Despite Numerous Scandals, Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart Has an Impressive Net Worth

The 1980s were a crazy decade for a whole host of reasons. This was a time of decadence in America as Wall Street injected money into the pockets of those who knew how to manage it. Because capitalism and consumerism were kings, young urban professionals, also known as yuppies, were all the rage.

If you were in the right place at the right time, you were making money.

This decade also ushered in the AIDS epidemic and the devastating loss of over 100,000 people, most of whom were gay men. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the Internet was born. It was the best of times and the worst of times.

Strangely, this decade was riddled with scandals involving televangelists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard, and Jimmy Swaggart. Although Jimmy was eventually forced out of his own church, his net worth is still pretty heavenly. Here's what we know.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Jimmy is worth $5 million, which could go a long way in a collection plate. Technically his career began when he was just a child as Jimmy is the son of a preacher man. The family was Pentecostal and were part of the Assemblies of God church. Jimmy started spreading the good word after he got married at the age of 17.

In his memoir, To Cross a River, Jimmy wrote about struggling throughout the 1950s as he and his wife and child traveled around Louisiana. The young preacher was making about $30 a week and would often stay in church basements, with other pastors, or in the occasional cheap motel. They also got by on the money Jimmy made when he sang gospel music at other churches.

By 1955, at the young age of 20, Jimmy was developing a following while preaching from a flatbed trailer someone had donated to him. Things really took off in 1960 once Jimmy started recording gospel music and sending the records to Christian radio stations.

In the late 1960s, he founded the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, La. This gave him the opportunity to broadcast his sermons, and thus, a televangelist was born.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Jimmy was one of the most successful televangelists preaching in the United States. That all changed in 1986 after he accused fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman of having multiple affairs.

After Marvin was defrocked, he filed a defamation lawsuit against Jimmy, which was settled for $1.75 million. Two years later, Marvin got his revenge after busting Jimmy with a sex worker at a local Travel Inn Motel.

Although he delivered a tearful apology on television, Jimmy was defrocked. He established the Jimmy Swagger Ministries, but in 1991, Jimmy was pulled over by police who quickly discovered he was with a sex worker.

He temporarily stepped back from his ministry but triumphantly returned in very little time. As of June 2025, he is the senior pastor of Family Worship Center and the Chancellor of Jimmy Swaggart Bible College.