In Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global, Marla F. Frederick focusses on contemporary religious broadcasting (primarily Pentecostal) of African Americans and its impact on the Caribbean region (primarily Jamaica). Taking an ethnographic approach, the author seeks to explore how people of color have been influential in televangelism's “transnational flow” (4), largely due to the power of the Internet and its social media. She sees “digital religion” as disrupting market-based religious broadcasting that had earlier been dominated by white, male voices. The title of the work is playful, using “colored” as representative of literal color television (a medium that started out as black-and-white about when the civil rights movement was getting under way) and the rise of diversity in the field of televangelism. Two areas of Frederick's focus are the gospels of prosperity and sexual redemption.

The prosperity gospel was a way for the high production costs of televangelism to be paid for, as listeners were promised that the more they gave to the broadcast ministry the more God would in turn bless them. The overhead expenses necessitated a large audience best obtained by sensationalized programming, which was a natural fit for the Pentecostal faith tradition. Reflecting on the ministries of the Reverend Ike (Frederick Eikenkoetter) and Bishop Carlton Pearson in the first two chapters, the author argues that their prosperity gospels have been shaped in part by the racism of the American experience. In fact, she regards the black prosperity gospel as a form of racial uplift, an affirmation of the American Dream that was largely missing from the religion that backed the civil rights movement. The author goes on to make an interesting connection (based on an idea offered by historian Richard J. Powell) between the flashy health-and-wealth ministers and the black “dandy” figure that dates back to the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 focusses on how the African American prosperity theologies have translated in Jamaica in the midst of recession, even being heartily embraced by the poorest of the poor because of the fluidity and relativity of the faith concept.

The “gospels of sexual redemption” are the focus of chapters 5 and 6. Here American female evangelists, including Pastor Paula White (who happens to be Caucasian), Juanita Bynum, and Joyce Meyers, are credited for opening space for raw discourse on sexuality and sexual abuse, bringing a self-help message of respectability and redemption that has resonated with women around the world. According to the author, bookstores in Jamaica had more books by these three women than by Jamaican authors. And Bynum has reported that an event she hosted in Kenya in 2005 attracted 750,000. The popularity of these female ministers, Frederick explains, is because they are seen as being authentic. The author does not say so, but there seems to be a traditional gender role here being carried out where women primarily preach to other women, while men preach to everyone the message of prosperity.

Colored Television is heuristic, but not definitive. The critical distance between author and subject matter is narrow at best, perhaps because the research trips seem to have been carried out as participant observer. For instance, there is little commentary on the “preying” aspect of the televangelism world, although Frederick shares an anecdote of someone who felt bad because she could not afford the fifty-dollar fee to have her slip of paper with a prayer request inserted into a miniaturized “Wailing Wall” so that it could be prayed over by a prosperity preacher. Frederick believes that the Internet will be a tool for the democratization of televangelism, though she concedes that production expenses for quality programming (which today's viewers automatically demand) will continue to present a challenge from totally freeing it from corporate control. She wonders if this success of the new televangelism is countercultural or simply a new form of establishment religion.

Though Colored Television is narrow in geographic scope, Frederick suggests that her findings are global. This examination of how African American Christianity has in some measure made an impact on the global stage is largely an inconsequential story because the real action is occurring in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with homegrown ministries that will likely be making a global impact of their own for decades to come. Readers would gain more about globalized Christianity by reading Philip Jenkins, works such as The New Faces of Christianity (2006) and The Next Christendom (2011). Frederick does not list Jenkins in her bibliography, but his research on the transnational aspect of Christianity shows that Western society is no longer the driver.