JIMMY SWAGGART'S SAVINGS

Elgy Gillespie meets

the hell-fire evangelist with a million-dollar house

WHEN the hellfire and brimstone evangel- ist Jimmy Swaggart was nine, he began prophesying and 'speaking in tongues'. Rocking Jerry Lee Lewis was growing up then, and he began vying with his first cousin to get at the honkytonk piano in the house of their rich old uncle Lee Calhoun.

The two boys had lots in common besides their uncle and the formidable grandmother who reared them together in the town of Ferriday, 80 miles up the Mississippi on the Bayou. Together with a third cousin, the bluegrass singer Micky Gilley, who now runs the biggest bar in Texas, they were all 'saved' in the Assem- bly of God Church on Texas Street where people began coming to hear Jimmy talk of the wrath to come, sometimes in Japanese or German as ex-prisoners of war would confirm.

Theirs was a large clan of Delta drifters, almost Faulknerian. Jimmy's parents were itinerant musicians who eventually got into a small business. This was the old South of Jim Crow segregation, tent meetings, old- style revivalism, old split-foot and shouting out for religious joy. It was not the booming new South of Walker Percy: yet somehow, an astonishing crop of famous men and big-time success stories sprang out of Ferriday to make up the new wealthy class in Louisiana.

Back in the Forties, Jimmy and Jerry Lee were teenage high school drop-outs. The boogie-woogie piano and left-hand stride of Jerry Lee had already been created at Uncle Lee's and later on at the big black clubhouse in what they called Bucktown, the black half of Ferriday, where Jerry Lee was the only white kid playing and drinking and gambling. Then one day Jerry Lee's father made a good deal on 400 eggs. With the profits he drove Jerry Lee to Sun Studios in Memphis so that the man who discovered Elvis could hear him. From then on there was a whole lotta shakin' going on. Jimmy was also offered a contract by Sam Phillips of Sun; but he changed his mind and went back to preaching. It did not mean never seeing Jerry Lee. He was still his closest friend, through all the drugs and drink and women; and once he pulled his cousin off the stage when he was too far gone to perform. `Why, I thank you,' Jimmy Swaggart said, when I told him he plays as well as his cousin. His accent is the Bayou drawl that he uses to such hellraising effect on his gospel television show. 'Jerry Lee could play real good. Still can. Best left hand in the business, fastest right hand too. No- body to beat him. And I'm six months older, so he got it from me.'

You can hear Brother Swaggart on the ivories whenever you call his world minis- tries complex in Baton Rouge; they put on his tapes whenever you are on 'hold', and you can also hear him singing and playing on his television show. Yes, he wears a Rolex, like it says in the song by Ray Stevens, the Nashville singer. But as a theatrical entertainer lost to the world of rock, you also get Jimmy working his hands right off the keys in a wild effusion of barrel-house piano backed by gospel choir, his wife Frances in a stunning designer's gown, and a phalanx of trum- pets, saxophones and drums, interrupted only by Jimmy's tirades against Aids, Catholicism, communism, abortion, homosexuality and — most loathsome to him of all — secular humanism.

It is hard for a reporter to get to see Brother Swaggart, still less spend a day with him. Unsure why I had been accorded the honour, I discussed Jerry Lee's piano techniques in his study, sitting on a plush sofa and surrounded by lots of handsomely bound books in front of his huge and expensive desk. That same desk has been the cause of many miles of newsprint speculating about its price. Apparently it conceals remote control switches to his two million-dollar fenced-in jacuzzi-ed homes (one is his son Donny's) and was said to cost $11,000.

Brother Swaggart shrugs it off. Material wealth is no embarrassment to the chunky 51-year-old with the slight pompadour and the pinky ring sitting beside me. I believe him when he says his followers approve. I have seen his followers, and they seem to enjoy the good things of life too, in a Christian way of course.

