Daily Grind: The Spiritual Workday of the American Prosperity Gospel

Abstract

This paper responds to two common questions surrounding the controversy of the American prosperity gospel: what kind of work is the prosperity gospel and who does it benefit? I argue that the movement contains both heavily supernatural approaches and deeply pragmatic responses to the market. Further, its wealthy preachers are the most direct beneficiaries and the focus of the debate over the movement's claims.

KEYWORDS:

• history
• American religion
• prosperity gospel
• financialization
• ethnography

I had never heard of the ‘prosperity gospel’ when I first caught wind of a megachurch not far from my home and how its pastor celebrated a new liturgical holiday dubbed ‘Pastor’s Appreciation Day’ by receiving all kinds of gifts. My favorite part of the story had been how the pastor rode one of them – a motorcycle – around onstage and everyone had cheered. The road leading up to the church itself was stamped with his last name, and his books and recorded sermons were always available in the church lobby for purchase, cash or credit. For this pastor, it was all in a day’s work.

This little reminiscence is likely to evoke the kind of ambivalence that has followed me around for my past eight years studying the American prosperity gospel. What exactly is required of a historian writing about one of the most reviled religious movements in Christian history? There are many who wonder whether prosperity theology is theology at all. What if these preachers are really up to something else? David Ruccio, with characteristic good humor, joyfully denounces the movement as a proxy, a sham, and a con that masks the deeper lie: that this faith and this economy are never going to reward Americans for their efforts. Are these believers simply victims and marks? Heath Carter wonders if their faith is sadly misguided rather than a hard look at the real world. At this point, I suspect that many readers of Blessed would rise up and applaud these thoughtful commentators. Until I started getting reviews, I did not realize there were so many synonyms for ‘flimflam.’

In this view, the prosperity gospel is worse than nothing because it disguises itself as something. In Christian terms, it disguises itself as hope. The message has structural integrity insofar as it makes possible a world in which those with the most can extract tribute from those with the least. Its preachers make you believe in a charmed market where everything you give comes back to you, as they like to say, ‘pressed down, shaken together, and running over’ (Luke 6:38). As such, the prosperity gospel is many things, but it is not theology. It does not talk about God, as theology does. It does not even talk about God, as historical theology does. This is an extractive industry.

Since both commentators raise the subject of labor, I would like to begin and end with this question of industry: precisely what kind of work is the prosperity gospel and who does it benefit?

What kind of labor is this? Though the book addresses this question in a relatively unconstructed way, the role of emotional labor serves as one of its perennial themes. Believers worked extremely hard at generating positive expectations about the future, avoiding negative ideas and words about the present and past, and behaving as if their prayers had already come true (a practice known as ‘acting faith’). They moved their bodies as if they were not sick. They thanked God for financial payments that had not come their way. They praised God for wayward children that had not returned home. Not yet, they would say, but soon. In the late-nineteenth century, the rise of a metaphysical movement called New Thought convinced a generation of Americans that their minds were potent incubators of their dreams, a newfound confidence that many Christians have since applied to their appeals for health and, from the 1950s onwards, wealth. This was the Protestant work ethic – Max Weber’s diagnosis of the Puritan search for assurance of salvation or perdition transformed into hard work – folded into an entirely mental world. Believers scoured their minds of words, emotions, and spirits that could inhibit them from seeing their lives confirm their faithfulness. This was the arduous work of the prosperity gospel, those small acts of cultivating an alternative imagination and learning how to recast spiritual lives as labor measurable in divine currency and redeemable for earthly rewards.

I suspect that Ruccio and Carter knew before I did that the spiritual labor of everyday prosperity believers lay somewhere at the core of my investment in the American prosperity gospel. Prosperity churchgoers spent inordinate amounts of time and effort not dwelling on money – as the stereotype goes – but cultivating and managing their own spiritual expectations. Their metaphors and language rested on potentiality and perseverance for the not-yet-future. Even the most mechanistic accounts of giving and getting required a language of in-between. Megachurch pastor Rickie Rush captured this spirit of hurried patience in his description of God as a drive-through window, as you must give your order (positive confession) pay in advance (tithes and offerings), and then wait while God assembled your order. The more specialized the order, he told his audience, the longer the wait. Audiences could sing about their longing for that soon-to-be miracle in Juanita Bynum’s hit song ‘I don’t mind waiting,’ a luxuriously slow chorus that lingered on the repeated refrain ‘I don’t mind wa-i-t-ing … I don’t mind waaaaait-ing for you, Lord.’ It was the liturgy of the anticipation. Preachers talked like farmers, with seeds sown and harvests to be reaped.

