Dear Roberto,
You have asked me to explain the prosperity Gospel. How could anyone both believe that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” and interpret wealth as a sign of divine favor?
This is a difficult question. Christians have wondered and worried about the relationship between worldly wealth and eternal salvation for over 2,000 years. But I will offer you what I can from my little storehouse of knowledge.
1. Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?
Even as a pious Catholic schoolboy, you must have noticed that the gospels talk about wealth and poverty in slightly different ways. In the Gospel According to Luke Jesus says “blessed are the poor.” The poor, full stop. In Matthew, he says “blessed are the poor in spirit.” How shall we understand this?
Many early Christians took Luke at its word. The materially poor were the special chosen ones of God. But Clement of Alexandria, writing in the second century, disagreed. Spiritual poverty was far more important than material poverty. To Clement spiritual poverty meant a kind of detached attitude toward money and other worldly concerns. (You should only be passionately attached to God.) In fact, it was good to have money, because then you could give it to the church, the poor, and to other charitable causes, thereby demonstrating and strengthening your sense of detachment.
I have other friends who think Clement was a sellout. They say he spiritualized the radical message of the early church and in doing so diluted it. I am less sure. It seems to me that Clement was psychologically astute. Perhaps this experience is unknown to bankers like yourself, but for myself I can say: I have never been so obsessed by money as when I did not have enough of it.
Regardless, the church more or less adopted Clement’s position. A man who had a lot of money could be saved, so long as his money, so to speak, did not have him.
During the middle ages the relationship between wealth and salvation changed. In order to raise money (for cathedrals and crusades and the like), the church centered in Rome sold indulgences. I am sure the priests and nuns explained to you that even in the middle ages, no one could buy salvation, but they could buy spiritual benefits, especially time off their purgatory sentence. As Johann Tetzel told the good Saxon peasants, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
The abuse of indulgences infuriated Luther and other leaders of what was eventually the Reformation. Corruption, however, was not the real issue. On a deeper level, the reformers objected to the church’s claim to mediate salvation between the Christian and God. Christians, Luther insisted, could not earn their salvation by following the church’s rules. Salvation was a direct and unmerited gift from God.
The reformer John Calvin took Luther’s ideas in a disturbing direction. He agreed that salvation was an unmerited gift, but damnation was also in a sense unmerited. From before the foundations of the world, God had chosen some small elect number for salvation, an eternal communion of the saints, while the rest he selected for an ever-lasting, God-forsaken loneliness, which Calvin called hell. “Surely no more terrible abyss can be conceived,” wrote Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “than to feel yourself forsaken and estranged from God; and when you call upon him, not to be heard.”
Understandably, the citizens of Calvin’s Geneva wanted to know whether they were in God’s good graces or not. Sorry, Calvin told them, that is a great mystery, only for God to know. But, he allowed, there might be signs of salvation; no one can know for sure what they are, but they’re probably there.
2. Ye Cannot Serve Both God and Mammon (Though Mammon Might Appreciate How Ye Serve God)
Calvin’s answer did not satisfy all of his followers. This is understandable, as it must have been hard to live with the ever-present possibility that you were condemned unknowingly to eternal existential horror. If Max Weber is to be believed, later Calvinists were so nervous about the whole thing that their anxieties led them to accidentally invent capitalism.
Here’s what happened. How could people know if they were saved? In popular Calvinism, their behavior at least gave you a hint. So, what did right-living look like? Everyday Calvinism’s cardinal virtues included thrift, industry, and sobriety. Calvinists treated their jobs as vocations, as religious callings, and consequently did them very well. As a financier, Roberto, you must appreciate how these values, lived consistently, were conducive to the accumulation of capital, which then, rather than being blown on some sort of carnival, was prudently reinvested.
It wasn’t much of a leap to take success in business as an indirect sign that the businessman was living out those Protestant virtues (thrift, industry, and so on), and it wasn’t much of a leap from there to the idea that the businessman himself was holy, which would only be the case if he were one of God’s chosen. Hence wealth was an indirect sign of salvation, although never certain.
We are approaching the prosperity Gospel, Roberto, but we must first consider the unique contributions of your adopted country, the United States of America. Namely, evangelical Protestantism and “New Thought.”
Calvinism was very influential in Colonial America and the young republic. Think Puritans. But various ill-informed intellectuals to the contrary, America is not a Puritan country. The dominant American religious culture emerged in the so-called Great Awakenings, a series of loosely connected revivals that swept through the nation during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
This vein of Protestantism was both like and unlike traditional Calvinism in important ways. Like Calvinists, these evangelical Protestants drew a sharp line between the saved and damned, and again like Calvinists, they believed that God bestowed grace freely; it was ultimately unearned. But the differences were just as important. Chiefly, you could definitely know you were saved. In fact, you could pinpoint the exact moment when God had made his grace known to you. In the revivals themselves, this usually involved fainting dead away and springing back up again, morally and spiritually transformed. Hence “I once was lost but now I’m found, / Was blind but now I see.”
This new breed of Protestant also tended to believe strongly in prevenient Grace. This is a bit confusing, but it’s important. Remember that Calvin thought that you could do nothing to earn or merit grace. The revivalists agreed up to a point, but prevenient grace also made a little room for human agency. Prevenient means “preceding” or “coming before,” and the revivalists thought that God granted this prevenient of grace first, which in turn gave the sinner a chance to accept grace, to cooperate with God, and in accepting grace (saying stuff like “I accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior”) the sinner was saved. God gives grace and the opportunity to accept grace, but you’ve got to take that opportunity yourself. You’ve got to close that deal.
