It was a fall made all the harder by Swaggart's own scathing castigations of two other televangelists within the previous year or so. Swaggart's fall from grace came about after his association with a prostitute named Debra Murphree. He was well respected by broadcasters like Ted Koppel and Larry King." He didn't back down from hard questions or wrap himself in scripture and he was one of the few televangelists who released an audited financial statement to the press. Seaman said, "He appeared to be an intelligent man, a straight-shooter, with a very balanced and healthy take on his craft. Somewhere along the line, that apparently changed since donations to Swaggart's ministries at one time were up to about $500,000 a day! Before Swaggart's fall from grace, his ministry was bringing in an estimated $150 million every year and Swaggart himself was one of the most respected of the televangelists. But he was genuinely committed to serving God and instead of going for money, he traveled for over a decade in a car, with his wife and son." I'm of the opinion that these traumatic events and the living conditions they created in American families is a large part of why these men believe what they do and are as driven as they are.) Swaggart, a cousin to both Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley, "started out dirt poor and could have made plenty of money playing honky-tonk piano like Jerry. (The other era for the birth of big name evangelists seems to have been in the decade following WWI- for example, Billy Graham and Oral Roberts were both born in 1918. Jimmy Swaggart, like so many of the big name televangelists, was born in the decade following the great Depression. But unfortunately, it doesn't seem to say a lot to the millions of people who still see Swaggart as an upstanding and steadfast "man of God". The five most prominent links on the page- and all of them about marketing and making money for JSM ministries and not about spreading the message of Jesus.
Their goal is to put one in the hands of EVERY soldier- regardless of whether they're Christian or not, I suppose), the next link is for "What's New" (it too opens a link to more things you can buy from JSM to make the ministry money), and the final link is about JSM shopping affiliate programs. Right beside the picture are, in order from top to bottom, a link for "all television offers" (ie, things you can buy that make Jimmy's ministry money), then a link for all JSM products (ie, more things that you can buy to make Jimmy's ministry money), then a third link which is an appeal to help our troops overseas (it opens a page so you can send JSM money and they'll send Bibles overseas to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When you open the home page of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries (or at least when I opened them in late 2004 doing research for this article), the first thing that hits you is a picture of Jimmy today, standing at a microphone, preaching, with lots of pictures of him over the years in the background. Exposed!: Unmasking the Agenda of the Radical Religious Right: Dismantling the Constitution of the United States of America
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