Shayne Lee: The Economics Of Religion
The forces of capitalism have descended upon the religious world, according to Shayne Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African Diaspora Studies.
Professor Lee was intrigued by the rising popularity of the "mega-church" and the apparently decline of smaller churches. "There have been some major shifts in American Protestantism that has a lot of people baffled," Lee says. "Now, it's the sociologist instead of theologian who is most equipped to find these changes."
Lee says today's religion can be analyzed in terms of supply and demand. He sees preachers as religious suppliers and their members as clients. The churches that are in decline generally emphasize a doctrinal message and dogma. "In our post-modern age there seems to be more popularity among those churches that borrow from pop culture and have a therapeutic aspect to it that is spoken in a language people can understand," he says.
To illustrate his point, he wrote a highly acclaimed book on the Reverend T. D. Jakes, whose Dallas church regularly draws 28,000 attendees. Jakes is the most popular African American preacher in the country and possibly the most significant African American preacher since Martin Luther King. His book is the first scholarly account of Jakes' rise from the coal mine towns of West Virginia to what Time Magazine called "America's New Preacher."
At the opposite end of the social spectrum, there's Lee's interest in Hip Hop. He teaches a course entitled, "Hip Hop in Urban America," which is wildly popular with students. "Tulane has a huge hip hop following," he says. "It's almost like jazz and a perfect metaphor for the American experience."
