How had Christians made peace with this vile, hideous music, he asked with urgency in his voice, drawing out words like ‘pul-pit’ and ‘bye-bull’. At one performance, he took aim at ‘the devil’s music’: rock and roll. He shouted at his audience about the moral degeneracy that dragged reprobates through the gates of hell. Before the cameras and the glare of stage lights he paced back and forth, waving his arms like he was fending off a swarm of bees. In the summer of 1985, Swaggart was on the road, conducting one of his mass revival crusades in New Haven, Connecticut. The country rightly deserved God’s judgment, Swaggart assured his audience with fury. The Reagan-era televangelist was ‘tapping some powerful resentments here he is speaking to the disenfranchised’. A reporter at the New York Times took note. Americans had lost interest in the Bible, he warned with deadly seriousness. With his southern drawl, he thundered against Hollywood celebrities, evolutionary scientists, communists, homosexuals, Catholics, feminists, secular liberals and other ‘enemies’ of the faith. Like many other Pentecostal preachers – who were moving into politics at a rapid rate – Swaggart believed that the Holy Ghost emboldened him to witness the arrow-straight truths of the Bible. Some stations even took him off the air for his religious and cultural bigotry. Critics reviled his holier-than-thou pulpit posturing and his bellicosity. He had honed a brash, bold, loud style of preaching that made him a revered figure, both in the context of the Assemblies of God – a group of affiliated churches that formed the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination – and in the broader world of evangelicalism. At its peak, his ministry was taking in over one million dollars a week. His popular crusades and regular services appeared on television sets across the United States and around the world. The television preacher Jimmy Swaggart became a Christian megastar in the 1980s broadcasting from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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