| Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
Author: Kate Bowler
Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA |
Heavenly Rewards
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heavenly-rewards_764675.html
That business of God and Mammon.
Anyone who doubts that truth is stranger than fiction
should reflect on the fact that one of America’s leading “prosperity”
preachers is named Creflo Dollar. The owner of two Rolls Royces, he
shames and cajoles his congregation, most of whom are poor African
Americans, into giving their money to his ministry, telling them that to
do so will make them not poorer but richer. After all, God wants
them to be rich; He wants money to rain down on the righteous as a sign
of His blessing. How do we know? Because Jesus himself was rich and was
used to receiving gifts like gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
The Reverend Ike (1935-2009) interviewed in his office, 1998
associated press
“Prosperity
attached itself to baby Jesus immediately,” he says, “and that same
gift to prosper has been given to us as heirs of Christ.”
The paradox at the heart of Blessed is that this
apparently materialistic creed, immensely popular in the megachurch
world today, is actually highly idealistic. This is a world in which
faith trumps any number of hard material realities. It can bring wealth
to the poor and health to the sick, replace despair and depression with
“victory.” Christians in this frame of mind don’t so much give their
money away as they “sow” it like seeds, believing that it will lead to a
great harvest and return to them in the form of material and spiritual
blessings.
It is also a world that mixes flights of fancy with
dogmatic literalism. Ecstatic ministers describe their visions of
“angels, doves, dragons, and clouds of light.” They create elaborate
agricultural metaphors about sowing, reaping, threshing, and gleaning.
At the same time, however, many believe that to speak exactly the right
words is vital for seekers of health and wealth: Black magic,
witchcraft, and the personal malice of Satan are real things that must
be countered in definite and specific ways, such as literally vomiting
them up. Some favor talismanic objects and rituals, like putting a
dollar bill in your shoe if you want to be rich or laying a sanctified
handkerchief on an injured limb.
Membership in such churches has its privileges, but it
makes heavy demands on members’ time as well as on their wallets. To
attend church only on Sunday is regarded as the bare minimum, even
though Sunday services can be three or four hours long. Members who also
attend midweek prayer and healing sessions and do extensive volunteer
work for the church come closer to the ideal. When Kate Bowler asked
some harried members how they found time to devote 10 or 15 hours a week
to the church, in addition to their work and family responsibilities,
they gave her a puzzled look and told her she had it backwards: The real
issue was how to make time for anything else.
Bowler, a professor of religion at Duke University, shows
how this “prosperity” Christianity grew out of earlier trends in
Protestant history, notably Mind Cure, positive thinking, and
Pentecostalism, all of which equated faith with the achievement of
worldly well-being. She describes it as a religious style well-adapted
to American economic conditions: “The prosperity gospel’s emphasis on
the individual’s responsibility for his or her own fate resonates
strongly with the American tradition of rugged self-reliance.”
The idea that God wants Christians to be rich picked up
speed in the 1970s, along with the rise of mass-audience television
ministries. Bowler makes a distinction between what she calls “hard” and
“soft” prosperity preaching. Hard prosperity was all the rage in the
1970s and ’80s, when televangelists enjoyed linking specific dollar
amounts to the promise of percentage returns and eternal salvation. Jim
Bakker was a case in point, weeping on TV in his mint-green suit when an
appeal for funds fell short. So was Oral Roberts, who told viewers that
if they did not send in $8 million, God would “call him home” to
Heaven. Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye, whose fall from grace came as a
blow to satirists everywhere, were exposed as frauds in 1987. They had
been extorting credulous viewers’ money to fund a lavish personal
lifestyle rather than investing it in Heritage USA, their Christian
theme park.
