It was more than sad and pathetic watching Jim Bakker, the founder of the expansive Praise the Lord television and camping grounds empire, blubbering as he was hauled to a police squad after conviction on an assortment of crimes. Comedy shows, however, did not take pity as they parodied Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker into oblivion, particularly “Saturday Night Live,” and turned Jessica Hahn into a household name.
Many people took devilish delight when another Jim, Jimmy Swaggart, went up in flames after he got caught patronizing prostitutes after one of his fire-and-brimstone sermons on the subject of moral turpitude and demon lust. In fact, it was Swaggart who helped engineer the downfall of fellow pastor Jim (Bakker) after informing officials of the Assemblies of God of religious rival Bakker’s infidelities with a church secretary and dismissed Bakker as a “stain on the body of Christ.”
Swaggart also coaxed another prominent minister, Marvin Gorman, into secretly admitting to an affair with the married wife of a church deacon — but then subsequently made that private confession public and completely ruined Gorman’s career.
So when Gorman got an anonymous call that Swaggart was slithering along an area of notorious ill repute on the outskirts of New Orleans — an hour from Swaggart’s massive Baton Rouge-based empire — Gorman actually hired a private investigator to follow Swaggart into a prostitute’s nest and dutifully informed the media and church officials of Swaggart’s supreme hypocrisy.