A related development in 19th century America was so-called “New Thought.” Originally a spiritualist movement, its proponents believed that by thinking positively a person could attract health and wealth. You will recognize its legacy today in books like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, Oprah’s favorite self-help manual The Secret, or in the sales techniques of Donald J. Trump, who as a child attended a church affiliated with none other than Norman Vincent Peale. In all of these cases, one visualizes and/or prays for something first, and then if you have enough faith, lo—it appears. Name it and claim it!
Although the “New Thought” movement came out of unorthodox spiritualist movements rather than mainstream Protestantism, I think we can see a strong cultural affinity between the two. Both assure the individual that something wonderful can come their way (wealth, health, grace and salvation), but the individual is responsible for making a crucial leap of faith (naming it and claiming it, accepting Christ into your heart, and so on).
As now must be obvious, revivalist Protestantism and New Thought are the prosperity Gospel’s intellectual foundation. There is no one moment when the “prosperity Gospel” arrived, but especially in the post-War period, ministers like Oral Roberts told their flocks that God wanted to reward them, to heal them or even shower them with riches. All they needed to do was accept God’s offer. This meant they had to believe, to pray and invite Christ into their hearts, to say yes to God’s plan and make a tangible sign of their faith. Usually a donation. But don’t worry! God will return to you whatever you give a hundredfold. Isn’t that the lesson of the parable of the talents?
I know that sounds like hucksterism, pure and simple. But I hope my little history lesson also helps you see how it emerges from a long tradition of Christian thinking about wealth, poverty, and salvation. It’s possible to be both financially rich and spiritually poor (after all, you’re willing to give that money away). As a proponent of the prosperity Gospel, you’re not earning salvation like some Papist; no, like any good Protestant you are accepting God’s free gift of grace. And money doesn’t make you holy! As with the stereotypical Calvinist businessman, it’s your holiness that’s making you money. For the Calvinist, that holiness was sobriety and thriftiness; for the prosperity Gospel adherent, it’s faith in God’s coming reward. But the pattern is the same: holiness -> money.
And if it’s just hucksterism, why is it so popular? Why are Pentecostalism, faith healing, and the prosperity Gospel spreading like wildfire, especially in the global south? And why is it so popular with the poor and striving lower-middle classes, rather than with the already rich? I refuse to believe that people are just stupid. There’s got to be a deeper explanation here.
Enter Karl Marx.
3. An Inverted Consciousness of the World?
Surely you remember Marx’s famous lines on religion: “Religion is at once an expression of real suffering and a protest against it. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless situation. Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
The last line has understandably gotten the most attention, and we could certainly apply it to the prosperity Gospel. This is how: like a good opiate, religion numbs pain. More specifically, religion numbs present pain by promising future rewards. So, in the case of the prosperity Gospel, poor believers are assured that riches are awaiting them, if not heavenly riches then earthly riches in the future, someday. The congregants just have to pray a little harder, believe a little more sincerely, reach down deeper into their pockets for a bigger donation—and the money will come back to them. If it doesn’t, that’s on them. They didn’t believe enough.
As the Marxist would hasten to add, this line of reasoning keeps them from thinking too hard about the economic system they live under. Why are they poor? Why do they need to pray for money? Why isn’t there an easier and more reliable way to get it? These might be uncomfortable questions. Religion, in Marx’s view, plays an indispensable role in a capitalist society because it misdirects people and diverts their attention, and in doing so keeps them ignorant of how the capitalist system works and divvies out rewards. If only they put away their silly myths, he thinks, they would realize who their real enemies were and make world revolution, or at least vote to raise the capital gains tax.
That would be the standard Marxist analysis of the prosperity Gospel. I think we can give a better one.
I have always been drawn to that first line of Marx’s quote: “Religion is at once an expression of real suffering and a protest against it.” Let’s break it down. “Religion is an expression of real suffering.” This means that religion responds to present conditions, speaking to the realities of peoples’ lives. These lives are often hard. Petitionary prayers only make sense if the believers are asking for what they haven’t got, so you should be able to look at religious beliefs and see, in a roundabout way, what their society isn’t providing them. That’s how religion can also be “a protest against” suffering. For example, take “Give us today our daily bread.” If many early Christians genuinely didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, then asking for daily bread would then be a way of asking for a different world, one that didn’t leave them without the necessities of life. In a roundabout way, it could be read as an indictment of Roman society.
What might this tell us about the prosperity Gospel? It would certainly tell us that these societies do not provide reliable roads to wealth, or even financial security. Even more, it would tell us that the workings of wealth are utterly opaque. Money seems to fall on some and not on others with no rhyme or reason.
This must be especially true in developing countries, where the prosperity Gospel is wildly popular. Just imagine: national economies being transformed as they modernize, great fortunes rising and falling overnight, distant international bodies and banking concerns raising and lowering the prices of goods and the very value of the currency itself! The prosperity Gospel speaks to the chaotic and incomprehensible reality of many peoples’ economic lives, wherein wealth and poverty are as inscrutable as divine election or disfavor. And, of course, these people have no more control over global capital and its machinations than they would have over a mysterious and implacable Calvinist God.
It would be possible to make the orthodox Marxist point again here. These beliefs are just obscuring reality, because the workings of capital actually do follow predictable laws, and the people could recognize them if they gave up their fairy tales and then seized the means of production, etc.
Yet I confess I wonder, Roberto, if the proponents of the prosperity Gospel are on to something. Marxists and free market enthusiasts don’t agree on much, but they tend to believe that markets are rational and obey various laws. Yet there is so much chaos, so much uncertainty, so many unpredictable booms and busts (if there were not, how could anyone make money betting on them?). It may be that those holy rollers are responding to a reality that their cultured despisers would rather ignore.
That, at any rate, is how I understand the prosperity Gospel, to the best of my ability. I am sorry it took so long for me to write to you. But taking care of a baby, and then keeping up with a toddler, took more time and energy than I had anticipated.
Yours,
Paul