Salvation on the Small Screen?. Nadia Bolz-Weber

invited her to join me for the hour. Ann appreciates that Joyce pokes fun and laughs at herself. Apparently Joyce was raised in a very conservative Christian tradition where women were forbidden to have any authority in the church, much less be preachers. Ann tells me that Joyce “felt a calling to preach, so she had to leave her church where she couldn’t live out that calling, and in the process she lost everything, all of her friends and her community. It’s a powerful story.” I agree.

      Joyce’s show is called Enjoying Everyday Life, and the intro is a montage of people doing just that — laughing, having pillow fights, playing in a pile of leaves. But I have to tell you it’s hard to see Joyce doing any of these things herself. She’s now standing on a huge stage behind a large pulpit. She’s dressed in slimming all black with a small gold sweater and dangly earrings. The audience numbers in the tens of thousands and appears to be mostly women.

      She opens with a sternly voiced directive: “Open your Bibles up to 1 Peter, chapter 5, verse 8.” She proceeds to read the passage (not surprisingly) from the Ted Turner colorized (Amplified, engorged, made-up, enhanced) version, and this does not go unnoticed by the New Testament scholar in the room, Ann comments, “It’s weird that they always use the Amplified Bible.”

      “Dealing with the devil,” Joyce announces, “is something we have to deal with all the time, so we might as well learn to do it right.” She’s talking about how thirty years ago as a good church member she didn’t know what it meant that she was constantly struggling with someone who “wanted to steal my righteousness, peace, and joy and the good plan God had for my life.”

      She tells us that the devil roams around looking for open doors to mess with people. “God spoke to my heart a number of years ago.” She claims, “He said, ‘You can forget about open doors; the devil is looking for every tiny crack he can crawl through.’ The more God blesses you, the more responsibility he gives you, and the more of God’s anointing power and authority that’s released in your life, the narrower your path must become. You may get by with things one year that you can’t get by with the next year.”

      I hate to admit this, but I think she’s right. The whole devil thing is weird to me, and I’ll get to that, but I have to say that the closer I get to ordination, the more I struggle with things that haven’t been an issue for me for years. My friend Kyle would put a Jungian twist on this and say that my shadow side doesn’t go away just because I go to seminary. It’s just that now I have no choice but to deal with it.

      “As a believer in Jesus Christ, you have power and you have authority.” Joyce has this strange mannerism where whenever she moves from the pulpit she clasps one hand over the other in front of her like an evangelical opera diva and stays like that while walking around the stage. It feels a bit like she’s trying to control herself through a gesture management program.

      “Turn your Bibles to Luke 10:19.”

      “Behold I have given you authority and power.” (She reads from Luke 10.)

      Joyce turns to the audience and says, “Say authority and power.” They comply.

      “Don’t you like those words? Say, ‘I have authority.’ [They do.] Say, ‘I have power.’ Say it again. ‘I have authority.’ ‘I have power.’ “

      The camera pans to the audience of mostly middle-aged women saying, “I have power.” I’m thinking about how empowering this must be to have one of their own speaking with such authority and telling them that they too have power. I’m thinking too of how ridiculous it would seem to me if I were there. I wonder then about my own criticism of these preachers. They all seem to be preaching to the disempowered, and I’m not really their target audience. Maybe these sermons that seem like self-help sprinkled with a few Bible verses, basically Oprah meets Jesus, really do help the powerless feel emboldened to claim some sort of control in their lives. How right is it for an empowered person to criticize the message? Well, in fairness, if Paula and Jesse and Joyce and Creflo were living comfortably middle-class lives like actual clergy folks, it would be harder still to criticize. But the fact of the matter is that their multi-million-dollar lifestyles are funded by the Social Security checks and low wages of their “ministry partners.”

      Joyce goes into a little thing on obedience. This is language that I can’t stand, partly because I have huge authority issues and partly because I think “obedience” can be really abusive. I’m realizing that I’m not saying much of this out loud to Ann. I know she has a fondness for this woman, and I don’t want to risk offending my former New Testament professor. Thankfully, I don’t have to feel awkward for long because Ann soon volunteers her own criticism, “Sometimes this prooftexting can be bothersome.” Ann adds, “I appreciate that she can be empowering and her humor can be really self-deprecating, but one of the difficulties I have is how she uses this empowerment language. She is a real leader with something to say, but then she can turn around and talk about her need to be submissive or obedient to her husband. She’s an empowered woman who speaks the Word but then talks about being submissive to Dave. She doesn’t talk about being equally yoked and partners, just the submissive stuff. There’s this dichotomy that disturbs me. Maybe that’s a throwback to her origins. Maybe she thinks she needs to be submissive so she doesn’t lose her audience.”

      I find Ann’s comment interesting, especially because Joyce hasn’t really mentioned the whole “men having most-favored-gender-status in the eyes of the Almighty” issue at all. Yet Ann comments on it. Then I realize that Dr. Ann Brock, myself, and “Dr.” Joyce Meyer are all in the same boat in a way. We all were raised in Christian traditions that did not allow women to “have authority over men.” In my case this included forbidding women to usher or even help pass the collection plates. I never understood how handing a man a bulletin or collection plate was an exercise of authority, especially when we all knew that forty-five minutes later at the potluck I’d be handing that same man a plate of fried chicken. Handing him a plate in the “auditorium” (“sanctuary” was too Catholic sounding): no. Handing him a plate of Colonel Sanders: fine.

      A list of things we must do in order to have a good relationship with God follows:

      Being a victorious, powerful, stomp-on-the-devil’s-head Christian is a full-time job. One little sermon on Sunday morning is not going to keep you in victory. You’re going to have to love the word, live in the word, you’re going to have to put time into your walk with God, you’re going to need to study, you’re going to need to pray, you’re going to need to say no to things that keep you from having time with God. Remember the promises of God are for who-so-ever will.

      My issue with this is that the ball is totally in our court. Maybe God is actually at work in the world and we can’t see it, much less participate in it, when we are spending so much time trying to tend our relationship with God alone in our rooms reading our Bibles. Don’t get me wrong. I love the biblical text, and most mornings I actually manage to read the daily office readings. But silently reading the biblical text, much less any text, is a somewhat modern invention, although we think of it as a given. Spiritual discipline as a part of Christian life I have no problem with. It’s (a) doing it so that we will get something back from God, and (b) locating the activity of God in the world solely in some sort of quiet personal interior relationship in the individual that I find problematic.

      Joyce Meyer claims that the reason some people are closer to God than others is not because God plays favorites, but because some people are willing to put more time into the relationship than others. There’s a decent crowd for her talk, but she scoldingly claims that there should never be empty seats at something like this, which to me seems to go beyond speaking as a “victorious” Christian and just a few inches into the realm of narcissism.

      Going back to the devil, Joyce tells us that “the devil hates you. He wants you to be miserable and to be a Christian with a bumper sticker and no fruit in your life. Think of the mental image most people have of Christians.” Head hanging she shuffles across the stage pathetically saying, “Just trying to make it through till Jesus comes back to get me, can’t wait to get to heaven,” and the crowd cheers as she straightens up and says strongly, “Well, Jesus isn’t