Feuds: God and Money Part 9

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

For millions of committed Christians, the late '80s brought agonizing disillusionment. One after another, some of the country's most prominent Protestant televangelists revealed themselves as pious pretenders, driven by lust or avarice or unsaintly ego. Perhaps most distressing was the ammunition the scandals gave to the skeptical and scornful. While erstwhile believers in Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Marvin Gorman winced at the exposes of dalliance and the unconvincing protestations of repentance, countless other Americans were laughing.

Now, just when it seemed the humiliating high jinks were safely in the past, they're back. In New Orleans last week, jury selection began in a $90 million defamation suit filed by Gorman against Swaggart and his allies, which gives promise of even more bizarre allegations -- including infidelities by the dozen and demonic possession straight out of The Exorcist. The proceedings will also offer further dispiriting evidence that leading televangelists saw preaching as a business rather than a calling. Out of their own mouths, it seems, will come harsher accusations than anything in Elmer Gantry.

Gorman, former pastor of a 5,000-member First Assembly of God Church in New Orleans and TV preacher on 57 stations, led off the roundelay of forced sexual confessions. In July 1986, his fellow minister Swaggart summoned him to a makeshift tribunal at Swaggart's First Assembly headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., where Gorman was confronted with charges of adultery and pressured into resigning his ministry immediately. Gorman closed the circle two years later when he unveiled surveillance photos of Swaggart emerging from a motel room with a prostitute. That led in short order to Swaggart's ouster and the gradual dissipation of his far larger teleministry. But wrecking his nemesis -- while offering ostensibly sympathetic prayers for him -- did not satisfy Gorman. Now he is suing for wealth he believes would have been his were it not for Swaggart's vendetta, which Gorman says was motivated by business rivalry rather than morality. As proof, he argues that the drumbeat of rumor from Swaggart only intensified after Gorman quit their shared faith.

Among the charges Gorman says the Swaggart camp falsely spread:

-- that Gorman had more than 100 adulterous affairs over decades (he admits to two, only one involving sexual intercourse);

-- that he had "multiple immoral incidents . . . with women who came to him for counseling";

-- that he sired illegitimate children;

-- that he stole church funds;

-- that he had Mafia connections;

-- that he emanated an "evil spirit," which entered a woman and spoke in Gorman's voice as it was exorcised by Assembly of God preacher Tom Miller.

Beyond the whispering campaign, Gorman's attorneys hint at coercion. They suggest his programs were dropped from the satellite owned by James Bakker, of PTL teleministry notoriety, as a quid pro quo for Swaggart's business on the same system, and for the Louisiana preacher's silence about PTL hush money to Bakker paramour Jessica Hahn. If that was the deal, it didn't last: within a year Swaggart became one of Bakker's denouncers and helped bring about his resignation and PTL's financial collapse.

Swaggart's basic defense, his lawyers say, is that any charges he made were factual. Says attorney Phillip Wittmann: "It's a very simple case to defend."

Gorman may exaggerate the threat he posed to Swaggart, whose operations were grossing $140 million a year before his fall. But he was beyond question a fast-rising figure. More important, Gorman was lining up wider distribution via two Louisiana TV stations and a satellite uplink -- a purchase that was scheduled to occur the day he quit the church. Gorman contends he could have brought the plan off but for Swaggart's accusations. Instead his TV ministry went bankrupt in 1987, and he left the airwaves. His new church, the Metropolitan Christian Centre in suburban Metairie, La., has 450 congregants, and Gorman returned to the airwaves this month on a New Orleans UHF station. But his dream of a Texas-to-Alabama regional network has been dashed, and his debt exceeds $5 million.

Even if Gorman wins, Swaggart Ministries may not prove that much more of a prize. Once the most widely viewed of all televangelists, Swaggart has lost four-fifths of his weekly audience, plummeting from 2.2 million viewers to fewer than 400,000. Enrollment at his Bible college is down by two-thirds, to & 450, and several floors of a classroom building have been leased out. An intended 12-story dormitory, half a block from his showcase Family Worship Center, stands abandoned in mid-construction, its windows void of glass, tall weeds crowding its rusted entryway. Swaggart can still draw the faithful: a couple of weeks ago, 1,200 people attended a three-hour Sunday service, at which he sang, preached and pleaded for money. But Swaggart attorney and co- defendant William Treeby concedes, "We're suffering." Jeffrey Hadden, a University of Virginia scholar of televangelists, says Swaggart has stayed relatively debt-free. "Otherwise," Hadden explains, "he wouldn't have made it. But he doesn't have $5 million in change lying around."

The pivotal effort in any civil suit is to enlist the sympathy of jurors, to make them want to help. One prospective juror was excused last week when she said, in response to questioning, that she would have trouble being objective because "the sin of hypocrisy is worse than adultery." By that standard, both sides in this trial might be in trouble.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/New Orleans