American Hustle

I can't say Kate Bowler's book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, was a thoroughly enjoyable read.¹ I found it distressing, disturbing, disquieting, and disconcerting (the list could go on) from beginning to end. Not unlike reading that Lloyd Blankfein, chairperson and CEO of Goldman Sachs, was really only ‘doing God's work.’ [He also insisted we should be celebrating his bank's success, not condemning it. ‘Everybody should be happy,’ he said. ‘The financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out’ (Arlidge & Beresford 2009).]

But, I'll admit, I also found Bowler's book both highly entertaining (there were times I found myself laughing out loud at the harebrained ideas, pie-in-the-sky promises, and farcical behaviors of members, especially the leaders, of the Prosperity Gospel movement) and deeply human – since clearly Bowler developed a great deal of affection, perhaps even grudging admiration, for at least some of the members of the Prosperity Gospel movement she met along the way.

There's more than one reason, then, that the entire story of the Prosperity Gospel reminded me of American Hustle, the recent film in which David O. Russell manages to capture a nation of small-time con-artists, who both deserve our affection (in the earnest manner in which they reinvent themselves and try to ‘do the right thing’) and represent a distraction from the real culprits (the big-time con-artists whose activities have actually put people out of work and driven them into poverty, kept their employees' wages low while corporate profits and incomes at the top have soared, and now seek to deprive those at the bottom of much-needed social benefits, like food stamps and extended unemployment compensation).

Because at least at one level that's what we're talking about here: small-time con-artists (even when they preach in megachurches and attract millions to their television programs) who are quite adept at reinventing themselves to take advantage of people's attempts to improve their lot in life and to negotiate the contradictions and tensions of American capitalism – the promised land that is offered and the many ways the possibility of following the path to the land of milk and honey is frustrated and undermined. It is an American Dream that is both dangled before us – if only we invest adequately in our faith in Jesus – and largely kept out of reach. We're talking about small-time hustlers who actually embody that faith, or at least its trappings, until of course it all comes tumbling down by one or another much-publicized scandal.

That is what makes them different from the members of their congregations, who allow themselves to be conned by the promise but are quietly hidden from view if and when they fail. And different from the real hustlers – on both Main Street and Wall Street – who have made out like bandits both in the run-up to and now in the midst of the Second Great Depression. The only thing they have in common is their shared belief that they're all ‘doing God's work.’

What Bowler's research demonstrates, at least at one level, is that the USA really is a nation of con-artists and hustlers – and it has been since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Our history is a gold mine of quick-rich schemes, self-improvement messages, and mind-over-matter techniques; of campaigns to applaud the winners and blame the victims; and of religion at the service of smooth-talking preachers and gullible congregants. Who needs a camel-through-the-eye afterlife when it's all within our reach – at least potentially, if we take the right spiritual and financial risks – in this life?

And why not? If the 1% can get theirs (especially in the run-up to the Great Depressions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when their share of national income reached and exceeded 20%), why can't the rest of us get a piece of the action? Why should the rest of us suffer through stagnant wages, long working hours, growing debt, and physical and mental distress when a tiny minority can just take the money and run, with soaring incomes and growing wealth on which they pay increasingly low taxes, making financial decisions as if the entire globe were their oyster? When those at the top managed to create an almost perfect hustle: first, by keeping wages low while productivity rose (and thus grabbing the resulting surplus in the form of corporate profits, chief-executive incomes, and stock-market gains) and, then, by lending some of that money back to the 99%, in order to purchase consumer goods, housing, and higher education that would otherwise be out of their grasp, so that a privileged few can walk away with even more of the national income. Clearly, it worked, at least for a while, until it brought the USA and world economies to their knees. And then, of course, when it looked like all hell would break loose (in 1929 and 2008), they got bailed out.

Is it any wonder, then, we saw the emergence and spectacular growth of a Prosperity Gospel movement [which, as Hanna Rosin (2009) reminds us, prospered precisely in regions of the country, the South and Southwest, that have experienced the highest highs and lowest lows of the housing bubble]?

