JSM- masters- of- the- sweep — Deception Bytes. Three years ago I moved from North Carolina to Baton Rouge to begin a job as Webmaster for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. I did not know much about the ministry, but I needed a job and the idea of working for a ministry seemed appealing.
The Swaggart’s seemed nice enough at first, but I was soon to find out that this kindness was only offered in exchange for my complete loyalty and subjection to totalitarian- like control. In the days and weeks after moving to Baton Rouge, I was perplexed at the oddity of my everyday encounters with ministry employees.
People seemed burdened and stressed. When smiles were given, they were the stiff and sterile kind, not the kind that invades your face, and crinkles your eyes. In my mind it should have been the most joy filled environment in the world to work in and the lack of levity concerned me. People seemed guarded and paranoid, and never spoke of the Swaggarts without lowering their voice and quickly looking around to see who might be listening. People seemed particularly fearful of Frances. I remember it was at times like this that I would defend her.
Oh really”, I would gush, “she is really the nicest person and has been so kind to me”. They would stare back at me unblinking, with cold, dead eyes. I could see I was not convincing them. I could also see that it was not up for discussion. I still remember someone entering my office and commencing to talk to me in a barely audible voice. I laughed and said, “What, do you think it’s bugged”? They looked at me dead serious and said, “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time”.
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I wondered then, just who, or what, I had become involved in. The three years I spent there were three of the hardest years of my life. My sentence came to an abrupt end when I was fired unceremoniously along with four other people. The only thing that tied all four of us together was an unsolicited email that had been sent to my work address which outlined some highly offensive material that was being printed in the ministry’s print shop.
Being masters of the sweep, it was important for them to silence the voice of anyone that knew, lest they infect others with the truth. At Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, it seems that being righteous is not nearly as important as looking righteous.
In the days that followed, the print- shop worker who had been so outraged over what he had been asked to print decided to talk to Jimmy. He was still under the impression that Jimmy did not know. He believed, as I had for so long, that somehow there was a rogue element loose in the ministry perpetrating these things without Swaggart’s knowledge. I felt compassion for him as I knew that when the acid of truth ate through his wall of denial, it would be particularly painful. It was. If I could count the number of people who said to me in my three years there that there was something not right. There was too much secrecy, too much control of information.
By controlling the information an individual has, they limit the person’s ability to think for themselves. Individuality is not prized at JSM and is targeted for special treatment. This special treatment involves isolation, shunning, and coercive persuasion. It is a process designed to break a person’s individuality and replace it with their cloned group- think. If a person still does not bend, then an artfully crafted piece of gossip is skillfully inserted into the grapevine to destroy the person’s character.
They have it down to an art form. I watched it happen to others, and I experienced the pain, frustration, and humiliation of it, when it happened to me. Most people cave in and conform. Faced with forces they feel unable to escape from, they adapt. They learn to anticipate problems and manipulate events to avoid self- incrimination. It is hard to even realize it is happening to you when you don’t know who your enemy is.
Your enemy seems like they are your very best friend and advocate and only have your very best interests at heart. At Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, people come to expect humiliation, isolation, ostracism and punishment, because they can never live up to the ideal. Since they set themselves up to be the ultimate judge of good and evil, their employees live in a state of constant fear of failure, fear of being fired, and constant guilt and shame over perceived wrongs they may have committed against the organization.
It does not help that the rules seem to constantly change or that there are two sets of rules. On more than one occasion when I was being given a particularly coercive talk about my absence from church, Frances remarked that she knew me better than I knew myself. Odd, since scripture clearly states that no one but God can know the heart of man. Watch Sweet Smell Of Success Download Full here. She was setting herself up to be Holy Spirit to me, to lead me and guide me in the ways she deemed righteous.
It did not seem to matter to her that attending church there was never made a condition of my employment, nor did it matter that there were many people employed there who did not go to church at all, including members of her own extended family. When I told Frances that there were many “unsaved” people who worked there she looked at me coldly and said, “Well that is different, they are unsaved and they don’t go to church anywhere.” Clearly in her eyes it was better to be unsaved than to be saved and not go to their church. After my own experience, I began to search through online material and books to see what others had experienced. I knew that the mistreatment of those in their employ had to be a pattern. In some ways, what I found was therapeutic. Reading the experiences of others and knowing that I was not alone, that many others had experienced similar mistreatment, was somehow affirming.
For obvious reasons, one of the first sources I looked at was award- winning investigative journalist John Camp. Although certainly not the focus of his investigations, he describes some instances that to those of us who have been at the receiving end, seem all too familiar. In his book, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, John B. Camp describes how he initially became interested in digging deeper into Jimmy Swaggart Ministries.
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