Reprehensible or Representative? The Gospel of Wealth in Modern American Life

The prosperity gospel boasts a remarkably diverse array of detractors. Fundamentalist, neo-Reformed, and mainline Christians almost never find themselves on the same side of theological battles, but when it comes to the gospel of ‘health and wealth,’ they all tend to deploy an arsenal of negative adverbs and adjectives: ‘palpably unbiblical’ (Hannegraaff 1993), ‘politically quiescent’ (Byassee 2005), and ‘deceitful and deadly’ (Piper 2007), to name just a few. Meanwhile, scholars across disciplines – including theology, to be sure, but also anthropology, sociology, political science, history, marketing, and more – have also rushed to join the critics’ ranks, citing the prosperity gospel as a source of problems ranging from the subprime mortgage crisis to glaring global inequality.¹ The startling intensity and prevalence of such opprobrium is enough to make one wonder: is this booming sector of the national and, increasingly, global religious marketplace really so reprehensible?

Kate Bowler’s new book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, offers reason to think that the answer may be ‘no’ – or, at the very least, ‘it’s complicated.’ This magnificent study underscores that the prosperity gospel was never simply, as its cultured despisers would have it, a half-baked, money-making scheme concocted lately by a few crooked televangelists. The movement has deep roots in American life and particularly in the intermingling currents of early twentieth-century Pentecostalism and New Thought. Bowler traces a continuous story from that juncture through the present day, recounting how prosperity faith first caught on in black and white churches; how, in the decades after World War II, a rising set of entrepreneurial, media-savvy ministers like Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts systematized and popularized the prosperity message; how this fledgling stream of American Christianity diffused into a diverse array of new denominational contexts during the charismatic surge of the 1960s and 1970s; and, finally, how the movement rebounded from a series of salacious 1980s scandals to become a formidable cultural and religious force. These days more than 1 million Americans attend prosperity megachurches, while countless more attend any number of smaller congregations across the country. Blessed indeed.

Bowler attributes the prosperity gospel’s success, in part, to the resonance of its ideas. She argues provocatively that the movement boasts not only a history but also a certain intellectual coherence. At one point, she construes prosperity faith as ‘the foremost Christian theology of modern living,’ while at another, she remarks upon its ‘comprehensive approach to the human condition’ (pp. 78 and 232). This approach springs from a distinctive faith that in the atonement achieved by Christ on the cross God permanently altered the possibilities of human life: health and wealth – indeed, victory – are within every believer’s grasp. This core conviction has proven readily exportable, and yet it remains recognizably American. Bowler reflects, ‘the movement’s culture of god-men and conquerors rang true to a nation that embraced the mythology of righteous individuals bending circumstances to their vision of the good life’ (p. 226).

Part of what makes Blessed distinctive is the methodology that informs it. Bowler doubles as both historian and ethnographer throughout. Her sources include more traditional fare – books, periodicals, letters, and the like – but the scope of her research extends also well beyond the archives. She visited fully a quarter of all American prosperity megachurches and attended every major movement conference. She conducted phone interviews, surveyed hundreds of websites, participated in Benny Hinn’s 2008 Holy Land Tour, and spent 18 months observing congregational life at Victory Faith Center, a small African-American church in Durham, North Carolina. This remarkable variety of source material lends Bowler’s account of the prosperity gospel a richly textured quality. She outlines, on the one hand, the boundaries of what is a discernible movement, emphasizing especially shared understandings of faith and overlapping circles of communication and collaboration (the latter dramatically illustrated by the book’s graphical depictions of prosperity networks).

But, on the other hand, she underscores the extent of internal diversity. The book makes it clear, for example, that race has from the very beginning inflected the tradition’s development. As much as white and black ministers preached analogous gospels, their emphases sometimes varied, hardly a surprise given the extent to which – at the level of everyday life – white and black believers’ motivations, concerns, and experiences diverged. Bowler cites the fact that for many African-Americans, for example, faith healing was especially attractive because it represented an alternative to the historic and contemporary racism of the medical establishment. Other fault lines include region and, notably, gender. Bowler’s discussions of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship and of women’s access to leadership roles are especially revealing, though the contrast between ordinary men’s and women’s experiences is somewhat more muted in her account. One wonders whether, in the many prosperity churches she visited, women predominated in the pews, in keeping with the much larger pattern of American religious history (Braude 1997). Was it possible to interview and interact with comparable numbers of women and men, and if so, did they talk about their faith in similar ways or did they tend to claim different kinds of promises? Toward the end of the book, Bowler broaches fascinating questions about how and why prosperity teaching appeals to middle-class Americans, but it is not entirely clear to what extent the middle-class prosperity gospel does or does not diverge from its working-class counterpart. It would be fascinating to know how more affluent prosperity believers reconcile their faith with the Bible’s cautionary words regarding wealth. Or are they altogether nonplussed by Jesus’ ancient warning, ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19:24)?

