The "electronic church" ministry of popular television evangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart has been widely criticized on a number of counts. TV evangelists support themselves by appealing to their audiences for donations. Premiums in the form of inexpensive jewelry, books and pamphlets, cassettes, or printed copies of sermons are offered to those who call or write. Respondents are then solicited further by direct-mail techniques. Mainline church leaders claim that such "commercializing" cheapens religion.
America's first televangelist Jim Bakker paid some $265,000 to cover up a sexual misadventure. Later he was convicted of misspending millions of followers' dollars. Rival preacher Jimmy Swaggart called the Bakker scandal a cancer. That was before Swaggart was photographed visiting a prostitute named Debra Murphree. According to Murphree, he was "kind of perverted...I wouldn't want him around my children."
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