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Time wonders if T.D. Jakes is "the next Billy Graham"
IS THIS MAN THE NEXT BILLY GRAHAM? That's the cover line of this week's Time magazine, which lists Dallas Pentecostal T.D. Jakes as "America's Best Preacher" in a series of "America's Best" cultural innovators. Is Time repeating itself? Maybe its editors thought no one read its December listing of Jakes in its "Time 100" as one of the country's spiritual innovators. In that piece, Time religion reporter David Van Biema emphasized the Jakes of books, music, theater, and television. Here Van Biema's emphasis is explicitly on his preaching:

He purrs like Isaac Hayes and screams like Jay Hawkins. He slips from quoting a standard hymn—"Just as I am, without one plea/ but that Thy blood was shed for me" almost straight into hip-hop: "Transform me/ Translate me/ I release you to rearrange me/ Are you willing to be changed?" He does this without warning or acknowledgement. (If you miss one riff, don't worry, there will be another one along in moments.) And however leisurely Jakes' presentation may seem, each sermon eventually reveals itself as perfectly calibrated and balanced, cohering into an often exquisite extended metaphor.

But saying he's an amazing preacher is very different from suggesting he's "the next Billy Graham." Both are able to fill stadiums, but the two are very different—even in preaching styles. Jakes is a weekly preacher, Graham is a crusade evangelist. That means that the topic ("You must be born again") and structure (e.g. sermon illustrations from the newspaper) don't vary much for Graham. And though Graham's approach was very innovative against the news in the 1950s, it's now relatively common among evangelistic preachers. And that's not to mention the radical institutional differences between the two men. Van Biema seems to recognize these differences, and answers the question "Is this the next Billy Graham?" with what sounds like a "no."

There is a huge difference between being America's best preacher and America's Preacher, Graham's unofficial title for decades. In fact, that category may have evaporated, given today's cultural landscape and absent Graham's singular attributes. He is a white man in a country that understood itself, myopically, as white. He is a Protestant in a nation that was more aware of its Protestant roots than its growing diversity. A Baptist, he preaches a Gospel message so pure as to elude denominational criticism. He is expert at minimizing personal or philosophical particularities that would have reduced his constituency. A friend of Presidents, he lives in comfort but has nonetheless avoided ostentation and escaped the "rich preacher" label.

Jakes, by contrast, is a man of vivid particulars living in an age suspicious of the phrase "common ground." Some Americans might find him too black. Some Christians would consider him too Pentecostal, and even some Pentecostals question aspects of his theology. … Gay Americans would have no reason at all to consider Jakes their preacher. … Many other Christians believe that Jesus was a poor man and that wealth corrupts. Jakes is not their preacher.

Even if he's not America's preacher, Van Biema writes, everyone should experience him at least once. But why? That question is answered in a sidebar on the resurgence of biblical preaching. "The reason that preaching is enjoying a revival in churches where it was a dying art, say religion scholars, has to do with appetites that are harder to satisfy outside church, as the culture grows noisier and more coarse," writes Nancy Gibbs. It's somewhat surprising that Time faults a lack of commitment to the Bible as the reason for the drop in preaching's moral authority:

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September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45