It may be hard to believe, but it's true: until the publication of this volume, there was no book devoted solely to the phenomenon of black televangelism. This is despite the fact that studies in white televangelism comprise a respectable bookshelf cluster, and, more importantly, it is despite the fact that black televangelism dominates the public airwaves on Sunday morning. For reasons somewhat mysterious and possibly exclusionary, the story of televised African American Christianity was, before Walton, unacceptably untold.
No more. Future scholars of the subjects here explored by Walton will return to Watch This! time and again for footnote and provocation. As a social ethicist, Walton is unrepentant in his subjective interest in this research, seeking as he does to “evaluate all forms of dogmatism, parochialism, and provincialism, including those of the black Christian community and the academy, that preclude intellectual innovation in relation to this form of African American Christian expression” (xv). Quoting Walton in this way suggests that his is a polemical treatise; save for the concluding chapters, this is not the case. Walton seeks to fulfill two intellectual ambitions with this research: first, to revise the denominational and political bent of twentieth-century African American religious historiography; second, to observe just what is conspicuously contradictory in the discourse of that revisionary subject. Using black televangelism as the ladder of postwar African American Christian expression, Walton both relates a new plotline for that group of activity and, in his role as an ethicist, opines upon its content.
This makes Watch This! eminently readable, since Walton's unsparing eye never leaves his mark, nor does he ever forgive the cultured chroniclers who have missed the target altogether. “Chicanery and stratagem cannot account for the enduring success of African American broadcasting,” Walton explains, choosing instead to note other, more pervasive themes to the gospel recordings, radio preachers, and electronic distributions of the Word (168). The focus of the book is to demonstrate how black televangelists capitalize upon American cultural myths, such as (to borrow Walton's terms) the myth of the American dream, or the myth of black victimology, or the myth of the ideal family, to convert their viewers to more than Christ. Black televangelists promote a picture of a life born again in neoconservative, rabidly patriotic, and hyper-masculine formats. While such family values fantasies have always been a part of the African American preaching tradition, Walton finds his leading pastors, bishops, and preachers occupying a post-civil rights era in which the ongoing social realities of class, race, and gender require their revived reiteration.
This is a thick description of black religious broadcasting that slices confidently through the profusion of materials supplied by its subjects: the broadcasts, the video distributions, the printed publications, stage plays, and their musical recordings. No matter what they're selling or saying, Walton says, “televangelists all sing a familiar tune” (15). This is a position built upon a series of careful case studies, narrating the biography, theological emphases, and cultural location of multiple leading figures, including Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, Bishop T. D. Jakes, Bishop Eddie L. Long, and Pastors Creflo and Taffi Dollar. Even as these preachers represent different sectarian locations (neo-Pentecostal, Charismatic mainline, Word of Faith), they are, in Walton's discerning rendition, participating in a consistent production of social discourse. As this profile emerges, readers gain a new appreciation for the history of evangelical television, the relationship between religious broadcasting and the mega-church movement, and the emergence of the church as a corporate entity in the modern period. There are readings, too, of T. D. Jakes's The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord and Taffi Dollar's A Woman after God's Own Heart, as well as sidebars on religious race recordings by preachers like Rev. Calvin P. Dixon, religious radio shows by Holiness preacher Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux, and new religious movements like the Spiritual movement led by Prophet James F. Jones, organizer of the Universal Triumph, the Dominion of God, Inc.
Walton uses these antecedents as well as an array of secondary research to gird up a study which relies on limited field visits and selective documentary readings to offer a wide discussion of complicated enterprises. From his viewing and reading, Walton relates impressive details from the architecture, organization, and sartorial style of the chapels and churches under his examination. Despite the fact that he surveys only male leaders, gender readings pervade, as Walton describes a “metaphysical physicality” compelled by televangelist practices. Although this is a spiritual state brought about, as Walton sees it, by rituals of self-affirmation in the electronic churches, it also may have bleaker gendered consequences. Toward the end of Watch This!, Walton asks: “Should we pray for and be deeply concerned and saddened about an unhealthy culture of hypermasculinity and a patriarchal savior complex that possibly helps to cultivate sadomasochistic and misogynistic tendencies?” (227). This is the urgency of Walton's study, pressing upon his readers to wonder at the social accommodation encouraged by these ministers. The posited viewers are those “dehydrated by doubt, despair, and dejection” who come to the “constructed space” of these churches to no longer be defined by those circumstances (xii, 15). In his rendering, the consumption of black televangelism may assist these viewers “to obscure reality, flatten internal contradictions, and ignore constructive alternatives for attaining desired spiritual and sociopolitical ends” (14). Thus, Walton concludes, the producers and participants of African American religious broadcasting may find themselves “reinforcing the very social systems that they believe themselves to be dismantling” (17). While opinions on the experiences and projections of viewers would be better left to more anthropological vantages of this subject, Walton's provocations return careful cultural critique to the study of contemporary American religious creativity.
