Whether or not Mr Swaggart's resignation proves any more permanent than was Mr Gary Hart's retirement from the presidential campaign – in circumstances both culturally and sexually similar – remains to be seen. He told them he had "asked myself 10,000 times" why he had done whatever it was he had done – and concluded that, after a lifetime "trying to be perfect", he now accepted that he was not. Yesterday's resignation was the agreed result and Mr Swaggart appeared to satisfy most of his audience's acute sense of life's sinfulness by making a clean breast of it.
The Elders of the Assemblies of God, who claim 16 million members and 30,000 ministries worldwide, duly announced that Mr Swaggart was helping with their inquiries into "sexual moral charges … with other women" – not his wife, Frances. It was Mr Gorman's claim that Brother Swaggart was the serious adulterer (compared with his own single lapse) that led to Friday's TV reports that photos exist showing Jimmy ministering to a prostitute. And at the height of last year's sex scandal which overwhelmed the Praise The Lord TV ministry of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, he sued Mr Swaggart for $90m – and joined those suggesting that the preacher had engineered similar charges in order to take over the Bakkers' then-thriving ministry. Mr Gorman was defrocked and went bankrupt.
Though details of Mr Swaggart's "moral failure", with whom and how often, were conspicuously absent from yesterday's confession, the sin alluded to was plainly adultery or "immoral dalliances" as Mr Swaggart put it when he denounced his fellow pastor, Mr Martin Gorman, in 1986.
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