The Prosperity Gospel

Valentin de Boulogne, “Christ Driving the Money Changers out of the Temple,” c. 1618

Back in the fall of 1978, a month or so before I would turn in my resignation from the SWP—a victim of the “turn”—I was selling the Militant newspaper at the entrance to a grocery store in Kansas City on a Saturday afternoon as a middle-aged, matronly looking woman approached. She looked at me and smiled, then pointed to a Buick sedan in the parking lot, and announced “See that car? Jesus got me that car.”

This was my introduction to the “prosperity gospel”, the subject of an eye-opening article (Mammon from heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession) by Benjamin Anastas that appeared in the March 2010 Harper’s. Like most articles in this very fine magazine, it is behind a subscriber’s firewall but you can read it on the Jehovah’s Witnesses website, of all places. Here’s a key passage:

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Jesus slept in animal stalls and lived off the charity of women. He left the world with no possessions, and he cared especially for the least among us and the “poor in spirit.” His only act of violence in the Gospels occurs when he overturns the tables of the moneychangers and drives them out of Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” He said. “But you have made it a den of thieves.”

In America—and, increasingly, around the world—an alternative gospel has emerged, one in which Jesus was a small businessman and entrepreneur, his disciples were men of relative wealth, and when the Son of Man traveled, he didn’t go coach. This theology is known as the “prosperity gospel,” and among its most common tenets is the belief that God wants His children to enjoy health, happiness, and wealth now and not as an eternal reward in Heaven.

The gospel of wealth in American religious life dates to the late 1800s, when the Robber Barons sought to reconcile their industrial fortunes with a Bible that warned against the pursuit of wealth. One of the most prominent exemplars of this new creed was Russell H. Conwell, a Baptist minister from Massachusetts and author of the best-selling inspirational tract “Acres of Diamonds”—originally a speech that he delivered in churches, social clubs, and meeting halls across the country. Conwell had a vision of the Gospel in which to “honestly attain unto riches” was nothing less than a godly duty for any Christian American. “Money printed your Bible,” Conwell wrote, “money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers.”

During the economic boom that followed World War II, the prosperity gospel was embraced by the prophets of the Holy Spirit, particularly two giants of the Pentecostal tradition: Kenneth E. Hagin, father of the Word of Faith movement22. The evangelist E. W. Kenyon (1867-1948) developed the Word of Faith theological principle known as “positive confession,” which holds that whatever promises you find in Scripture and “confess” to God, you can have. and founder of the RHEMA Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Oral Roberts, the pioneering media evangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University. The white Pentecostals of the Dust Bowl era had been among America’s poorest people. After the war, though, they gained a foothold on the American dream: houses, cars, leisure time. The uncompromising Pentecostal faith—based in firsthand encounters with the “gifts of the spirit,” such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy—adapted itself to this new influx of money and opportunity. In the popular telling, Oral Roberts claimed he felt the divine hand of guidance one day in the late 1940s when his Bible miraculously opened to a passage from 3 John: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” Roberts used this scriptural insight to boil the joyful news of the Gospel down to a simple promise: Something good is going to happen to you.

Roberts’s most enduring theological principle, and his greatest innovation as an evangelist and religious entrepreneur, was the “seed-faith” gospel. Inspired by Napoleon Hill’s 1937 handbook, Think and Grow Rich, Roberts transformed the Parable of the Sower, which for Jesus was a metaphor for the abundance of faith, into a miracle investment opportunity for believers. If they planted a “seed” in “good ground,” they were guaranteed an exponential return: “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” Seed-faith theology sanctified the human desire for wealth by converting it into a tithe or an offering to Roberts’s ministry. Versions of the seed-faith gospel are still extant in many of the largest media ministries. Whether it’s Joel Osteen’s promise of a more “abundant” life or T. D. Jakes’s coaching his followers on how to “reposition” themselves to find success, the underlying message is clear: The more freely you give, the more generously you will receive.

The connection between prosperity and Jesus has been made in the pages of Harpers before. In May 2005, there was an article by Gordon Bigelow titled Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics that detailed the connections between evangelical Christianity and Victorian era economics. Fortunately, this article can be read in its entirety here even if you are not a subscriber. Bigelow writes:

These were middle-class reformers who wanted to reshape Protestant doctrine. For them it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God’s plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.