Performing happiness and the expectation of positive tomorrows became a staple of Sunday mornings, and many of these churches (particularly those with more immediatist views about the relationship between positive affect and results) were among the happiest I have ever attended. Greeters urged me to get my dancing shoes on, and ushers assured me that this would be the greatest service of my life. In this, the rise of a new religious priority on positive feeling and performance mirrored the cultural drift toward happiness as a significant unit of production. Research on the labor of emotion, like Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank You Economy (2011) and Sam Binkley’s Happiness as Neoliberal Enterprise (2014), and, more popularly, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided (2009) have found that a reflexive priority on positivity as a ‘life resource’ was also a consequence of living in an increasingly privatized neoliberal state that compelled its citizens to be self-constituting and resourceful. With the burgeoning field of positive psychology, prosperity preachers would agree that, as the author of The Happiness Advantage said, ‘happiness is not just a mood – it’s a work ethic’ (Achor 2010, p. 50).¹

This work ethic often paid off. Bosses noticed their bright smiles and infectiously positive attitude. Churchgoers pressed bills into each other’s hands when things were looking up for one member and down for another. Sermons encouraged listeners to show up on time and be thoughtful about details. The volunteerism of running a church taught people workplace skills that were transferrable come Monday morning. Desire itself – perhaps for a car, a promotion, more children, and happy marriages – was sanctified as worthy of God’s attention. When socioeconomic class was reified by imagined horizons, spheres of what seemed possible, the prosperity gospel helped believers utterly reconceive of their place in this economy. But as Heath Carter has argued persuasively, if these self-help efforts work, it is only because the decline of organized labor and the rise of staggering inequality have ensured that it may be their only hope.

The prosperity movement brimmed with metaphorical economic language: investments, returns, divine banks, and billion-dollar trade secrets. At times, however, the movement seemed to be describing an enchanted marketplace so governed by unseen forces as to negate any real connection to commerce. Prosperity believers exchanged money in the present for multiplied money in the future in a heavily theorized mystical system with God acting, in their words, as the Divine Banker. Money, propelled by belief, was donated to a church whose anointed pastor multiplied it back to the giver by operating according to spiritual laws, which in turn opened up new streams of revenue to bring it back to the believer. But as what? Cash? A job promotion? A social security check? A child’s return? A happy marriage? A phone call from a friend? A fortuitous meeting? How should they go about counting and measuring what it meant to be blessed?

Sometimes these heavily supernatural and naturalistic prescriptions for financial success came all at once as a buffet of options. In the same Black Economic Success Training (BEST) seminar run by celebrity pastor T. D. Jakes, a NASCAR franchise owner credited his love for God as his winning advantage, an Oprah-endorsed financial expert promoted godly self-esteem as an interview must-have, and a megachurch pastor asked the audience to ‘plant a seed of faith’ and ‘put away the Washingtons,’ as one dollar bills would not be enough. The seminar was neither purely pragmatic nor esoteric, concrete nor abstract. The prosperity gospel, like the genre of self-help broadly, combined positive affect (‘You can do it!’), gritty utility (‘Use what works!’), a financial buy-in (‘All for only $19.95’), and an abstracted set of spiritual presuppositions about the sweep of history toward their own betterment (‘There’s a plan for your life.’). It was difficult at times to discern where the movement’s utilitarian ethos and its cosmological framework intersected.

This ambiguity came, in part, because the prosperity gospel was of two minds about whether the market was wholly spiritual terrain. For those who promoted the common foundation of the universe, governed by a cosmic law of like-attracts-like, it was easy to imagine that all things (including the markets) worked by the same principles. Its predecessor, New Thought, had almost immediately added business acumen to one of the many benefits of spiritual self-mastery. Metaphysical author William Atkinson’s Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life (1901) recommended that young entrepreneurs ‘accept the means of financial salvations’ by practicing everything from wielding mental control to attract business to transfixing clients with their ‘magnetic gaze.’² Faith in God required faith in the marketplace to mete out the rewards of faithfulness. Many modern prosperity preachers likewise argued that the lives of the rich helped reveal the secret keys that set the spiritual forces of sowing and reaping in motion. This was a divine economy. Mike Murdock’s $ecret$ of the Riche$t Man Who Ever Lived (2012) argued that the hidden principles of achievement that had made Solomon the richest man who ever lived were at the beck and call of all Christians who would dare to believe. American capitalism, in this view, was a playground readymade for those who knew the rules of the game.

