Harvard University Associate Professor Marla Frederick yesterday evening discussed with a Goddard Chapel audience her research on the influence of American televangelists on Jamaicans. She expounded on why those preachers' messages of prosperity have become so attractive to inner-city Jamaicans racked by poverty.
The Christian gospel of prosperity, she said, has combined with impoverished Jamaicans' desire for a new route to modernity and material improvement to offer them hope.
The sermons of American television ministries like those of Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes, she said, have thus become an important part of spreading faith in Jamaica.
"The instability and malleability of the concept of prosperity is [key] to its longevity," she said.
An associate professor of African, African-American and religion studies, Frederick was participating in the Office of the University Chaplain's Forum on Religion and the Media.
Prosperity gospel states that God rewarded faith with physical and material wealth. Frederick said it has become particularly popular in televangelism.
These television broadcasts are intended for middle-class Americans; the audience she found in Jamaica, she said, appeared completely different than the classic target group.
"The prosperity gospel consistently informs at least some of the religious ideation of the country's Christian population," Frederick said. It became clear to her that media played a role in spreading this theology.
Some scholars have determined that the failure of certain routes to wealth have led many to seek new strategies, according to Frederick. The words of American televangelists have helped fill that gap, she said.
"Prosperity theology provided a promise of a certain return on their faith," Frederick said of Jamaicans looking for change amid strife. "One's life did not have to waste away" in nihilism, she added.
Jamaicans pray with American televangelists who "offer them means to material gain," Frederick said, adding that those Jamaican viewers adapt those messages to their unique contexts.
Frederick began her talk by setting the scene of a violent, poor, urban area. She has conducted research in inner-city Kingston, Jamaica, among what she called "an underworld of drugs and violence," poverty and a high rate of both political and non-political homicides.
"It's a different kind of lifestyle than we are used to seeing when we think about Jamaica," she said. "Not even local churches wanted to set up in this area."
But the prosperity gospel offered a way into these communities.
She told the audience, which numbered at one point around 20, that during her research, she visited a man named William who engaged in "spiritual warfare with the enemy" by setting up a tent church in a particularly poor and dangerous place where bodies often littered the streets.
"A large portion of William's church is made up of single women trying to provide for their children," said Frederick, who explained that 90 percent of children in Jamaica are born out of wedlock.
An "oasis" amidst a "desert" of impoverishment, Frederick said, the church's Pentecostal leanings and emphasis on the prosperity gospel have inspired many.
Yet many Jamaicans who follow this gospel remain poor, which begs the question of what the televangelists' teachings offer them and why they continue believing, Frederick said. Jamaicans often take issue with how, as one person she talked to put it, televangelists make it seem like the gospel is for sale, constantly pleading for money.
She explained that the prosperity gospel has several elements that make it attractive to those in the slums of Jamaica. In particular, the gospel has an ability to adapt to the unique situation of these individuals and their conception of prosperity, as it often includes less tangible ideas like one's relationship with God.
The reinterpretation of prosperity gospel in Jamaica gives scholars insights into the underlying notions of that theology, she said.
University Chaplain David O'Leary praised Frederick's study of religion and the media.
"I'm thrilled that more anthropologists are looking into religion to analyze it," he said, calling that a good sign.
