On The Prosperity Gospel

things I find fascinating: religion, scams

I recently read Blessed by Kate Bowler, a book about the prosperity gospel, which is a large evangelical subculture in the United States.¹

Exactly how large is hard to say. “Prosperity gospel” is a bit of an insult. Most believers in the prosperity gospel think of it as something those people are doing over there where they only preach about how God will make you rich. The speaker, who isn’t part of the prosperity gospel, thinks God makes you rich and also does other things. Many evangelicals who attend non-prosperity-gospel churches read prosperity-gospel self-help books or watch prosperity-gospel televangelists. And the prosperity gospel fades gradually into normal evangelical beliefs. An ordinary evangelical might believe that God wants His people to prosper or that God blesses people who donate to the church, without accepting that if you tithe then God will give you exactly ten times as much money back.

Regardless, about a sixth of Christians identify themselves as followers of the prosperity gospel, while a third believe that God increases the wealth of those who give. So we can guess that it’s quite common.

The prosperity gospel is the belief that faith is a power which turns spoken words into reality. Through faith, people receive health and money, so if you are successful it means that God has blessed you. God’s people are completely victorious and nothing can stop you from being happy on Earth.

The prosperity gospel originated in the early twentieth century. Faith healers began to realize that if God healed diseases through faith there was no reason to believe that He wouldn’t heal poverty through faith. They picked up some ideas from the New Thought movement (which would later become the New Age/spiritual community), such as the idea that positive thoughts cause positive circumstances and negative thoughts cause negative circumstances.² The movement grew, partially because of the typically American interest in practical self-help techniques that will make you successful, and partially because of the universal human tendency to get tired of obediently praying for blessings from God and start trying to figure out how they could order Him to do His job instead.

We can distinguish between “hard prosperity” and “soft prosperity.” Soft prosperity developed out of hard prosperity in the 1990s. Soft prosperity is less likely to propose supernatural mechanisms for devotion to God making you wealthy. Cheerfulness and hard work get you a promotion; thriftiness leads to savings; saying that you’re already healthy and prosperous makes you have high self-esteem. Being a good manager of your “time, talent, and treasure” will make God bring you prosperity. Some congregations (especially black congregations) emphasize debt counselling and starting small businesses.

Soft prosperity gospel evolved after a series of scandals made people jaded about hard prosperity gospel. The wealth of prosperity-gospel preachers had never been a problem: God was simply rewarding them for their faith. But ministers were caught cheating on their wives, committing rape, throwing prayer requests into the trash without reading them, and defrauding their followers. The sex scandals were bad enough, but the fraud was worse, because it showed that the prosperity gospel was wrong. If God were sending you prosperity, why did you want to defraud people?

These days, most hard prosperity gospel preachers have a black or Latino audience,³ because the major scandals were among white preachers and black and Latino evangelicals didn’t consider them relevant to their lives. Further, the black church has often been more concerned with material things than the white church—emphasizing black economic empowerment and mutual aid—and this tendency can be perverted by the prosperity gospel. Even so, many modern prosperity gospel churches with a black or Latino audience emphasize debt counselling, starting your own business, and other practical endeavors.

I’m used to religions having a bunch of weird quirks, reflections of the founders’ and leaders’ idiosyncratic personal opinions or pet peeves or aesthetic preferences. The hard prosperity gospel is not like that. Over the years, it has lost its every quality that is not maximally efficient for extracting money from parishioners. The whole phenomenon makes me think of nothing so much as multilevel marketing schemes. I think both subcultures’ efficiency is the result of an evolutionary process. The strong live and the weak perish, and so the survivors become sleek lean grift machines, the apex predators of fraud.