The second major issue Blessed brings to the fore, at least indirectly, is how much work it takes to keep this particular economic system going. According to one school of economic thought, which stretches from Adam Smith on down to contemporary neoclassical economics, the economic system we call capitalism corresponds to human nature. Smith referred to our ‘natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.’ Contemporary neoclassical economists start with the idea that everyone, by their very nature, is a rational, self-interested utility-maximizer. In both cases, the presumption is that individual human beings buy and sell commodities (including land, labor, and money) in a perfectly natural (transhistorical and transcultural) fashion – and that the result, as long as markets are free and the rights of private property are respected and protected, is the greatest benefit for each individual and for society as a whole. That's quite a set of presumptions and conclusions (which, ironically, as any student of Econ 101 knows, require a lot of heavy-lifting)!

What is missing from that complex but simpleminded account is the amount of cultural work that is necessary to keep the capitalist hustle going. Is it any surprise that, when a tiny group at the top is able to directly appropriate (or get their distributed share) of what the other members of society produce, a great deal of work needs to be done both to get us to overlook or justify that social theft and to give people at least the dream they can take home their fair share of the pie, or at least make it possible for their children to move up the economic ladder. What we have here is a vision and a dream that need to be produced and disseminated both for native-born Americans and for immigrants, for whites and Blacks (and, more recently, for Hispanics and Southeast Asians), and for entire households (although, of course, the men and women within those households have to constantly reconfigure what their own roles have been and are going to be, even when the Prosperity Gospel movement seems to presume the gender rules will remain as they always have been, bequeathed to us from some mythical past). It's a culture and an ethics – or at least an ethos, a gospel that is by turns both secular and religious, according to which capitalism successfully functions for society as a whole and, if not, at least for those individuals who accept the correct faith and make the appropriate investments. And who, at the end of the day, can only blame themselves, and not God or the economic system, if they fall short.

Blessed represents an important contribution to that story – of the complex and changing relationship between the ongoing hustle and the cultural gospel that lie at the heart of American capitalism. Bowler starts her engaging account during the first Gilded Age, in the late-nineteenth century, which as it turns out was a ‘hotbed of mind-power’ –which, when combined with Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, gave rise to a form of metaphysical religion, especially the New Thought movement, with an instrumental view of faith. [Let us remember that this is also the time (1891) when the Roman Catholic Church decided it had to actually engage the modern world, in the form of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, of new things, subtitled ‘On the Conditions of Labor.’ Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel and the Booths' Salvation Army were two other responses to the swelling ranks of the native-born and immigrant urban working class during that period.] Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, with the first Great Migration of African-Americans to the industrial cities of the North, Bowler finds a cross-pollination of New Thought, Pentecostalism, and African-derived traditions that ‘promised to smooth out the rough edges of capitalism and industrialism with theologies that countered poverty, disease, and despair’ (p. 26). And so we have the first cast of colorful characters (from E. W. Kenyon to Father George Hurley) and forms of worship (including church services, faith meetings, and revivals) of the New Thought movement.

But the New Thought movement didn't stop there. If individual self-actualization and a powerful mind could bring good physical and mental health, why not also greater financial wealth? Here, then, we have the beginnings of the religious gospel of wealth – in many ways both an extension of and a break from the secular Horatio Alger stories that had been so popular in the late-nineteenth century – which, remember, represented the rise to middle-class respectability not through a Protestant ethic of hard work but, instead, an act that rescues a ragamuffin boy from his bottom-of-the-pile fate through contact with a wealthy elder gentleman who takes the boy in as his ward. But who needs a wealthy patron when it's possible to achieve success on one's own (or at least through one's personal relationship to Jesus)? So, at least in this sense, the gospel of wealth is actually a religious version of the self-help programs and books that proliferated during both the Roaring 1920s and Great Depression of the 1930s.

