Swaggart began his career as a televangelist in 1975, starting Jimmy Swaggart Ministries and the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College in Baton Rouge. He published dozens of Christian books, and in the 1980s, when his program appeared on more than 250 TV stations, he traveled to South and Central America on ministry trips.
However, his popularity declined in the late 1980s after he confessed to adultery and was implicated in a scandal involving prostitutes, which caused him to lose his clerical authority in the Pentecostal cooperative organization, the Assemblies of God, and forced his church to leave the denomination.