At the center of this early evangelical doctrine was the idea of original sin: we were all born stained by corruption and fleshly desire, and the true purpose of earthly life was to redeem this. The trials of economic life—the sweat of hard labor, the fear of poverty, the self-denial involved in saving—were earthly tests of sinfulness and virtue. While evangelicals believed salvation was ultimately possible only through conversion and faith, they saw the pain of earthly life as means of atonement for original sin. These were the people that writers like Dickens detested. The extreme among them urged mortification of the flesh and would scold anyone who took pleasure in food, drink, or good company. Moreover, they regarded poverty as part of a divine program. Evangelicals interpreted the mental anguish of poverty and debt, and the physical agony of hunger or cold, as natural spurs to prick the conscience of sinners. They believed that the suffering of the poor would provoke remorse, reflection, and ultimately the conversion that would change their fate. In other words, poor people were poor for a reason, and helping them out of poverty would endanger their mortal souls. It was the evangelicals who began to see the business mogul as an heroic figure, his wealth a triumph of righteous will. The stockbroker, who to Adam Smith had been a suspicious and somewhat twisted character, was for nineteenth-century evangelicals a spiritual victor.

Even though the prosperity gospel can be found in mega-Churches all over the United States, Anastas’s article takes a close look at one manifestation, those found in the Black community in Georgia, including one called The Prophet’s House led by Bishop Thomas Weeks III. Anastas describes a typical prayer session at the church:

“If I told you that there was a trust set up for you two thousand years ago that had endless supply,” Weeks said, “would you act like you were broke?”

“No!” a few people answered.

“I can hear you!” someone yelled.

“Bless the Lord,” someone else called back.

“If you don’t know what a trust is,” Weeks continued, “a trust is an amount of money set aside for an eternal or a working purpose reset to set itself between fifty-five and one hundred and ten years.” The energy in the sanctuary faded. “That is a legal document that says it cannot be touched unless the trustee of the trust authorizes it to go any other place.” Someone clapped and the murmurs rose again. “Which means it calculates, it reproduces after its own kind. It pools the factors of its resources from worldwide areas. I don’t even have time to go into it. . . . God says I put a trust together called inheritance. And I put it in every believer.”

When the moment came to share his Global Entrepreneurial Anointing, Weeks carried a vessel filled with oil to the podium and picked up a business-card holder. One of the keyboard players in the worship band set a romantic mood. “I’m going to anoint you tonight,” Weeks said softly, “that the eyes of your understanding will be enlightened.” He started shuffling through a stack of blank business cards. “Do you not know that there is going to be wealth around this room like never before?”

“Glory!” a woman called out.

“Amen!” someone else answered.

“Brother Philip,” the Bishop said, “stand up.” Brother Philip did as Weeks asked. “Brother Philip is one of the great young men of this ministry,” the Bishop explained, still shuffling the business cards. “Some of you that need your carpet cleaned? You know, the children act up, other things were messed up? I trust this man. And today, Philip, I want to be able to say to you that your business is going to take off like never before.” The room erupted in applause for Philip’s good fortune, drowning out the soundtrack for a moment. “You clean the floor of the Prophet’s House. And you serve the prophetic spirit of this house. May the Lord give you for every foot that trampled in and out, may he return it back to you with open doors in your life.”

Although it is not reported in Anastas’s article, Weeks was arrested in 2007 for wife-beating and sentenced to three years probation. Here he is in better times showing off a McMansion that he is about to put on the market:

Fifty years ago the Black church in the South stood for Black liberation and for some of its leaders a life in struggle. As it happens, the same social and economic forces that have robbed the trade unions of its fighting spirit have also undermined the bonds of solidarity that made the Black church a primary agent of progressive change in the U.S.

It is something of a paradox that as the capitalist system offers fewer and fewer people—especially Blacks—a path upward into a solid middle-class existence, it simultaneously entices more and more to seek individualistic solutions either of the “prosperity gospel” kind or charter school lotteries.

As desperate as these times look, there will be a brighter future since the power of bourgeois illusions wear thin in an epoch when they cannot be realized.