For others in the prosperity movement, there could be no harmony with the suits and ties on Wall Street, the stronghold of Satan. In this interpretation, the business world and its capitalist titans represented the locked vault that kept the ‘wealth of the world’ locked away from faithful (and often marginalized) Christians. Prosperity preachers who took this view were the most distant from the mainstream of the movement, armed with their own self-published literature and smaller audiences, but wildly popular with those ready for, as one book promised, No More Debts: Your Broad Guide to Living Above the World’s Economic System and Begin to Spend from God’s Pocket (Omole 2009). These savvy believers understood that the world was stacked against them and that the wicked heaped up treasure for their own purposes. The sheer preponderance of inequality stoked their apocalyptic imagination – soon and very soon God would transfer the wealth of the world into their hands as part of end-times wealth transfer. ‘It is our responsibility to spoil the world of its wealth,’ wrote one manual, ‘so that the money that belongs in the Kingdom of God will flow through the hands of the children of God’ (Smith 2011, p. 208).

These two prescriptions for how to achieve God’s wealth – in the market or above the market – capture a paradox at the heart of its message. The prosperity gospel rested on the understanding that spiritual laws operated with perfect uniformity. The law of sowing and reaping guaranteed a better return on all money given to the church. The law of positive confession ensured that positive words spoken aloud harnessed divine forces on the speaker’s behalf. These laws were deemed laws because they worked the same way for anyone, anytime, in any economic climate. (For this reason, the Great Recession prompted endless prosperity sermons proclaiming that ‘This isn’t our recession!’) Other currents running through the American spiritual landscape (monism, vitalism, transcendentalism, etc.) had contributed to the sense that all cause and effect – and indeed materiality itself – was suffused with order or, at least, a series of clues. This image of a world that motors along, governed by laws buried deep into the cosmos at the dawn of time, harkened back to Deism, the favorite Enlightenment faith of the Founding Fathers, who believed in the supernatural origin of a universe that did not need God’s perpetual intervention. But this image of a world governed by spiritual laws – laws that likewise undergirded the workings of capitalism – forever bumped up against Christianity’s faith in God’s constant meddling. Why would Christians who lived in a world of predictable spiritual laws of cause and effect need God to step in at all? Surely the poor but faithful businessman could use the wisdom of Solomon or attract clients with his magnetic spiritual charisma. The faithful need not beg God for end-times wealth transfers when all God’s spiritual tools lay at their feet.

The prosperity gospel’s conflicted confidence in the market to dole out spiritual rewards (or punishments) surfaced with internal debates about the debauchery of the rich. Every now and again, preachers would ponder the spiritual state of a wealthy and immoral businessman, nameless, but a kind of spiritual prototype that raised a significant question: what does his success really mean? The anonymous man’s life was never described as so lonely or so pitiful that it explained away the question itself, and multiple answers clamored for ascendancy. Some concluded that his wealth was a fleeting moment before his inevitable downfall, but most reflected a more thoroughgoing conviction that God’s laws were tightly tied to forces that drive stock prices and interest rates or lead the right client through the door. The anonymous man had fallen into the mystical currents that floated some men’s fortunes and sank others to the very bottom.

From their perches atop ministerial empires or makeshift storefront podiums alike, preachers had to work hard to convince people to reinterpret the mundane – washing dishes, dropping off the kids, and standing at the copy machine – as part of a divine conspiracy of blessings and lessons. Ruccio perfectly captures the spirit of these restless preachers, endlessly exhorting audiences toward a calculation of future reward, with his image of the hope-peddling salesmen of the American hustle, which leads us to our second question about the nature of this labor. Who benefits from the hustle and bustle of the American prosperity gospel?

The lightening rod of controversy on this subject is, of course, the prosperity preachers themselves. The most common question I receive at the end of every lecture is about how many of these preachers are con artists. I do not disagree with Ruccio that there is a prosperity gospel preacher out there, right now, defrauding a widow in Florida. Jim Bakker’s new show is a great example of someone who was an expert salesman, and he just happened to be selling the gospel. The resurrection of ‘The Jim Bakker Show’ features the disgraced preacher with his new wife, a dead ringer for the now departed Tammy Faye, selling a range of items including dehydrated food stuffs marketed to elderly folks concerned about food storage in the end-times. It is strangely compelling. When I began my investigations in earnest, it started with a research trip to see Benny Hinn, a controversial divine healer I had previously seen many times before and admittedly disliked for his habit of shouting at attendees, his staff, and especially his pianist named Cheryl, whose accompaniments never quite seemed to match his expectations. As a consummate revivalist, Hinn labored over every crusade. He sweated. He paced. He yelled at anyone in his 2008 North Carolina crusade who wanted to exit to use the bathroom while he was speaking. His life seemed simultaneously extremely difficult and aggravatingly easy. During his much-anticipated mass baptism service in Israel in 2008, Hinn sat perched under an enormous blue Nestlé umbrella, out of the hot sun and above the water, fanning himself and lightly tapping each person on the head as his workers below did the heavy lifting of lowering believers into the water and pulling them out again in Jesus’ name. I spoke recently to a Kenyan pastor who worked for Hinn’s Nairobi crusade in 2000 that attracted a million nightly worshippers. The local pastor worked for three months with a team in preparation, but when the big day came the Man of God (as the pastor called him earnestly) appeared for only a moment to bark orders before disappearing behind a wall of bodyguards. The millions of shillings that came in nightly left the pastor confused about whether the prosperity gospel was a religion or a franchise.

