Book Review
“Of making many books there is no end. . . “ Ecclesiastes 12:12 NRSV
Brand® New Theology: The Wal-Martization of T.D. Jakes and the New Black Church
by Paula L. McGee. Orbis Books, 2017.
Reviewed by Chris Caldwell
“T.D. Jakes is the Sam Walton of the New Black Church” (178). If that strikes you more as criticism than compliment, then you and Paula L. McGee are on similar pages as she weighs the good and bad of Bishop T.D. Jakes’s empire. “Empire” is an overused word, especially when it comes to religious leaders; but in the case of Jakes, the Italian leather shoe seems to fit.
Jakes grew from Baptist and Pentecostal roots, and McGee notes the contrast between the early years and now. There once was Jakes with off-the-rack suits and unsophisticated video production; now we have Bishop Jakes the brand, which is sophisticated, strategic, and profitable. As McGee puts it, “Like many prosperity preachers, Jakes has not only remade and repackaged his brands, he has also remade himself” (148). His ministry assets are estimated at 400 million dollars, and his ventures go far beyond church buildings or broadcasting worship services, to include books, talk shows, movie deals and more. Jakes wields tremendous influence among African Americans but also in mainstream culture and, indeed, in global culture.
Jakes is a central figure in what is called the “New Black Church,” and the tension between the New Black Church and the more traditional Black Church helps drive this book. The Black Church focuses on the “liberation of the self and of the community,” while the New Black Church focuses on prosperity for “the individual over community” (15). Many are buying the New Black Church’s notion of liberation via free market individual prosperity, but McGee is not one of them. While granting the need for financial education in our culture, she can’t go along with Jakes when he says, “Christ’s poverty is a religious myth,” or when he prays thanks to God for “giving me tips on stocks, bonds, annuities, people, places, and things” (125, 126). McGee (rightly, in my opinion) sides instead with the Black Church’s more traditional prophetic role, as it stands over against mainstream culture and reserves the right to offer an independent critique. One of the great strengths of African American churches and the schools they have spawned is that they uniquely are controlled and funded by African Americans. McGee contends that Jakes loses too much as he has crossed over to a more mainstream ideology, message and funding stream.
McGee’s own story overlapped Bishop Jakes’s story about 15 years ago. A former WNBA star and an ordained minister, she was once on the speaking circuit among those associated with Jakes and the New Black Church. Over time, she became uncomfortable with the New Black Church and left that arena to focus her time on more traditional Black Churches and on higher education. This gives her a useful bit of an insider’s perspective, but she is careful not to overplay or over rely on it. Her writing from a female and womanist perspective strikes me as helpful too, given the strong emphasis put on women in Jakes’s ministry.
Indeed, the signature part of the Jakes brand is WTAL: “Woman Thou Art Loosed!” The term comes from Jesus’ proclamation to the woman he healed as recorded in Luke 13. In Jakes’s hands, the metaphor is expanded to include other forms of healing and liberation, although this word “liberation” is tricky when it comes to Jakes and the New Black Church. McGee handles this issue carefully and deftly. Her work is published by Orbis, long a source of works of liberation theology. Some Orbis readers might refuse even to grant the label “theology” to the teaching of the New Black Church, and might be even more reluctant to associate the New Black Church with “liberation.” McGee, however, acknowledges that preachers and members in the New Black Church genuinely feel they possess a theological message of liberation. McGee is reluctant to dismiss the feelings of millions of adherents, but she has problems with their theology and the version of liberation offered.
In the book’s final chapter, “Wal-Martization: Keeping It Real,” McGee takes the gloves off a bit and details how “Bishop Jakes’s lifestyle and his theology of empire endorse a ‘preferential option for the rich’ rather than a ‘preferential option for the poor’” (184). From where I’m sitting, having formerly pastored an affluent predominantly white church, and now teaching at an HBCU (historic black college or university), it seems to me that confirmation bias—the tendency to affirm ideas that in turn affirm us and our status—is a sin we all need to guard against. We all have our blind spots, and so McGee’s thoughtful and balanced critique is a word we all need to hear.
Chris Caldwell is professor and chair, Department of Sociology, Simmons College of Kentucky which is a historic black college.
