Oh, My Aching Swaggart Back!
It's the 30th anniversary of my aching back.
It's better these days. I sit in a Herman Miller Embody chair.
Yet the story is a strange one.
In 1986, I was speaking at the New Orleans gold conference. I had spoken there several times over the years.
My partner John Mauldin had come along. He had set up a conference with Jimmy Swaggart. Rev. Swaggart had been influenced by an accountant and self-taught dispensational theologian, Dave Hunt. Mr. Hunt was convinced that all social and political involvement by Christians is a snare and a delusion. He did not like what I was doing.
Mauldin had heard that Rev. Swaggart was planning to do a televised attack on us. Mauldin managed my publishing company. He was overseeing the marketing of a series of books on social action that I had edited -- I wrote four of them -- the Biblical Blueprint Series. Four volumes were out, jointly published by a major evangelical publisher, Thomas Nelson Sons. There were six more to come.
Mauldin wanted put a lid on any attack. Somehow, he got through to the person in charge of Rev. Swaggart's schedule. This was 16 months before the first hooker scandal brought his ministry to a crisis. Mauldin arranged a conference with him.
His ministry's facility was an hour's drive from New Orleans. So, we drove to Baton Rouge.
We had lunch with him and two or three members of the faculty of Jimmy Swaggart Bible College. (The school's name did not survive the second hooker scandal in 1991.) The conversation was affable.
Then he took us on a tour of his video production facility. It was huge. It was so huge that he got lost. He had to ask an employee how to get out. I did not blame him.
He had set up soundproof booths for dubbing his sermons into foreign languages. These were impressive. One student ran the video, sentence by sentence. A bi-lingual student then read from a printed translation in the foreign language. Another bi-lingual student monitored the first bi-lingual student's pronunciation and timing. This was timed to match the exact movement of Swaggart's lips. He even had videos being broadcast by satellite into Outer Mongolia. This was in 1986.
In his office, he agreed to this deal: he would not do a broadcast against me until he had read one of my books. I figured I was safe.
Mauldin and I got back in our rented car. He was driving. About 15 minutes out, my lower back began to hurt. It got worse. It felt like a burning. By the time, we got back to New Orleans, I could not get out of the car unassisted. Over the next two days, I could not put on my socks. He had to help me.
From that time until now, I have had daily lower back pain. It hits when I get up in the morning. I tend to ignore it most of the time.
I do not blame my back pain on Rev. Swaggart. I don't think it was a case of reverse healing. But the timing was curious. I was happy that he never got around to reading one of my books before the first scandal hit. After it did, he had better things to do than expose me. I never had to respond. Discretion is the better part of valor, especially with respect to lower back pain.