The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast

Jimmy Swaggart was ordained by the Assemblies of God in 1961 and on the air within a year. What began as a local radio ministry grew, by the early 1980s, into a television program broadcast on more than 250 stations, reaching an audience estimated in the tens of millions across more than a hundred countries. For nearly two decades it was among the most watched religious telecasts in the United States, built entirely around the preaching, Bible study and gospel music of one Assemblies of God minister.

Then, on February 21, 1988, the broadcast that had made Swaggart famous became the vehicle for something else entirely. Confronted days earlier with photographs of him at a motel with a prostitute, Swaggart took to his own pulpit and his own airwaves and confessed. His voice broke. He wept in front of thousands in his congregation and millions more watching at home, asking God to wash away every stain of what he had done. The moment was rebroadcast, quoted and parodied for years afterward, one of the defining images of American televangelism's excesses.

The Assemblies of God moved to discipline him. What exactly followed is not agreed on by every account: some say the denomination formally defrocked him, others that Swaggart left rather than submit to the discipline it required. Either way, the ministry his ordination had built kept broadcasting under his own name, independent of the denomination that ordained him, a second act built on the same television infrastructure the first had spent seventeen years constructing.