The revivalists of the Prosperity Gospel movement really come into their own in the postwar years, ‘preaching upward mobility to people already on the way up’ (p. 51). This was, as we have come to recognize, a ‘special period,’ a kind of Golden Age of American capitalism, in which unions flourished, inequality decreased, and American business dominated the national and international landscape – at least for a couple of decades (and still, lest we forget, with a nervous confidence, as McCarthyite witch hunts demonstrated). The ministries expanded as did their churches: it was a gospel of American prosperity and of church prosperity (increasingly assisted by growing television ministries, for which those of us at Notre Dame have our own local connection: Lester Frank Sumrall and his Christian Center Cathedral of Praise, now the Christian Center Church, in South Bend).

During the mid-1970s – with declining rates of profit, stagflation, and the US defeat in Vietnam – that brief period of American economic exceptionalism came to a close. Unions were once again on the defensive (especially after Reagan fired the air controllers, while across the pond Thatcher took on the British miners), American businesses began to move production off-shore, and trickledown economics started – first as a trickle, then as a flood – to shift the gains in national income toward the top.² This turns out to have been fertile ground for the new Prosperity Gospel movement, the one we know best: Oral Roberts, Pat Roberts, and Kenneth Hagin became household names; the multimedia Word of Faith movement and the thousands of chapters of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship flourished; and a corresponding flood of Black Prosperity Gospel preachers (including Frederick K. C. Price and Carlton Pearson) took the stage. What brought these disparate and diverse organizations and figures together? According to Bowler (pp. 95-96), the movement's defense of individual material wealth rested on three key arguments: (1) the idea that Jesus' death and resurrection abolished not only sin and disease but also poverty; (2) Jesus himself possessed great wealth and so should his followers; and (3) the promise of prosperity for aspiring Americans was merely an extension of the Abrahamic covenant, that material want would be visited upon God's people only if they disobeyed him.

So, while American workers, whose wages now began to stagnate, chased the Dream by working longer hours, sending more members of their households out to work, and then, when all else failed, taking on increasing amounts of debt in order to secure at least some of what they had been promised and had come to expect, the Prosperity Gospel movement was there to buck them up, as long as they invested wisely in God's message – what Bowler refers to as ‘hard prosperity,’ which meant large tithes and proper thinking. The ‘hundredfold blessing’ was the kind of well-crafted Ponzi scheme of which Kenneth Lay (of Enron fame) and Bernie Madoff (of more recent conviction) would have been proud. And they were enormously successful, giving rise to multimillion-dollar media empires and more than three dozen megachurches.

And then, of course, came the well-known scandals: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and so on. But the Prosperity Gospel movement continued to grow, especially within the African-American community, shining the light on such preachers as T. D. Jakes and Noel Jones, based on a combination of Pentecostal and charismatic influences. As Bowler explains, ‘those pastors who began traveling in prosperity circles tended to be media-savvy, entrepreneurial, and trend-setting mavericks willing to take a little heat from headquarters in order to broaden the scope of their ministries.’ And the message, within both white and black churches, softened a bit: no longer identified with the wrong side of the tracks, the movement had developed ‘a smooth new language and style of persuasion. . .It was therapeutic and emotive, a way of speaking that shed its Pentecostal accent for a sweeter and secular tone’ – what Bowler calls ‘soft prosperity’ (p. 125).

A softer language, perhaps, but still an all-encompassing message. It became a total system: the promise of mind-over-matter faith healing, divine wealth, and total victory over potentially debilitating circumstances. And it has worked: by 2011, approximately 1400 American churches were megachurches (each attracting 2000 or more weekly attendees) and Prosperity Gospel churches crowded the upper reaches. What that means is about one million people were attending American Prosperity megachurches. Bowler's argument is that the Prosperity Gospel's place at the top – in terms of percentage of megachurches (almost half of all churches with more than 10,000 members), average size (almost 60% had more than 8500 members), and key urban locations (especially in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles) – makes it an important actor in and on the American religious and cultural landscape.

* * *

And so the Prosperity Gospel movement has, against all odds, grown and expanded – from the wrong-side-of-town tent revivals and prayer meetings to mainstream religious, media, and even political status, at least within that vast landscape of nondenominational Protestantism. And it's all because of an enormously successful hustle.

