Word: swaggart
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...curious way we're more likely to forgive cool guys than squares. At least they never promised to toe the line. That's why we're so harsh with ministers who fall from grace, like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Mark Twain once said that a man, if he's any good, never gets over being a boy. We like men in whom we can see the vestiges of the boy. You can still make out the flirtatious teenage horn player in Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich--who last week deemed Clinton an "illegal man"--despite his love of dinosaurs, probably...
Sonny is a composite of preachers from rural Texas, Virginia and Tennessee. "I listened to the way they whoop," he says, "then hold the note and cut it with a cadence." If you expect a Jimmy Swaggart-style spellbinder, who coaxes near operatic melodrama from his rich baritone, E.F. will disappoint you. The narrow range of Duvall's voice can convey muscle and danger; the music is lacking. His whoop is a thing of will, not an expression of soulful exuberance. For that, listen to the real preachers Duvall hired for small roles. Black or white, they'll have...
...combination of many enemies, a flamboyant life-style and a nonprofit tax exemption inevitably resulted in charges of impropriety similar to ones she launched against religious institutions. "Madalyn was sort of the Jimmy Swaggart of the movement," says Gaylor's daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor, who is editor of Freethought Today. "I'm not implying criminal activity, but they were always bragging about silk suits and Cadillacs. At the same time the roof was always leaking--and 'Please send money.'" Madalyn, critics claim, like many charismatic movement leaders, had utterly lost the ability to distinguish between herself and her cause...
...play, everyone in the family suddenly becomes a fountain of angry complaints pent up for much too long. This brings life to C.C., force to Ed, humanity to Ian (well, a little bit) and fury to Pat. Add all this to Leeore Schnairsohn's slick-radio-announcer-turned-Jimmy-Swaggart version of Porter and his born-again bride Zivia, and you've got an ending too deliciously and devilishly clever to spoil in a mere review. The true meaning of the title is revealed around this point: it's not just that Zivia is sucking the life...
...turn of the decade, the religious right's national crusade seemed moribund. A series of spectacular embarrassments (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker) and costly political setbacks (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, the 1992 G.O.P. Convention) spawned a cocky conventional wisdom that the holy warriors were a burnt-out force. Then from the ashes arose a new strategy of striking at the local level to seize the national agenda from the bottom up rather than the top down. "We do our best to fly under the radar of the media and professions so they don't know what hit them until...