Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart Dies

Famed televangelist Jimmy Swaggart has died in a Baton Rouge area hospital. He was 90.

Swaggart, one of the first preachers to bring his ministry to a massive television audience, had been hospitalized for the past few weeks. His family said he passed of cardiac arrest in a statement.

 Swaggart spent the 1950s traveling in Louisiana as an impoverished preacher, living in church basements and cheap motels on $30 a week. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Swaggart made the full-time transition to televised ministry. By 1983, Swaggart’s telecast appeared on over 250 stations nationwide.

A series of prostitution scandals rocked his ministry in the late 1980’s and early 1990s. He was suspended and ultimately defrocked by the Assemblies of God for the first of these scandals. His dalliances with ladies of the night eventually cost him most of his television spots.

Swaggart is survived by his wife, Frances, son Donnie, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Requiescat in pace