The movement is propelled by preachers who manage to convince people that, if they believe they control their own destiny, as long as their hearts and faith are in the right place and they fork over a large share of their income to demonstrate their commitment, they can overcome psychological and physical obstacles and achieve financial success. It's a strategy that, of course, serves to line the burgeoning pockets of the Prosperity Gospel evangelists themselves. (Which reminds me of the old Teamsters story: ‘Why,’ asked a worker who was being recruited in a union-organizing drive, ‘do you show up on the picket line in a Cadillac?’ The answer? ‘To show you that, if you stick with the Teamsters, you, too, will someday be driving a Cadillac.’)

And it's as American as apple pie (or, if you prefer, extreme diets and beauty makeovers). What we have here is hustle that dates back at least to ‘40 acres and a mule’ and continues through railroad speculation (which, when it went bust, brought on the First Great Depression, later renamed the Panic, of 1873), real-estate bubbles (remember the Marx Brothers' movie The Cocoanuts) and ‘painting the tape’ stock-market boom (which collapsed on Black Thursday in October 1929, ushering in what we now refer to as the First Great Depression), and, closer to our own time, the dot-com bubble (which had its origins in Clinton's economic program, but which was subsequently blamed on Bush), the solution to which created the conditions for the next and most recent financial hustle: subprime mortgages and the derivatives that, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, represented the beginning of the Second Great Depression.

As we know, every hustle (like any game of Three-card Monte) requires three characters: a dealer (who places three cards facedown on a table, often on a cardboard box, which provides the ability to set up and disappear quickly), a victim or ‘mark’ (who is tricked into betting a sum of money, on the assumption that they can find the money card among three constantly moving, facedown playing cards), and a shill (who pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, while in fact conspiring with the dealer to take advantage of the mark).

Bowler's book is replete with hustling dealers (all those preachers who, first under tattered tents and then within shiny megachurches, deal the cards of holy scripture and invest-in-Jesus messages), ready-to-be-hustled marks (who, by the hundreds of thousands, are willing to play the game by donating large sums of money on a weekly basis in the hopes of spotting the money card and walking away with good health and unexpected financial success), and shills (who pretend to cooperate with the marks but in fact are in cahoots with the preachers and get their cut, in the form of privileged positions within the churches and their vast multimedia empires).

What could be more American – especially in a country that, against the expectation of all modernizing thought, from Max Weber on down, has not embraced secularization and shed religious belief. On the contrary!³

The basic structure of the hustle is also a reminder that it needs a third party, a supplement. It's not enough that there are hustling dealers and ready-to-be-hustled marks, who are willing to face one another over the cardboard box. The hustle doesn't work unless there's a shill, which gives the hustle its allure and legitimacy.

And that's what the Prosperity Gospel movement accomplishes for the economic system as a whole. It both signifies there's a hustle taking place (otherwise why would anyone need a special relationship with Jesus to succeed?) and provides cover for the hustle (since it's made out to be the only game in town, all we can do is make the appropriate spiritual and financial investment and hope to receive our just reward).

Which is exactly how American capitalism works. There's a basic economic structure – of a majority of workers who are dependent on a small minority of capitalists for their livelihoods. And that's important, since the workers' pay is enough to allow them to consume the commodities they need in order to go back to work the next day but not so much that they don't have to go back to work the next day. Thus, most people continue to be forced to have the freedom to sell their ability to work to their corporate employers on an ongoing basis.

But there's nothing natural about that basic relationship. A lot of work needs to be done in order to confer a certain legitimacy on those bonds and on the roles people play within them. In other words, there needs to be a culture – a language, a discourse, what I referred to above as a gospel – that explains and justifies both the parts of the system and the system as a whole.

It's a culture that makes sure the system as a whole is properly governed (which, as we know, is an impossible task, since it falters on a regular basis, falling into recessions and sometimes economic depressions, as a part of the ‘normal’ working of the system) and, perhaps even more important, that individuals govern themselves (in order to be able to successfully exchange commodities on a regular and ongoing basis). This is particular the case during periods of growing inequality – when, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2014) have recently explained, we all become ‘more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.’

