c. 1998 Religion News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. _ It might as well have been the Ebola virus that swept through the sprawling, once-thriving Jimmy Swaggart headquarters here 10 years ago.

A decade after Swaggart tearfully confessed to an association with a prostitute, the $144 million campus that once bore his global hopes is almost eerily empty. Gone are most of the 1,500 employees who shared Swaggart’s vision, the 1,500 students who studied in his schools, and the nearly 7,000 worshipers who arrived on Sundays to hear the Pentecostal evangelist and musician rock Satan back on his heels.

Even Swaggart, 62, is not much in evidence now.

“For so long he was a major fixture in the Pentecostal community,” said Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, a magazine covering the Pentecostal movement. “When someone like that just vanishes off the screen, people wonder.

“We get letters quite often. They ask: What is Jimmy doing?”

The answer: Swaggart still preaches _ but to much smaller audiences and on many fewer television screens.

And his message seems to have changed: It’s much less promotion-oriented and much more spiritually focused now, said one televangelist researcher.

Beyond that, he is in a bunker mode. Neither Swaggart nor anyone in his ministry speaks to the press, secular or religious.

Its contributions withered, its staff laid off and most students gone, the ministry has been forced more into the real estate business than ever before. Today it relies heavily on rental income from corporate tenants in what were once to be college classrooms and dorms.

To be sure, Swaggart and his wife, Frances, seem _ as recently as 1995 _ to be doing well personally. Publicly available tax data filed by Jimmy Swaggart Ministries that year, the latest available, reported the two collected about $360,000 in salaries.

Yet Swaggart is clearly off the stage, the rising arc of his ministry shot down in 1988, the year he was photographed with a prostitute in a seedy motel zone in suburban New Orleans, 80 miles from his home.

Ten years after that remarkable confessional Sunday, Feb. 21, 1988, the enduring national image of Swaggart has come to be his upturned, tear-stained face filling the television screen.

Students fled; staff quit; contributions plummeted.

But the defections left intact a core of true believers, said Barbara Nauer, a Baton Rouge English teacher and writer who worked for Swaggart between 1988 and 1991.

“Among the people who were left, there was tremendously high morale,” she said in an interview. “It was a siege mentality. They believed in him, do or die.”

Two years later, however, came a coup de grace of sorts: Swaggart was stopped in a car with a prostitute in Indio, Calif.

At its peak, Swaggart’s ministry was taking in $150 million a year. His television reach was global. His American audience numbered 2 million.

But today he is nowhere in the lineup of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the nation’s largest Christian broadcasting network.

His name appears tied for 19th in Nielsen Media Research’s list of noncable devotional programs measured last July. His television presence appears to be exclusively on hard-to-monitor local cable channels.

At one time in the mid-1980s, the ministry was so rich it put up nearly $70 million in new buildings during a four-year period. More recently, however, the Bible college had only about 40 students, Swaggart told CNN in an impromptu curbside interview last fall.

Still, the ministry in 1995 reported income of $11.3 million.

Among the major sources of revenue, direct public support accounted for $6 million, another $2 million came from the sale of unnamed assets, and $2.3 million came from rents, according to the 1995 return.

In the decade since 1988, real estate has become the ministry’s salvation.

In 1996, a mall developer paid Swaggart Ministries $10 million for a slice of Swaggart land. The state pays the ministry almost $2 million a year to house workers in two buildings on campus.

The clear consensus among researchers is that Swaggart will never again wield the power he once did over American religious life.

But a large number of Pentecostals are nonetheless disposed to accept him back, said magazine editor Grady.

“The Christian community we serve is not snarling at Jimmy Swaggart. Christians would love to hear that Jimmy Swaggart has found healing in his soul, been restored _ would love to hear him say that and ask the community to forgive him and receive him back,” Grady said.

“I think he feels betrayed and marginalized by the Christian community, and because of all the hurt that’s happened, communications have broken down. Now he won’t pick up the phone.”

And there is also evidence Swaggart’s message has changed.

In the late 1980s, Swaggart spent a significant amount of his television time either raising funds or promoting his ministries, said Steve Winzenburg, a researcher who monitors televangelists at Grand View College in Des Moines, Iowa.

But more recently, 91 percent of Swaggart’s air time has been focused on spiritual preaching, compared with only 9 percent for self-promotion or fund raising, he said.

“That’s a dramatic change for him,” Winzenburg said.

(OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

But in Swaggart’s isolation, Nauer and others believe they see a deeper dynamic at work in the influence of Frances Swaggart, the preacher’s strong-willed, intelligent wife who reportedly exercises formidable oversight over the entire ministry.

In a new book, “Jimmy Swaggart: Dead Man Rising,” published by Glory Arts of Baton Rouge, Nauer generally views Jimmy Swaggart with admiration and sympathy but is highly critical of Frances Swaggart, who fired Nauer in 1991.

Nauer characterizes Frances Swaggart and members of her family as forces dominating Swaggart, turning his formidable preaching and musical talents into money.

“The man himself is so totally naive he sees none of this,” she said. “Yet among people who love him, it’s so obvious this is the case, they don’t understand why he doesn’t see it,” Nauer said.

Meanwhile, the future of the Swaggart Ministries seems clouded.

The huge Family Worship Center seating 7,000 has been partitioned so the hundreds who come there now do not look lost in its empty spaces.

In front of ministry headquarters, an Avenue of Flags creates a corridor in which the flags of the countries where the ministry had a presence were to fly.

Once, most of the poles had flags snapping in the breeze.

Today most are empty. A few banners still flutter, but even some of those are shredded.

DEA END NOLAN