Washington, USA - At first glance, T. D. Jakes is not an obvious fit with the buttoned-up Bush White House. As the founder of the Potter's House, a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas, he is a multimillionaire businessman, novelist and playwright. He also happens to have played himself in the R-rated movie version of his best-selling book, "Woman Thou Art Loosed," the story of a woman raped as a girl by her mother's boyfriend.
He has his own theater production company, a music label and television shows on Trinity Broadcasting Network and Black Entertainment Television. As any of his followers can tell you, Bishop Jakes likes theatrical, melon-colored suits, lives unapologetically in a Dallas mansion with his wife and five children, and has a Bentley and a jet.
"I grew up in five generations of entrepreneurs, and I think you can be involved in business without compromising your religious principles," he told The New York Times last year. In fact, he said, "I think historically the ministers who were portrayed as charlatans may have had only one revenue stream. You don't have to fleece the church to be successful."
On Friday, Bishop Jakes was with President Bush at a prayer service for the victims of Hurricane Katrina at the Washington National Cathedral, preaching the sermon at the invitation of the White House.
In his rich, rolling baritone, Bishop Jakes, one of the nation's most influential and mesmerizing preachers, intoned that the storm "has made us think and look and reach beyond the breach and dare to discuss the unmentionable issues that confront us."
Then he added, as he seemed at times to look straight at Mr. Bush: "It is not so important what we say, it is important what we do. Defining moments of history cannot be defined by rhetoric and words or anger, or soliciting people to respond in a tempestuous way. But real leadership is defined by what we do. The good Samaritan teaches us that it will cost money to help people, and sometimes we have to love them enough to pay the bill."
Supporters of Bishop Jakes said afterward that his performance was an agile fusing of religion and Hurricane Katrina's tough racial politics, and that his pointed words showed that he was not there as a blind supporter of Mr. Bush. Others said that after the government's slow response to so many of Katrina's poor, black victims, Bishop Jakes should not have been there at all.
Either way, the presence of Bishop Jakes - who also stood at Mr. Bush's side in Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 5 - underscored how much the White House is trying to shore up its support among the conservative black Pentecostal preachers whom Republican strategists have seen as a link to potential black votes.
So far, none of the half-dozen black megapreachers close to the White House have abandoned Mr. Bush. But after Hurricane Katrina neither have they embraced him, Bishop Jakes included.
As Bishop Jakes said in a telephone interview on Friday about his White House invitation and his relationship with the president: "We're not cousins or anything like that. I just think that we have an open-door policy with all presidents. And when I'm asked to come, if my schedule allows me, I will always come, no matter who is in the White House."
Bishop Jakes, who also had a relationship with President Bill Clinton, added: "I do think that African-Americans are waiting to see what this administration is going to do about this crisis. If the appropriate actions are taken in an expeditious, competent way, I think then our community will re-evaluate our opinions of this administration."
Bishop Jakes knows the president from Texas and pointedly said that he did not appear at Mr. Bush's side in Baton Rouge as a stranger. "It wasn't like I was just called in to begin a relationship," he said.
He also said that he and his church have been heavily involved in relief work for hurricane evacuees who have relocated to Dallas, and that he had a message that day in Baton Rouge for Mr. Bush.
"I don't have the need for a photo op," Bishop Jakes said. "I do have the need to make him aware that there were thousands of people who were living in other people's homes. For me that issue was the primary reason for me to be there, and I would go again and again. I pastor 30,000 people, and they're looking to me to bring their concerns before whoever is in the White House."
Did he have any insight into the president's private thinking about Hurricane Katrina? "I think he's very disturbed by it," Bishop Jakes said. "I think anybody would be disturbed by it, not just from an image perspective. It's amazing the destruction. You'd have to be a monster not to care about it."
But as Bishop Jakes warned in his sermon at the National Cathedral: "Restoration is more than observation. It's more than looking from the safety of our television into the lives of other people, and assessing their situation from the comfort of our own luxuries and lives."
This can no longer be a nation, Bishop Jakes said, "that overlooks the poor and the suffering and continues past the ghetto on our way to the Mardi Gras."