Soft prosperity” preaching helped
repair the damage in the ensuing years. Favoring a slightly calmer
idiom, ministers like Joel Osteen and Kenneth Hagin looked more like
corporate CEOs than nightclub emcees and were less specific about
exactly how much money God wanted you to give. Before long, the
prosperity gospel recovered its recruiting momentum. Many
African-American ministers adapted to it, preaching godly wealth but
also cautioning members about the need to manage their finances, pay
their debts, and avoid reckless expenditure. The switch from a long
Christian tradition of holy poverty to one of holy riches has not
affected the other moral verities: Megachurch members are still expected
to be sober, chaste, industrious, honest, uncomplaining, and
courteous.
The charismatic leaders of the megachurches have, in most
cases, separated themselves from the old denominations. The separation
has sometimes been a result of disagreement over prosperity theology,
but it could also be the result of a specific minister’s belief that God
had singled him out with the blessing of wealth or a sudden recovery
from ill health. These independents, while autonomous, actually have
many things in common: bold entrepreneurship, massive capital
investments, broadcasting and publishing empires, and success theology.
They gather regularly at national conferences, where one or another of
them can usually be found as keynote speaker.
Bowler, rather than keeping an academic distance from the
object of her study, did much of her research as a participant-observer.
In addition to visiting and researching dozens of megachurches, she
attended faith-healing services at the Victorious Faith Center in
Durham, North Carolina, and befriended some of its members. She tagged
along with faith-healer Benny Hinn on an exhausting pilgrimage to Israel
with 900 other Christian tourists. In the midst of her research, she
began to suffer from a mysterious muscular paralysis, an experience that
intensified her response to the highly emotional healing-oriented
events.
After the trip, she seems to have struggled to find the
right voice in which to report her findings. I enjoyed trying to catch
sight of the real Kate, behind the façade of social-scientific
objectivity. She doesn’t let her guard down often, but occasional stray
phrases give away her actual train of thought. Determined not to condemn
the prosperity gospel out of hand (as most investigative journalists
have done), she works hard to show readers how its adherents explain
their way of life and how it offers an internally consistent worldview.
She is equally determined not to endorse it, however, and makes no
secret of the fact that it can be highly coercive.
Anyone coming to these churches from the outside is bound
to ask: Does the faith-healing actually work, and does the giving of
money actually bring back more money? Bowler sometimes met people who
had been “healed,” in the sense that they had become the object of the
minister’s tearful entreaties, and yet still they suffered. When Bowler
asked after the welfare of “Ruth,” one such sufferer, an informant told
her, “She has been healed. She is just claiming her
healing”—and then added, “I think she’s worried about negatively
confessing.” In other words, if Ruth was still confined to her
wheelchair, it must be because her faith wasn’t strong enough. She was
now expected to “claim” her return to good health as though it were
already complete. To ask for healing again would imply inadequate
sincerity the first time around.
Bowler also cites the case of a cancer sufferer prevented
by church leaders from returning to the altar for more “healing.” Once
should have been enough; now he was on his own. By the same logic,
members who don’t grow rich have only themselves to blame.
Readers of The Weekly Standard may know that human life
ends in death and that to blame individuals for their own deaths is
usually unreasonable. Prosperity preachers disagree: “Death meant
failure, the failure of the believer to win the spiritual battle against
illness,” paraphrases Bowler. Gloria Copeland, one of the female stars
of the movement, recently published Live Long, Finish Strong (2010),
advocating “unlimited life.” Even in a book dedicated to the
proposition that death is unnecessary, however, she finally admits that
at the age of about 120, Christians might want to “choose the time of
their own home-going.”
Bowler is relieved to discover among her friends at the
Victorious Faith Center a subterranean current of resistance to official
teachings. Sick members often help each other out without passing
judgment. They comfort the bereaved, rather than berating the departed
for lack of faith. They sometimes slip out of church early to accomplish
practical tasks or to look after their children. But even while
contradicting their church’s teachings, they continue to invoke them as
ideals for themselves and for one another.
Researching and writing Blessed could not have
been easy, and the author, if anything, understates her own
tribulations. Nevertheless, she has emerged with a historically and
anthropologically convincing account of this central trend in
contemporary American Christianity, in equal parts informative, amusing,
and horrifying.
Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory University, is the author, most recently, of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.