Worries about manipulative leaders and the evils of the prosperity gospel usually devolve at this point into methodological concerns. Does the prosperity gospel deserve the kind of historical neutrality that we historians typically offer our subjects? Should a book like this be different in tone than, say, a history of kindly Mennonites settling the plains of Manitoba? Most of my reviewers and the bulk of unsolicited responses from the masses have said ‘yes.’ A reviewer for the mighty evangelical consortium called The Gospel Coalition, for example, worried that the ‘even-handed style’ could be dangerous: ‘My fear here is that an unbeliever, or even an immature believer, could read this book and actually find the historical presentation of the prosperity gospel attractive’ (Jones 2014). It is a rare moment of perfect agreement between the most religious and irreligious in this country that the prosperity gospel is genuinely terrible. In close readings of celebrity pastors boarding their private jets, doesn’t the reader deserve to know when one is a fraud or a bully or even a saint? This is an especially compelling argument when describing prosperity gospels heard over loudspeakers in some of the poorest slums in India or Nigeria, stories of pennies dropped into offering plates instead of used for lifesaving medicines. Or a letter from a man whose sister died young wearing a new pair of dress shoes their parents had been spiritually instructed to buy as a testimony to her soon-to-be healing. Tragedies. Aren’t all those mass mailed letters, printed as if in scribbled handwriting, promising miracles to the dying for the bargain price of $20 miracle oil proof enough that these people are not really to be believed when they say they are happy, healthy, and whole?

Early on in my research, I stopped being quite as invested in parsing the rate of return that preachers receive for their efforts. As a young graduate student and teacher’s assistant, I told my students I would be taking this aforementioned trip with Benny Hinn’s tour, and I made a lame joke about his hair. After class, one of my incredibly shy students came up to me and gently told me that she thought I was really fortunate to be attending. After all, she had been healed from blindness in one eye at a Benny Hinn crusade.

I have had enough encounters like these to cultivate a methodological playful agnosticism, a ‘who knows’ that tries to show but not tell while studying a morally ambiguous movement. For as religious historians play with new methodological tools to tell stories of living subjects – particularly in borrowing ethnographic methods – there has been little consensus about how our commitments to our subjects make demands of us as historians. As someone very influenced by folklorists and anthropologists committed to collaborative ethnographic methods, I inherited an investment in matching accounts with a believer’s own self-description and, as Carter mentioned, involving subjects as much as possible in the fabrication of narratives. For various reasons, I did not go far down the path of collaboration, but I do regularly show people what I write about them for question and comment.

And here is what I learned: the hard part is not making people see what you see. That is inevitable. The hard part is getting to that place in the interview where you are not speaking the same language – she is telling you about how she does not believe illnesses are real and you are thinking that is impossible because she is a nurse. But that charitable agnosticism requires you to press in. What does she do when she feels an ache? Does she ever use her expertise at work to draw conclusions about her own health? How could she tell a patient that they have an illness when she cannot negatively confess? If I believed that I already knew that she was dim or deluded or uncritical, I do not think I would ask any of those questions. I would already have the answer. That cultivated practice of ‘maybe’ I have found to be one of the main reasons why people talk to me and why I find their reasoned thought world so fascinating. Assuming that, on balance, these are agents not victims yields richer stories, better data, and historical accounts that, I hope, allow readers to make up their own minds.

I have met people weeping with joy from a dramatic healing and people still wheeling their way out of the crusade with tears in their eyes. I have met preachers I despised and those I admired. But who cares what I think. I will close by saying that I treat this movement as propelled by a serious internal discourse and have attempted to reconstruct that in the book with only small gestures toward my own theories. Because I hope that you will make up your own minds about whether the movement is a holding pen for the gullible or the ambitious or the earnest or maybe even the very lucky. On the whole, the million or so Americans who attend a prosperity church believe that God has offered them more than hope. God has offered them certainty. Their pastors have flipped to the end of the story and seen that it turns out all right in the end. For believers, it is better than a dream. It is a dream come true.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you so much to these two thoughtful responders, Kathy Cummings and the Cushwa Center, for hosting this symposium and to the editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy for curating it.

Notes

1. This quote was brought to my attention by Sam Binkley.

2. See especially Chapter 12 for the use of the magnetic gaze and Chapter 13 for the ‘means of financial salvations.’