`I'm good enough on the piano to know Jerry Lee's very good. He's had some hard miles. If he's on alcohol and drugs he can't function. Who can?' Jimmy Lee is teetotal, and not one drop of liquor has ever touched those lips.

`Course, that boy is his own worst enemy. I pray every day that I will some- day get him to the Lord again. His troubles all began in England, you know, when the press got ahold of him and wouldn't let him be.' He meant when Jerry Lee and his 13-year-old cousin bride Myra Gale were dogged by British tabloids, and finally drummed out of England. They stayed married for 15 years, till loyal Myra found the drink and drugs too much.

`I have confidence he'll make it back.

But my, that boy is stubborn. That boy is real stubborn.' He sighed, and said he often wondered why he took this way and Jerry Lee took that. It could so easily be the other way round. It was as though they were the good and the bad sides of the same personality. 'I will not be satisfied till I know Jerry Lee has entered the Kingdom of God,' he wrote somewhere.

Swaggart has now transformed old- fashioned religion into his vast tent-shaped 7,000-seater $30 million family worship centre in modern Baton Rouge, Louisiana without losing that old-time gospel flavour in his services. But the trappings of his luxurious homes have caused the town to comment, as well as local television and radio stations. His complex is a bunch of white concrete buildings with the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College and the Vance Teleproduction Studio, which Swaggart says reaches over 80 countries and 90 million people. Gospel tapes and records and Swaggart pamphlets pour out all over the world from here.

Roughly $140 million in cash poured back in from the faithful last year, very often in widows' mites; though Swaggart says he has very rich donors too and gets offended if you suggest his congregation lightly sprinkled with a few blacks comes from the underprivileged. The esti- mated 40 million Americans who are 'born-again' pentecostal fundamentalists like him are no longer only the deprived, he says, but are the ambitious and the upwardly mobile too.

On figures like his annual turnover he is vague. But a committee in Congress up in Washington has asked him to come and be more specific for their hearings on the tax-exempt status of religions in the next session. So far, he has not replied to the invitation. At the same time a federal grand jury will be looking at Jim and Tammy Bakker's former PTL empire, now in the hands of Jerry Falwell. Swaggart played a brief but key role in the PTL 'Pearlygate', when he appeared on Ted Koppel's Nightline to substantiate some accusations against the Bakkers, but sug- gested Falwell was interested in expansion. At most the donors of the religious Right number five million in America: but all the major tele-evangelists are complaining that Oral Roberts and the Bakkers between them have killed business.

But Swaggart is not at all vague about what he dislikes. The list starts with homosexuals and drugs, and includes Catholics and the press. 'Why do you hate Catholics?' I asked, sampling a pamphlet or two. ('None of the things Mother Teresa does will add one thing towards her salva- tion,' is a very mild example.) 'I'm not anti-Catholic,' Swaggart re- plied, patiently. 'I'm very opposed to a lot of Catholic teaching; I think it's wrong and it's caused people a lot of spiritual prob- lems, but I don't hate them — I never disliked them.' Press reports of his attacks on Catholicism make his disclaimers seem feeble, but it was when he was quoted in an anti-Jewish remark that media columns flew. What Swaggart said was: 'Don't bar- gain with Jesus, 'cause he's a Jew' typical of Southern humour, his in particu- lar. 'That's ridiculous, just silly,' he says. 'I'm about as pro-Jewish as you can get. I support the state of Israel in every way, and why I support Israel is much deeper than personal like or dislike. In Genesis. God said those who bless Israel, He would bless; those who curse Israel, He would curse, and the Jews have always been God's chosen people. I don't want to go into a long technical discussion but the Jews made a mistake, they rejected Jesus Christ.'

Brother Swaggart was referring to a biblical verse about 'the time of Jacob's trouble', which all 'fundies' take to mean the war in the Middle East. Like all of them he is a biblical literalist, who takes Revelations and Ezekiel as gospel and thinks the world will end soon, after God's chosen have been 'raptured up' into heaven. Then will come the tribulation and the conversion of the Jews, after the Soviets have overrun Israel and Europe and seven years have been spent in burying the dead. But Armageddon will wipe out the ungodly, and Jesus will come back to Jerusalem to reign over the newly con- verted Jews for 1,000 years.'

