The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has a column up on WorldNetDaily on the racism that infects some black churches. His analysis makes a certain amount of sense, and he may well be right that “since the exodus of men, black preachers have retooled their message to play to women’s egos”; certainly, one hears enough of that sort of complaint aimed at the white church. Where the Rev. Peterson goes wrong is in the next paragraph:
Bishop T.D. Jakes, for instance, has built an empire by targeting the emotional needs of women. His popular books include “Loose That Man & Let Him Go” and “The Lady, Her Lover, Her Lord.”
There are two main problems here, which are (predictably) interrelated. The first is that this is a gross oversimplification of Bishop Jakes’ ministry. Rev. Peterson’s statements would lead one to expect that Bishop Jakes has written a flood of books “targeting the emotional needs of women,” when even a cursory look will show the contrary. Second, Rev. Peterson writes so as to imply from context that Loose That Man & Let Him Go! is a book addressed to women encouraging them to dump the men in their lives, when nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, the book is one of a number which Bishop Jakes has addressed to men urging men “to let Jesus take hold of their limitations and bondages and to come forth into the light of all God has planned for them”—a message I remember him preaching at Promise Keepers—and he’s been doing that rather longer than he’s been writing to women; the first of his books addressed to women, Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, wasn’t published until 1994. (Loose That Man & Let Him Go! came out in 1991; the title, incidentally, is addressed not to women but to the Devil.)All of which is to say that the Rev. Peterson appears to have an agenda, which he makes clear in the following paragraph:
Worse, Jakes has empowered women to assume leadership positions within the church, despite clear biblical admonitions against it.
It’s all well and good to speak of “clear biblical admonitions”; those of us who disagree with the Rev. Peterson’s school of interpretation on the role of women in the church don’t see anything of the sort, but it’s as appropriate for him to use such language as it is for me in return to say that his reading of the Bible is shallow, simplistic, and culturally bound. That’s well within the bounds of normal academic rhetoric. What isn’t, and what in fact is flat-out inappropriate, is to prop up his agenda by misrepresenting the facts. Whatever his faults and flaws (and no doubt he has many, just like all the rest of us), Bishop Jakes deserves better than that.