Mourning Jimmy Swaggart

The Christian right lost one of their main architects this past week. Jimmy Swaggart, televangelist, sex-worker patron, and later, internet meme, passed away at ninety-years-old on July 1st, 2025.

During the 1980s, Swaggart’s empire rivaled that of other televangelists like Jerry Falwell Sr., only to be toppled by several scandals. On two separate occasions, Swaggart was caught soliciting sex from a prostitute. While his public image was ruined, Swaggart continued shaping the modern Christian right from behind the scenes. Why then, as an atheist, do I mourn his loss?

Jimmy Swaggart had the quintessential rags-to-riches upbringing modern evangelicals love. Swaggart was born in 1935 to a Louisiana sharecropper and part-time preacher. He spent much of his early life in poverty as he traveled and preached in rural Louisiana while also working in the oil fields. He began full-time evangelical work in 1955 by preaching from the back of a flatbed truck, often using exaggerated emotions.

Swaggart’s flamboyant and energetic style is what laid the foundation of televangelism. During the 1970s, he moved his preaching from radio to TV, giving him a much wider audience. His weekly hour-long program had reached 250 stations by 1983, and his weekly adherents were in the millions.

However, several prostitution scandals brought Swaggart’s empire crashing down when it was at its height. In 1988, he was accused of soliciting a prostitute, for which he was defrocked.

The scandal is what led Swaggart to publicly apologize on his TV program, which involved the now famous scene of him crying and exclaiming, “I have sinned.” The image of him crying is now an internet meme and great source of ridicule for the Christian right. Subsequently, Swaggart was caught soliciting prostitution again in 1991.

While the second scandal largely pushed Swaggart out of the public eye for good, he continued to have a large effect on shaping the ideology of the Christian right, including making numerous homophobic statements. Why then is it important to remember such a vile and hateful conman?

As disgusting as Swaggart was, he showed the world what the evangelical right was really like: clean-cut in a suit and gold rings when the cameras were on, soliciting sex when the cameras were off.

Numerous other sex scandals involving evangelical leaders have arisen since Swaggart’s scandals. But his happened right as the Christian right was taking on a new role in American politics. The Reagan years mingled religion and politics to create what we know today as the Christian right – a political alliance of religious fanatics and old wealth.

Swaggart’s rags-to-riches story was the kind of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps tale the Christian right loves. In their view, here was someone born poor in rural Louisiana that was able to become wealthy and successful by working hard and being “a good Christian.” It was the kind of story that reinforced the protestant work ethic and morality of wealth.

There has long been this idea in American Protestantism that economic hardship and poverty are moral issues, not socioeconomic ones. Poor people are simply more sinful than wealthy people in this view. If people living in poverty want to become successful, all they have to do is work harder, stop drinking and doing drugs, and stop having premarital sex, and they too could become wealthy. Swaggart’s scandal brought that whole notion down.

For maybe not the first time, but certainly one of the most infamous times, people could see that a leader of the Christian right was not more morally superior to anyone else; they were just good at being a con artist, ready to cry on TV for a few bucks. Thus, the protestant idea that wealth equals morality was tarnished along with Swaggart’s image.

Swaggart’s TV performances were conducted with an almost circus-like atmosphere. Bright lights, a hundred-person gospel choir, and Swaggart himself in the middle on a red octagon stage. He would go on long sermons full of yelling and confessionals which usually involved him crying. His smooth southern accent covered the gaudiness of it all.

But take away the veil of religion and turn down the bright lights, and everyone can see exactly what Swaggart’s TV show was: a showman using the guise of religion to get people to send what little money they had to him.

When asked why an atheist should mourn the death of Jimmy Swaggart, I point to Swaggart’s rise and eventual downfall as one of the greatest exposures of the hypocrisy of the Christian right. Just like the old saying “the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Swaggart’s empire grew nationwide on the same platform it was destroyed on – the TV. No more could the notion of the protestant work ethic and wealth favoring the morally superior be applied to America’s massive wealth inequality problems. Therefore, atheists should remember Jimmy Swaggart as an involuntary whistle blower to the Christian right’s hypocrisy.