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Jakes is one of religion's most prodigious polymaths. His books, starting with his breakthrough inspirational volume Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, have sold in the millions. His 26,000-member Potter's House megachurch in South Dallas drew George W. Bush and Al Gore prior to the 2000 election. Jakes is a Grammy-nominated gospel singer and has a deal with Hallmark for a line of "Loose Your Spirit" inspirational greeting cards. He preaches regularly to millions on both Black Entertainment Television and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Yet millions more have never heard of him. When they do, new enthusiasts can adopt an awed tone not unlike acolytes of bebop jazz in the '50s or grunge in the early 1990s. Hubert Morken, an independent political-science scholar who had not heard of Jakes until two years ago, ended up profiling him for a book on influential religious leaders. "I was shocked by the guy," he says. "His gifts are colossal."
Part of what stokes Jakes enthusiasts is the extravagant celebratory bounty of black Pentecostal preaching. "When it comes to rhetoric," says Paige Patterson, a leader in the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention, "the best Anglo preachers on their best days don't preach as well as a good black preacher on his worst day." Regarding Holy Spirit-soaked Pentecostalism, one might add, More so. With its improvisatory electricity, ornate call-and-response cues and dramatic eruptions of prophesying or speaking in tongues, it is an unrivaled preacher's toolbox. The style is increasingly popular in non-Pentecostal black denominations and beyond: Kirbyjon Caldwell, a tongues-talking black Methodist, calls Bush "Brother President" and prays with him on the phone. Globally, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian faith.
Yet Jakes outstrips the movement's parameters. All Pentecostals know their Bible; fewer have the theological chops to casually drop a quick exegesis of Romans 1-8, perhaps Scripture's thorniest patch, into a sermon in order to explain how its author, the Apostle Paul, fostered cultural diversity in the early church. Jakes does, and has.
And he extends the tradition's emotional and psychological reach. Jakes was 10 when his father, a West Virginian who owned a janitorial business, developed a kidney ailment and died slowly over the next five years. The son comforted his mother and mopped blood from around the dialysis machine. The experience, which he terms "living between life and death," seems to have engendered a kind of fearless openness. As a preacher, Jakes takes on still-taboo topics like physical and sexual abuse and the shame of incarceration with a cathartic and psychologically acute explicitness. (Speaking to 64,000 women in New Orleans recently, he flatly broached a mother's nightmare: "You got a problem with your child. It's been 10 years since you've seen the child you wanted to see. Just some monster in his clothes.") It's Oprah-in-a-pulpit. But for Winfrey's generic spirituality, Jakes substitutes God. Says Charisma's Grady: "He taps into the core of human weakness and need and then proclaims Christ as an answer to that, in a way that causes people to stand up and shout."