It's a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement (review)

Abstract

A P R I L 2 0 0 9 147 It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement. By Scott Billingsley. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. x, 202 pp. $34.50. ISBN 978-0-8173-1606-8. In 1999, he drew 84,000 people to the Georgia Dome, shattering Billy Graham’s previous attendance record. He became the third-bestselling author for Penguin Putnam, behind only Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell. With money from his books and records, he afforded a lavish lifestyle, including an opulent home. It could be the story of a celebrity singer, but its the Horatio Alger life of T. D. Jakes, perhaps the most wellknown personality in Scott Billingsley’s It’s A New Day, the most recent addition to the University of Alabama Press’s Religion and American Culture series. Billingsley presents the lives and careers of the leading lights of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Some of these figures, like Jakes, are household names, both to American evangelicals and to scholars of American religion. Others, such as Kenneth Hagin and Joyce Meyer, may be unfamiliar to scholars but have exerted tremendous in- fluence on the movements Billingsley discusses. He argues that the leaders he presents “served as cultural mediators between the secular and religious worlds . . . taking socially and theologically liberal ideologies and shaping them to fit the sensibilities of conservative evangelical audiences ” (p. 1). In each of his chapters, Billingsley provides the biographies of several leading Pentecostal and charismatic figures. Virtually every story of these “religious entrepreneurs” includes at least a hint of scandal, either financial or otherwise. A brief account of Lindsay Roberts, recently alleged to have benefited from the misuse of funds at Oral Roberts University, is an ironic exception to this rule. Many readers will probably conclude that the charismatic landscape is populated by a flock of Elmer Gantry disciples. Billingsley, however, focuses on the ways that charismatic and Pentecostal leaders negotiated the cultural and theological minefields of gender and race. Drawing on a heritage of at least inchoate egalitarianism , some Pentecostal revivalists at mid-century gave women and men prominent roles in their ministries. A few women, such as Kathryn Kuhlman, forged independent careers, while many ministers’ wives became significant figures in their own rights. Along with more recent T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 148 figures such as Joyce Meyer, these women explicitly rejected feminism and affirmed the traditional role of women in the home, but they also insisted on the right and duty of women to answer God’s call to ministry. Thus, Billingsley suggests that these leaders helped younger generations of women “accept the message of sexual equality even if it was packaged in traditional rhetoric about submissiveness” (p. 97). On issues of race, Billingsley’s thesis is somewhat less persuasive. He correctly points to integrationist pioneers like the white Pentecostal A. A. Allen; however, it is more difficult to see a process of “cultural mediation ” in these chapters. After all, the white Pentecostal minister Kenneth Hagin Jr. fell out with the African American Frederick Price when Hagin suggested that parents could teach their children to eschew interracial dating. Moreover, the political views of the African American ministers that Billingsley presents are complex. Some, like Price, focus on confronting racism. T. D. Jakes largely avoids politics but articulates a clear social justice agenda. Others embraced the social message of the Republican Party because of concerns over abortion and homosexuality. Billingsley’s book will be of great service to readers looking for an introduction to recent and contemporary Pentecostal and charismatic Protestantism in the United States. His biographical approach is often engaging but has limitations. Biographies of individual leaders—often resting on the groundwork of David Harrell, Shayne Lee, and other scholars—comprise the bulk of his chapters, sometimes leaving too little time for analysis. Moreover, while one can hardly object to detailing the careers of individuals most scholars have neglected, his top-down approach often leaves one wondering to what extent the audiences...