Abstract
Every summer thousands of evangelical Christians travel to Fort Worth, Texas, to attend the Southwest Believers’ Convention, hosted by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. The convention is one of several revival-style campaigns organized across North America and Europe by Kenneth Copeland Ministries (KCM), arguably the premier Word of Faith ministry in America. This particular meeting is the largest as it is comprised of those whom many consider the Big Five of the Word of Faith: Jerry Savelle, Jesse Duplantis, and Creflo Dollar in addition to the Copelands. From early in the morning to the prime-time evening slot, these five evangelists rotate, taking the stage at the Fort Worth Convention Center. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature of Word of Faith, this neocharismatic movement is better known for the theology it espouses, the prosperity gospel of divine health and material wealth. Ministry partners—those persons who commit to supporting Copeland’s ministry through prayer and financial support—as well as regular viewers take off work, organize vacations, and even coordinate family reunions to brave the region’s heat and humidity to hear a positive word of prosperity from one of their favorite television evangelists.
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Notes
Scott Billingsley, It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 6.
According to Louis Althusser, individuals are subjected into a dominant ideological system by a hailing process which he refers to as interpellation. A mass-mediated message, for instance, calls out (hails) viewers with the end result being the total acceptance (subjectification) of a particular ideological proposition. Persons may resist the interpellation process with the understanding of being placed outside the system as rebels. There is little room for polyvalent interpretations or resistance within the ideological system itself. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Others (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174–75.
This project is informed theoretically by the “lived religion” approach that, according to historian David Hall, is concerned with “representing our subjects as they live with and work through multiple realms of meaning.” It is the way persons practice their faith in complicated and even contradictory ways that disrupts the “official” prescriptions of any given faith community. Practice, to again cite Hall, “bears the marks of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance. It is not wholly one or the other.” David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xi.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 42–46.
Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Pub, 1995), 147.
Dale H. Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty, Studies in Evangelicalism 13 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 14.
Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches : The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8–11.
David Edwin Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 461–62.
Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 180.
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics : How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schustser, 2010).
Joseph Tamney and Stephen Johnson, “The Popularity of Strict Churches,” Review of Religous Research 39, no. 3 (1998): 219.
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© 2012 Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong
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Walton, J.L. (2012). Stop Worrying and Start Sowing! A Phenomenological Account of the Ethics of “Divine Investment”. In: Attanasi, K., Yong, A. (eds) Pentecostalism and Prosperity. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011169_6
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