The Politics of Steven Furtick's Hairline

A Report from Elevation Church

This post is part one of three. Find part two here. Find part three here.

My very first thought when Steven Furtick walked on stage at the main Elevation Church campus was this: white people hairlines don’t do that.

Steven Furtick preaches at Elevation Ballantyne on Sundy, Sept 17, 2023. Photo by the author.

The picture, zoomed in, with the contested territory highlighted.

And Steven Furtick is most definitely white.

The hairline can’t be an accident. Every single thing you see at an Elevation campus is intentional. Each detail has been carefully designed. The entire experience is a triumph of planning, message discipline, and thorough production. I encountered it from the moment I pulled in the parking lot, where a volunteer directed me to an empty space and another met me just a few feet from my car. The second one had a rolling wooden box, brandished with the Elevation logo, from which he distributed orange, Elevation-branded umbrellas for the trek through the rain across multiple acres of parking. I deposited the umbrella in another rolling box near the door, just as another volunteer wheeled that box back into the rain. There was a miniature economy of mutual care happening and I had been ushered into it.

I arrived forty-five minutes early, having been warned by an acquaintance that the seats would fill early. In was not yet 9AM, and the lobby was already hazy with smoke-machine fog. On one side was a long line of dazed parents anxious to drop their kids off in the designated area. On the other were hundreds of people shuffling toward what I assumed was the auditorium. My contact was right about arriving early. We were shoulder to shoulder across the width of the building, all anxious to get in, to find some relief, to see clearly.

As the throng reached the auditorium, dozens of volunteers directed us to our seats. The volunteers opened one or two rows at a time from front to rear, pointing each person to a specific gray or orange chair. There was no courtesy space between neighbors, like the sparse pew-sitters at your local Presbyterian church might leave. Every available space got filled, and then a new row opened. Twenty minutes before the service was scheduled to begin, each seat held a casually-dressed human. We were a surprising array of racial and ethnic identities, the nearest thing to a multi-cultural church I’ve experienced.

I was in a gray seat. My neighbor was in an orange one. She told me that she attended because she did not identify with religion, or church buildings, or church governance processes. She wanted unfiltered God. I could see why she liked the blank slate of this theater. It lacked any religious identifiers. Had someone announced they were filming a Netflix comedy special that morning rather than a worship service, not a single thing would have to be changed.

“My relationship is with God, not religion,” she told me. “What is important is to know God yourself.”

“That’s interesting. Tell me, did you come to that idea yourself, or did someone teach you?” I asked her. She seemed not to understand my point.

Anyway, the smoke machine, the umbrellas, the umbrella case, the horde of volunteers in predictable clothing, the choreography, the chairs, the synchronous broadcast to twenty other sites. Every detail is planned.

So the hairline is not accidental.

Nor are the sneakers.¹

Nor is the preaching style, taken straight from the tradition of Black American pulpits. As Furtick worked his message towards an apex, he used short sentences in repeating rhythm to excite listeners. At the climax, he shouted short phrases. The keyboard player had come back on stage ready to interject: Short sentence. Organ riff! Short phrase. Organ chord! Rhythmic speech. Blues-y harmonies!!! Words! Chord! Word! Chord! All together, SHOOUUUTTTTTT!!!!!

Look: I have no problem with imitation. I’m a jazz musician. My mortgage gets paid because I’ve spent decades imitating the recorded testimonies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. But imitation in service of what? What I heard—and what I’ve heard across the other Furtick sermons I’ve listened to—was mimicry without meaning. Nothing pointed the congregation in the direction to which exemplary Black preaching has consistently been aimed—liberation, justice, collective lament turned to joy.² I was reminded of what I’ve heard neighbors and colleagues say: “y’all want our rhythm but not our blues.” I was witnessing an attempt at joy unspeakable without apprenticeship to the masters of liberationist exegesis, and without, so far as can be publicly discerned, any attempt at deep solidarity with the disinherited.³

The whole experience, from the hairline to the closing line, confused me. I heard and saw a presentation that sounded like one thing but looked like another. It felt like a façade. A production. Everything was a blank slate, from the exurb where we were sitting to the auditorium to the preacher himself. Everything was ripe for transformation, but all of it in the context of ambiguity. Transformation from what political condition? It was the context of no context, everything without a past or a setting.

