BATON ROUGE - Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart has passed away after suffering a cardiac arrest on June 15. He was 90 years old.

"When someone is 90 years old, you always know time is incredibly borrowed," Swaggart family spokesperson Megan Kelly said Tuesday following his death. "When this happened it was still a shock, still painful. It's been a painful journey. As brother Donnie has continued to say, this has been incredibly hard, but they're never going to question God. They're just going to trust and believe that God orders each one of our steps."

A public viewing and wake will be held Saturday, July 12 from at 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Family Worship Center Church on Bluebonnet Avenue. On Sunday, July 13, a celebration of life service will be held at 6 p.m.

Swaggart and his wife Frances moved to Baton Rouge in 1968 and, beginning the next year, grew his “The Camp Meeting Hour” radio show into the Family Worship Center and college campus along Bluebonnet Boulevard in Baton Rouge. The ministry's website says it broadcasts on 3,000 TV stations and 700 radio stations.

In a research paper at Oral Roberts University, Ph.D candidate Robert McBain wrote in 2022 that Swaggart, who grew up in poverty, decried the “gospel of self-esteem” as “man-made and man-oriented.”

Instead, McBain wrote, he sought to preserve traditional family values and preached against adultery, sex crimes, abortion, pornography, feminism, “alternative lifestyles,” and “easy divorce.”

Swaggart was born at Ferriday in 1935. He remained as senior pastor at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, but his son did most of the preaching.

In the mid-80s Swaggart and others criticized two other televangelists for their alleged sexual indiscretions, which led to one of them, Marvin Gorman, to hire a photographer to collect evidence on Swaggart.

In 1988, Swaggart himself had his credentials pulled from the Assemblies of God after hiring a prostitute, leading to Swaggart giving what became known as the "I have sinned" speech on television.

Swaggart’s congregation largely forgave the preacher — his TV show reached 800,000 viewers and donations rose. But in 1991, police who stopped Swaggart for a traffic violation found a second prostitute in his car, which caused many of his contracts to be cancelled.

Swaggart would, however, keep preaching. In 2010, according to his website, he opened the SonLife Broadcasting Network in which all programming generated for the 24-hour Christian network originates from the Family Worship Center. In addition to broadcasting live church services, they air regularly scheduled programs over the air or via satellite.