Prosperity Gospel prospering in hard times

I was reading this piece in Slate asking how the Prosperity Gospel -- the idea that God wants you to get rich, if you want to -- is faring in hard times, and thinking, "This is really good and well-informed; wonder who wrote it?" Turns out it's my friend and former Dallas Morning News intern Clint Rainey. Check it out. Excerpt:

Detractors wonder how this neo-Pentecostal offshoot became evangelical kudzu, snaking its way even into Baptist churches. When did Max Lucado and Pat Robertson, two mainstream evangelicals, start producing fawning blurbs for Your Best Life Now? And of the top 15 spots on Outreach magazine's largest megachurches, how did Team Prosperity get to control No. 1, No. 6, No. 10, and No. 14? Assemblies of God church leaders, whose Pentecostalism some tag as Prosperity ground zero, tried uprooting the theology, even resurrecting a 1980 position paper, but this has been ineffectively and self-destructively like using prescribed burning to eradicate kudzu that's already taken over the yard.

This movement is, if anything, durable. Neither incredulity of its methods nor bad publicity, like the cadre of TBN televangelists under Senate investigation for their Robin Leach-voice-over-worthy lifestyles, affects its salability. After all, Osteen's sunny view is that his message has "increased relevancy in a time of economic uncertainty." His church Lakewood generated $76 million last year, the most in the United States. He says attendance is up since the economy tanked. Hard-on-their-luck audiences are more likely to buy in to the message's fire-insurance appeal--the very "too big to fail" clout that attracted traders to AIG or Lehman Bros. until they failed them, too. For evangelicals, the culture wars trump self-policing; attempts to intellectually defrock Prosperity preachers come episodically from jailbird Jim Bakker, too-nice Rick Warren, or little-known leaders like Frederick Price of the National Baptist Convention, who compared Prosperity boosters to pimps. The signs do not point to a denouement.

But with two centuries of entitlement echoing Prosperity's mantra "What I confess I possess," who can blame people for flocking to Joel Osteen when he reassures them that "God wants to make your life easier"? Recent news that Americans have become less religiously classifiable doesn't mean a wave of Christopher Hitchenses so much as feel-good cafeteria spirituality stripped of tradition and dogma.

Why, it's our old friend Morali$tic Therapeutic Dei$m, in a get-rich-quick guise. It is disgusting, and God will spit it out of His mouth. These preachers are pimps of false hope and salvation by materialism. It is a cruel irony -- and a testimony to human gullibility -- that they continue to prosper amid hard times.