This is what nearly one quarter of the American population led by Falwell and the Bakkers truly believe. Their effect on the Pentagon's foreign policy can only be guessed, but Reagan has mentioned Armageddon from time to time, and the Republican Party as a whole has courted the religious right wing. It may come as no relief to hear that the fundie leaders support SDI.

'But still God loves the Jews, he loves them very much, and he prophesied he would bring them back to their land and that any nation that ever set themselves against Israel will eventually perish. And that's why I want Congress and the press and this country to stand behind Israel because God is with them and if we set ourselves against them it will destroy us,' Swaggart explains patiently.

The cry 'Rapture me up, Lord,' is as common as 'Halleluja' or 'We love you, Jesus,' in pentecostal services like Swag- gart's.

What caused the sudden upsurge in Eighties evangelists and fundamentalism? 'Ninety-five per cent of the reason is pure technology. It's only in the last ten years television has reached millions,' says Swag- gart. He firmly rejected any tentative suggestion from me that it might relate to Supreme Court decisions favouring equal rights, abortion and banning prayer from school, or the general malaise about mod- ern society. He is popular all over Central America, supports the Contras, and sends money to what he said were educational schemes in countries from Guatemala to Nicaragua. Last year he dined with Presi- dent Alfonsin's sister in Argentina. He often visits South Africa and enthusiasti- cally supports the Botha regime.

So why was he so down on old Darwin? 'All true Christians are creationist. Most definitely Adam and Eve walked in the garden. I believe the Bible word for word, and that we're created from the dust of the earth.'

And women from Adam's rib. The reason for his virulent anti-homosexual, anti-abortion stand is related. It shows why the fundies are so revolted by the Jimmy Bakker sex scandals. At the same time there is something undeniably sensual ab- out a gospel service, and its pentecostal religious ecstasy. Swaggart attracts reli- gious groupies the way his first cousin attracts secular ones. The style is atmospherically close to the free pentecos- tal sects of Northern Ireland, who are in touch with the evangelist Bob Jones, and are directly influenced by Bible Belt re- vivalism. (If Paisley could only play like Swaggart, it might go down a lot better in the south.) We touched upon the subject of his opulent lifestyle, and the money matters that all evangelists apart from Billy Gra- ham are a little unclear on. 'The news media as a whole thinks we're out for the money or trying to gain power or trying to take over the country. None of it is true. Yes, we're misunderstood by the press, but I don't care.

'Most of the accusations about our finances are smears. The media and the networks have not had any opposition; they've been king of the hill. Nobody out there dares come against them. They have made the boast if they don't like someone they can destroy them. Well, they haven't destroyed us. . . by "us" I mean myself and Jerry Falwell and one or two others.

'We have a voice in the American people and we are able to project our viewpoints and they don't like that. They do not understand the gospel and they think we're a bunch of crooks and thieves. A lot of media are plain wicked,' Swaggart went on. 'If I refuse to do an interview they go ahead and write it anyway. That's what they did to Oral Roberts.'

Still talking about the wickedness of the media we set out with his wife Frances to a local Tex-Mex diner for lunch, using one of his large Lincoln Intercontinentals. Dres- sed in a tight black leather skirt, Frances looks a worthy rival to Tammy Fay Bak- ker. She gives the impression of being the business partner. Endlessly, we came back to the subject of the press and tele- evangelists over our tacos and empanadas and chilli sauce. One might call it some- thing of an obsession.

'See,' says Frances, a little alarmingly, 'we checked you out. Normally we don't give interviews. But we got you checked. By who? By the people we use for that. We found out you were okay.' The outburst froze what had been an incongruously genial, if odd, group. Who on earth had she asked? Frances would not say.