Prosperity gospel and the economic crash

I encourage you to read Hanna Rosin's cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic, citing the role the spread of the prosperity gospel -- the idea that God wants you to be rich, and to have nice things -- to the economic crash. The title is "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?", which is an unfortunate headline, because what she really means to ask is: Did this faddish but counterfeit form of Christianity play a role in provoking the economic crisis?

It's impossible to quantify the degree to which it may have done, of course, but Rosin makes a good case that the utter insanity of the prosperity gospel -- coupled with the flat-out greed of bankers willing to make loans to gullible and greedy Jesus followers -- did harm. She writes, "Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities--the exurban middle class and the urban poor." As a Christian, reading about these crackpot preachers and their followers really burns me up. Here's the philosophical and historical gist of her piece:

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America's middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture--a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his "success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan." The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man--a "speculative confidence man," Lears calls him, who prefers "risky ventures in real estate," and a more "fluid, mobile democracy." The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with "grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God." The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: "The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I've done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me--that I'll be the one."

To be sure, this is not a drive-by trashing on prosperity preaching. Rosin really does try to understand its appeal. I found myself most affected by the way this stuff is taking off among minorities. Excerpt:

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how "God blessed me with my first house despite my credit" were common ... Sermons declaring "It's your season of overflow" supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about "what God can do," little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. "I would hear consistent testimonies about how 'once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,' or 'I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,'" he says. "This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster."

See? And here's a bit about how it appeals to Latino immigrants (who disproportionately took out subprime mortgages). Excerpt:

Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: "God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith." For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay's church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I've visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

And:

While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had "been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings"--small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. "In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything," says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. "They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it's God's will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else."

It says something that the most vibrant form of religion in America used to be the old Protestant kind that said if you worked hard and disciplined yourself and lived right, you would prosper. It was in some ways a myth, of course, but there were real truths about human nature embedded in it, and the kind of society built out of that ethic was likely to be a healthy one. But now the most vibrant form of religion might well be this corrupt casino Christianity. That says something too about our country, and its future.

These prosperity gospel jackals are the enemy of the Gospel. But I have to admit that I have never been poor, so I don't know what it's like to be tempted by this kind of pseudo-spirituality.