Word: swaggart
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...brought agonizing disillusionment. One after another, some of the country's most prominent Protestant televangelists revealed themselves as pious pretenders, driven by lust or avarice or unsaintly ego. Perhaps most distressing was the ammunition the scandals gave to the skeptical and scornful. While erstwhile believers in Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Marvin Gorman winced at the exposes of dalliance and the unconvincing protestations of repentance, countless other Americans were laughing...
...just when it seemed the humiliating high jinks were safely in the past, they're back. In New Orleans last week, jury selection began in a $90 million defamation suit filed by Gorman against Swaggart and his allies, which gives promise of even more bizarre allegations -- including infidelities by the dozen and demonic possession straight out of The Exorcist. The proceedings will also offer further dispiriting evidence that leading televangelists saw preaching as a business rather than a calling. Out of their own mouths, it seems, will come harsher accusations than anything in Elmer Gantry...
Gorman, former pastor of a 5,000-member First Assembly of God Church in New Orleans and TV preacher on 57 stations, led off the roundelay of forced sexual confessions. In July 1986, his fellow minister Swaggart summoned him to a makeshift tribunal at Swaggart's First Assembly headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., where Gorman was confronted with charges of adultery and pressured into resigning his ministry immediately. Gorman closed the circle two years later when he unveiled surveillance photos of Swaggart emerging from a motel room with a prostitute. That led in short order to Swaggart's ouster...
Yeah, he's right, I guess. Bill Buckner tookresponsibility for getting nutmegged in the WorldSeries. Jimmy Swaggart took responsibility for hissins before the Lord. Ronald Reagan tookresponsibility for Iran-gate. Well, at least heshould have. And I even recall a scrawny kid namedGrunwald blaming himself for blowing his highschool soccer team's 26-game winning streak bymissing an unmissable breakaway, but that'sanother column altogether...
...that at the National Religious Broadcasters ((convention in Washington)) about four or five years ago, in a major address I gave them. I do not know whether Jimmy Swaggart was there, but Jim Bakker was there...