Jimmy Swaggart--Dead Man Rising : On Black Light as a Weapon in the Culture Wars

This lively, eye-opening book by a Swaggart Ministries insider explains Jimmy as a God-driven and contradictory personality who is possessed of an awesome Holy Spirit anointing for healing, convert-making, and demon deliverance. It reveals the Swaggart sex scandals of the late 1980's to have resulted from Jimmy's private weaknesses as capitalized upon by his enemies, including Bob Guccione of Penthouse, some Assemblies of God officers and elders, Ted Turner's CNN, many hard-Left media types, and some greed-driven members of the evangelist's own family, including his business-manager wife Frances.

One of this book's great strengths is the light it sheds on Protestant-Catholic theological and worship differences while at the same time relating Jimmy Swaggart's recent history. The author, a Catholic charismatic and product of Jesuit university schooling, admits of her amazement upon discovering that the once widely broadcast preachings of Louisiana's Jimmy Swaggart (who is anti-Catholic after the fashion of Dr. Bob Jones III of South Carolina and Ireland's Rev. Ian Paisley), is most of the time preaching the purest traditional Catholic orthodoxy---but without ever suspecting this himself. Only after she becomes a full-time staffer with the Swaggart Ministries does the writer, a midwesterner, begin to divine some of the causes for the controversial evangelist's strange "soda-straw" vision of church life.

In sum, the book is a carefully written and thoughtful record of its author's own revelations about "Pentecost" and its people at the same time that it tells Jimmy Swaggart's painful story. JIMMY SWAGGART---DEAD MAN RISING leaves no doubt that Jimmy Swaggart's comeback from the near obscurity of his post-scandal years is to be expected, and fairly soon. All along, the preacher's 10:00 a.m.An unusual prophetic utterance reported in CHARISMA pentecostal journal in June, 2001 (p. 25) anticipates a religious revival of tremendous power soon to move from southern Louisiana up the Mississippi River and eventually to envelope the entire country. To this author's view, Swaggart is certain to be a key force in that impending movement.