Even more striking than the varied evidence that Bowler has assembled is the generosity with which she interprets it. She makes clear from the very beginning that she wants to complicate the popular image of the prosperity gospel as nothing short of a scandal, an especially implausible, crass, and manipulative form of modern belief. In her introduction, she writes, ‘American desires for the “good life” are basic and ordinary’; she goes on, moreover, to acknowledge her own indebtedness, as a scholar at Duke, to earlier gospels of wealth (p. 8). While hardly an apologist for the prosperity tradition, she is determined to see its adherents understood – if not quite on their own terms then in ways that they might still recognize. Indeed, Bowler mentions in one of her appendices that she had initially hoped to involve prosperity believers ‘in a shared interviewing, writing, and editing process’ (p. 262). Though this did not work out as she had hoped, her interest in pursuing it drives home what is eminently clear throughout: she wants these people to be taken seriously.

At points, she may take their self-understandings a little too seriously. Prosperity gospelers would almost certainly not identify in any primary way with a social class, and yet this is unmistakably – even if not exclusively – a book about working people’s faith. That way of framing the story catapults questions about the prosperity gospel’s relationship to the history of modern American capitalism to the fore. Such connections are implied throughout Bowler’s account – in her numerous references to the tradition’s individualistic ethos, for example – and she makes them explicit in her conclusion, writing that the prosperity gospel represented ‘the deification and ritualization of the American Dream’ and moreover that ‘it affirmed the basic economic structures on which individual enterprise stood’ (p. 226). These statements underscore why religious historians are not the only ones who need to read this book. Bowler’s story is intricately connected to larger ones about the decline of organized labor; the resurgence of political conservatism at the grassroots; and most broadly the process by which the American people came to accept jaw-dropping levels of economic inequality, such that, as of 2012, the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune commanded as much wealth as the poorest 94 million Americans (Stiglitz 2012). It would be illuminating to know, incidentally, whether prosperity churches, conferences, media outlets, and the like have many patrons in the ranks of the nation’s corporate elite. In light of these connections, Bowler is perhaps too sanguine when she asserts, for example, ‘The faith movement perpetually demonstrated the practical effects of its brand of optimism. Members cited such benefits of its emotional resources as a sense of self-worth and escape from personal pain’; and when she declares, ‘[The prosperity gospel] represented the triumph of American optimism over the realities of a fickle economy, entrenched racism, pervasive poverty, and theological pessimism that foretold the future as dangling by a thread’ (pp. 7 and 232). Perhaps Marx, et al., were right. In a nation that finds itself mired in a second Gilded Age – still beholden to a fickle economy and still home to both entrenched racism and pervasive poverty – should we not read prosperity believers’ penchant for ‘possibility thinking’ as woefully misplaced, a kind of spiritual soma that forestalls a more sobering and constructive encounter with material realities?

No matter where one comes down on that question, there can be no doubt that Bowler’s interpretive generosity yields a wealth of historical insights. Most importantly, it allows for an unsurpassed reconstruction of the moral universe within which prosperity believers, past and present, have come to understand themselves as pursuing the good. This book is replete with perceptive turns of phrase. At one point, reflecting on believers’ unwavering confidence that victory would be theirs, she writes, ‘their gospel was supernatural, to be sure, but not mysterious’ (p. 225). Elsewhere she construes Victory Faith Center (VFC) members’ insistently providential interpretations of positive personal developments as evidence that ‘they found God in the particulars of their lives’ (p. 132). Bowler’s impressive command of the contours of this religious world is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her poignant remarks regarding the meanings of silence at VFC in the wake of a member’s death. Having sifted through a number of possible interpretations, she concludes:

In the intimate and totalizing spiritual environment of a faith church, where each member’s health, wealth, and circumstances stood on display, the ambivalent silence might simply have allowed for a deep breath, a little space that mitigated the anxiety of revealing both the good and bad that unfolded in each person’s life. (p. 177)

In this moment and so many others, Bowler underscores the unexpected ways in which the much-maligned prosperity gospel is, in fact, deeply human – and almost familiar.

