Spirit Raiser

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Would everybody shout? 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. Jakes has called homosexuality a "brokenness" and says he would not hire a sexually active gay person. It is a common position among conservative religious leaders (Graham, for instance, called homosexuality a sin), but gay Americans would have no reason at all to consider Jakes their preacher.

Another case in point is his lifestyle. Jakes and his wife Serita, who is known as "the first lady," (they have five children) live in a $1.7 million pillared mansion on Dallas' scenic White Rock Lake next to an edifice once owned by oil magnate H.L. Hunt. He baptized former bad-boy athlete Deion (Neon) Sanders and befriended him, along with a host of luminaries like Natalie Cole. He flies on charter planes or in first-class seats, sups with a coterie in a room known as "the king's table," sports a large diamond ring and dresses like the multimillionaire he is.

Evangelical watchdogs find no hint of financial impropriety in all this. Jakes' income flows from book and record royalties and speaking fees, not from church tithes or his preaching videos. He has helped poor people both materially and spiritually, and is building a 231-acre rehabilitation and jobs complex in impoverished South Dallas. He feels that the poor need a fiscal model rather than an icon of self-denial. He claims Jesus must have been rich to support his disciples. But many other Christians believe that Jesus was a poor man and that wealth corrupts. Jakes is not their preacher.

America is constantly changing, as is Jakes. The two may yet come into consonance. Or not. That should not keep Americans, even those who don't claim Jakes as their preacher, from experiencing him just once. There may not be another like him soon.