Abstract
African American church studies professor Paula L. McGee maintains in her provocative book that only in America while under the sway of Bishop T. D. Jakes’s personal magnetism and brand management savvy is it possible that four words from the lips of Jesus could catapult a “once purple, off-the-rack gabardine suit and purple loafer wearing” Pentecostal pastor of humble beginnings into a multi-million dollar CEO with a nine-picture movie deal with Sony Pictures (147, 154). Bishop Jakes’s empire, McGee argues, was built on the backs of suffering Black women who heard and saw the story of their lives in an unnamed woman’s humiliation-to-healing account recorded in Luke 13:12, which reads: “And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity” (KJV).
Descriptively, McGee sets up the reader to see, on the one hand, an anthropologically grounded portrait of Bishop Jakes, as the archetypal religious figure whose rise in station is directly attributable to image crafting, a structured set of social relations, media access, and repurposed theology yoked to corporate capitalism, and on the other, to see divergent theological outcomes when Black congregational models with differing christological perspectives clash. Preacher, scholar-critic, participant-observer McGee types Jakes as the Sam Walton of the New Black Church whose “only Jesus” theology, strategic marketing (branding), and rhetorical wit justifies vast amounts of wealth accrual with biblical rationale.
McGee argues that the God of Jakes’s worldview is a venture capitalist and banker—a businessman who sacralizes America’s doctrine of exceptionalism and responds to tithing believers’ seed-faith giving and positive confession (72–78, 110). According to McGee, Jakes is both a prosperity theologian and a liberation theologian. He is the former because he interprets Scripture using rituals of Christian capitalism to build economic empires, justifying his approach theologically as God’s will and the most credible model for twenty-first-century ministry. He is the latter because he has developed a market-driven theology of spiritual liberation in response to human suffering, but in fact props up practices that exploit economically and emotionally vulnerable persons, thus bypassing the obligation of working to dismantle oppressive political systems.
McGee organizes her book into four chapters. Chapter 1 draws out historical distinctions and race, gender, and class assumptions between “the Black Church as refuge” traditional model of which Martin L. King is standard-bearer and “the mega-sized neo-Black church,” which Jakes and other prosperity preachers have shaped and funded and from which they share their theological offerings. With clarity McGee uncovers how prosperity preachers achieve financial success on the strength of the labor and purchasing power of women. She, however, settles for a descriptive critique of prosperity theology’s christological presuppositions in a generalized way consistent with what other scholarly critics have noted. Chapter 2, the most extensive of her chapters, examines prosperity theology as a pseudo-theology of liberation tied to theodicy-centered “problem of evil” concerns (85–94). And finally, rounding out chapters 3 and 4 is McGee’s detailed assessment of Jakes’s career-launching Woman, Thou Art Loosed sermon and (WTAL) brand and how from seizing on popularized tropes of the 1990s that described Black women as welfare queens, teenage mothers, and single mothers (143) he materially enriched his financial empire, which in 2008 was estimated to be worth $400 million (176).
McGee’s compelling look into the unique portrait of Bishop Thomas Dexter Jakes, the male preacher/CEO theologian who sets at liberty oppressed women too long silenced and forgotten in their local churches, and who gives them a voice in exchange for loyalty to his brand, is a worthy read and laudable scholarly accomplishment. But even still, at McGee’s own invitation, scholars are summoned to explore further how her thick description of preachers as profiteers can be channeled into a constructive vision for prophetic preaching in the age of empire.