Balls of Fire”, was already a rock ‘n’ roll star.

He could not guarantee that Cousin Jerry was not in the other place. That was up to the judgment of God, which he was facing now. He was praying and praying, unable to look at Him. Surely he himself was not destined for the Fire. For as Heaven was a literal place, so too was Hell (Luke, chapter 16). It was the torment department of Sheol, or Hades, in the heart of the Earth, where Satan ruled and from which dark forces attacked him. One took the hideous shape of a bear with the face of a man; another was the Evil One himself, as a hundred-pound weight on his back. When he shouted the name of Jesus, the bear-man collapsed and twitched like a wounded snake.

In the great war between Good and Evil he fought as hard as he could. But he still had the sin nature all human beings shared. Ever since Adam and Eve had disobeyed God, men and women had been born broken; unless they turned to Jesus Christ, none would be saved. Even he had shown that inner weakness by casting stones at other preachers, calling them adulterers, when in the late 1980s he too was visiting a pretty woman in a hot-sheet motel along Airline Highway outside New Orleans, where he asked her to pose for him. With her he called himself “Billy” and wore hats, as if anyone could hide from the gaze of God—or from the camera of the private detective one rival employed to catch him.

He knew from his vision, as he huddled before the Lord, that he would see every sin he had committed. That one was the worst. He had sinned against his faithful wife Frances, his consort of 36 years, and against the Lord whom he had loved for even longer. In February 1988, before his congregation and on national television, he had repented with many, many tears. He asked for this stain to be washed into the seas of God’s forgetfulness and not to be remembered against him any more.

He hoped this was the case. He hoped too that the Lord’s memory was not jogged by that time in 1991 when he was caught in a car with a prostitute in California. For he had suffered from his disgrace. Donations had fallen away, his ministry had shrunk, and the private jet had to be sold. He was suspended from the Assemblies of God and forbidden to preach for a time, though he soon defied that order. He went on preaching, though independently and on far fewer channels, til the end of his days.

His battle against the world, the flesh and the Devil had not been a total success. But he had still brought thousands of souls to Jesus Christ. They had been saved from the false cults of other religions, or from ignorance or indifference, by recognising Him. So when God now commanded him to stand up on his feet and look, look at his Redeemer, it should have been easy. As he got up, though, he was still unsteady. His only prop was his Bible, and he did not have it with him. But he didn’t need it, because he was suddenly washed, released, transformed, in the Blood of the Lamb, as if a warm bath flowed around him.

“Right,” said God. “You’d better come in.” ■