That turns out to be the connection between mind-over-matter financial prosperity and the contemporary version of faith healing as body regulation: each is a form of self-discipline, the regulation of one's own finances and body image, as a way of doing God's work.⁴ It's the religious version of the neoliberal gospel of self-governance.

Where does that cultural work get done? All we have to do is look around us and we can see we live in a world saturated with the machines and results of that work – in popular culture (music, movies, TV shows, novels, advertising, and so on), politics (endless campaigns and debates), education (from primary school through university), religion (such as the Prosperity Gospel movement), and of course, in my own little corner of the world, the discipline of economics.

According to mainstream economists, the world begins with self-interested individuals who face the never-ending problem of scarcity, and a system based on private property and free markets is the best way for individuals to make decisions based on those given interests and desires, which leads to maximum individual and social benefit. That theory is the basis of the ubiquitous Principles of Microeconomics courses in American colleges and universities (which now, as a result of a relentless campaign on the part of the Council for Economic Education and other organizations, reaches down into secondary and grade schools) as well as the oh-so-clever theoretical models and bow-to-the-laws-of-economics policy pronouncements of generations of neoclassical economists.

What is particularly interesting about that particular economic gospel is that it is not only a theory of or story about the existing economic system, but also has a performative dimension. In other words, it has effects on the way people who use and learn that theory behave. For example, it has become fashionable after the financial crisis of 2007–08 for economists to decry the growing inequality in the years leading up to (and, now, following on) the crisis. It is because the very wealthy had excessive influence on politicians or the government responded to those who were falling behind by attempting to expand homeownership, they say, that the government, banks, and housing industry conspired to promote a financial bubble. But this argument conveniently overlooks the legitimizing role played by economists themselves. It was mainstream economists and their ideas that justified the unequal distribution of income in the first place, by arguing that everyone – on the top and on the bottom – was getting paid what they were worth. In addition, according to a now-famous game theory study (by John Carter & Michael Irons 1991), economists and students who have taken courses in neoclassical economics are less likely to engage in cooperative behavior than noneconomists and students who have not been exposed to those ideas.

Here we have two key ideas: First, interests are not predetermined, and depend at least in part on ideas that are ‘in the air’ (including ideas that are created and disseminated by mainstream economists). Second, neoclassical economics plays an important role in shaping interests, and therefore (not unlike the Prosperity Gospel movement) has performative effects in making the world in which it exists.

So, the capitalist hustle has at least two different but overlapping dimensions: it is an economic system, which makes sure a large part of the winnings ends up going to the dealers, and an economic gospel, which gets the marks to keep coming back to the cardboard box with the hope that, someday and against all odds, they might find the money card – or at least be asked to take the role of the shill and get a cut of the dealers' winnings.

As I see it, the Prosperity Gospel movement, across the long history Bowler so eloquently describes and analyzes in her book, has played a key role in the American version of that hustle.

Notes

1. I want to thank Kathleen Cummings and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism for the opportunity to participate in the symposium at which I presented a first draft of this essay, and especially for the opportunity to read Kate Bowler's magnificent history of the American Prosperity Gospel. I also want to thank Jack Amariglio and Larry Grossberg for encouraging me to publish this essay, the editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy for considering and eventually accepting the symposium presentation for publication, and Dwight Billings and Ben Giamo for comments on the initial draft.

2. George Packer (2013), more than any contemporary academic, has provided the best account of the economic and social ‘unwinding’ that has taken place over the course of the past three decades. The saga of Dean Price, in particular, demonstrates the ‘spiritual and material thirsting’ that, like the ever-hopeful congregants in the Prosperity Gospel movement, made him ‘easy prey to the hucksters of the cloth.’

3. Although, according to the latest General Social Survey, as discussed by Michael Hout et al. (2013), there has been a general retreat from identification with organized religions since the early 1990s.

4. Which, as Karen Tice (2011) so perceptively identifies and explains, culminates in the Christian conversion of the Miss America Pageant.