The haze from the lobby drifted through the auditorium as well.

The space attempted to enact racial ambiguity. Multi-racial churches often operate in such spaces. They frequently give one image, but behind the scenes is another: the protection of whiteness behind a front of Blackness. Ultimately, racial ambiguity gets enacted in service of whiteness. ⁴

And behind whiteness is always an angle on space and places and their acquisition, and eventually, their conquest.

I didn’t start my visitations to Elevation Church thinking at all about Furtick. I was thinking about space and place and empires and how churches function within the built environment. As a writer and researcher, I’m interested in how geography and theology merge. Churches and their spatial orientations across our rural, urban, and suburban landscapes tell us something about this country’s theologies and about those churches’ politics. I came to think and write about the close connections of megachurches to the suburbs. But I couldn’t escape that the real estate called “Steven Furtick” has been publicly transformed. That makes him a powerful exemplar of the thing that was far more interesting to me: the new Elevation Church campus in my neighborhood. After years of researching white churches and the taking of American neighborhoods,⁵ and even more years trying to alter the trajectory of gentrification staring down my own neighborhood, here it all was packaged in one utterly forgettable megachurch service. Everything, from landscape to human body, was terra nullis, all of it available for conquest. The resonances of my research into Urban Renewal rang through clearly.

And so, I set out to visit Elevation’s new Enderly Park campus, which is 100% in Enderly Park but nevertheless is curiously called “Uptown.” I was curious to see whether, and how, the façade of racial ambiguity would play out in a majority Black neighborhood facing the unambiguously white rush of gentrification.

This article is part one of two (or maybe three). Subscribe now to have the next part delivered directly to your inbox in a week or so.

More love for Our Trespasses. From Chris Smith, senior editor of The Englewood Review of Books, and author of multiple books including How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church:

“By doggedly pursuing the history of Charlotte, North Carolina, and particularly the complicity of white churches in its urban renewal, Greg Jarrell makes a striking case for churches in other places to likewise explore the local histories of the people and institutions that have been bulldozed by the racially and economically oppressive forces of such renewal. Our Trespasses poignantly reminds us that the histories of our places matter in the formation of who we are and what we hope to become as churches. By wrestling with these painful histories of his place, Jarrell offers a fresh vision for cultivating Christian communities that are attentive to the gospel of healing and liberation that Jesus embodied.”

You can pre-order a copy of Our Trespasses from your favorite bookseller. If you use the button below, you can take advantage of our special deal at Park Road Books in Charlotte. Make your purchase and leave a note about a personalized inscription. I’ll sign it as you request before we ship it out to you.

One last note: The composer and musician Carla Bley died recently. She was one of one, an utter original. Ethan Iverson, the pianist and writer, has a remembrance up at his Transitional Technology Substack. It includes an incredible moment from an interview that you have to read, right near the top of this post:

TT 314: Carla Bley

I’ve not listened enough to Carla Bley, but I’ve tried to correct that in the past few weeks. Here’s a track from one of her best-loved albums:

See you next time, with a report from the Elevation Church Uptown campus, which is most definitely not located uptown.

1. You should know about this Instagram account called Preachers and Sneakers, which documents the excessive and distasteful affections of a number of high-profile preachers for overly-expensive shoes. There are some local stories around here, but I can’t confirm them, so they’ll have to wait.

2. Here’s a sharp piece from Melissa Florer-Bixler’s Substack on appropriation.

3. In case you’re wondering, I’ve been in a slew of marches insisting that Black lives matter, and never seen Brother Furtick in the streets. When the hard work of demanding change and putting bodies on the line is being done, he ain’t there.

4. Here’s one powerful personal and theological reflection from Chanequa Walker-Barnes on her personal website. Chanequa has a terrific Substack that you can subscribe to here.

5. That’s the subtitle of my book, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet. You can pre-order here, or from your favorite bookshop.