Is it in fact this gospel’s familiarity that has bred so much contempt? In closing, I want to build off of Bowler’s claim that her book describes not only ‘a discrete movement’ but also a ‘transformation of popular religious imagination that has not yet ended,’ one in which ‘Americans began to question an ethic of self-denial as a stony orthodoxy barren of the Gospel’s abundant promises’ (p. 7). While the critical discourse surrounding the prosperity gospel might lead one to believe that it is somehow sui generis, I would argue that, especially when it comes to attitudes toward wealth, the prosperity gospel is anything but an outlier on the landscape of modern American Christianity. In fact, my sense is that by the time this gospel was a twinkle in E. W. Kenyon’s eye, believers across the USA had already more or less shaken off venerable Christian worries about the intrinsic dangers of riches.

In my own work on the late nineteenth century, I have found little evidence of Christian concern with wealth qua wealth. To be sure, socialists, trade unionists, and assorted middle-class reformers mounted decidedly Christian critiques of the captains of industry. But with rare exception their issue was not with wealth itself but with the way it was distributed in industrializing America. For this reason, they did not resort, for example, to the gospel story of the rich young ruler, whose inability to forsake his possessions prompted Jesus’ famously bleak comment about the camel and the eye of a needle. Grassroots social gospelers much preferred the 5th chapter of James, in which the writer of the epistle, addressing the wealthy, exclaims, ‘Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts’ (James 5:4). Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, a touchstone of modern Catholic social teaching, warned that riches ‘do not bring freedom from sorrow and are of no avail for eternal happiness, but rather are obstacles.’ But even for Leo, the issue was not so much the corrupting power of money as the demands of charity and justice in a world full of want. On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, bishops and priests trumpeted the encyclical’s robust support for private property and harsh condemnations of socialism (Abell 1945).

Over the course of the twentieth century, American Christians became less and less likely to question the fundamentals of the nation’s economy. Recent books by Darren Dochuk, Bethany Moreton, Kevin Kruse and, of course, Kate Bowler explain how countless believers came to see nary a contradiction between Christian faith, the free market, and the private pursuit of plenty; for many, these seemed entirely of a piece (Dochuk 2011, Kruse 2015, Moreton 2009). To say this is, admittedly, to paint with a very broad brush. A vocal minority did join with the likes of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr., in denouncing the excesses of the American Dream.² But even King saw no problem with wealth in itself. Consider what he had to say in a speech delivered on 18 March 1968 – just weeks before his death – to a mass meeting of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Invoking the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, he conjured up an image of ‘Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell’ and then proceeded to immediately – and tellingly – clarify, ‘It wasn’t a millionaire in hell talking with a poor man in heaven. It was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multi-millionaire in heaven.’ As King continued, he brought the workers to their feet: ‘Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich,’ he explained:

His wealth was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus everyday but never really saw him. Dives went to hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible.

He concluded with a trademark rhetorical flourish, declaring, ‘Dives finally went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.’³ King’s was a biting critique of the American way of life, but one that rightly disposed multimillionaires could live with.

Such wider contexts suggest that those who disparage the prosperity gospel might be missing the forest for the trees. Especially when viewed in the light of the much longer history of Christianity, the dominant expressions of modern American belief all seem like prosperity gospels of a sort, and the tradition that is at the heart of Bowler’s book appears less an aberration than a variation upon the theme.⁴ Greed may not be good. But American Christians of many different stripes are counting on the fact that the storing up of treasures on earth will not imperil their eternal reward, and Blessed goes a long way toward explaining why.

Notes

1. On the subprime mortgage crisis connection, see quotations from Harvard University’s Jonathan Walton and the University of Pennsylvania’s Anthea Butler in David Van Biema (2008). For a very small sampling of other scholarly criticisms, see, for example, Isabelle V. Barker (2007), Russell W. Belk (2000), Daisy L. Machado (2010), and Kyle Murray (2012).

2. For the classic statement of Day’s dissenting faith, see Dorothy Day (1952).

3. For the full text of the speech, see Michael Honey (2011, pp. 167–178).

4. This is not to say that American Christians were the first to make their peace with wealth. For more on ancient precursors, see, for example, Wayne A. Meeks (1983) and Peter Brown (2012).