Swaggart, by Ann Rowe Seaman
They are as American as the Fourth of July, these sensationalist preachers who nowadays crowd the TV screen and in earlier days brought thousands into camp meetings. Having about them an almost biblical air of rawness, their strongest appeal has always been to souls well acquainted with hard knocks: sufferers from poverty, arduous labor, sexual abuse or the pervasive violence of America from its inception until now. Jimmy Swaggart exemplifies the pattern.