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The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospel and the Mortgage Meltdown
By philhigley | October 4, 2008
The article below is very interesting/sad…
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1847053,00.html
Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess
Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”
Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: “The pastor’s not gonna say, ‘Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,’ but I have heard, ‘Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you’ll get that house or that car or that apartment.’ ” Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: “It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy.” If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.
Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are “worthy of having more and doing more and being more.” In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.
But Walton suggests that a decade’s worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity’s bloodstream. “The economic boom ’90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message,” he wrote recently. And not positively. “Narratives of how ‘God blessed me with my first house despite my credit’ were common. Sermons declaring ‘It’s your season to overflow’ supplanted messages of economic sobriety,” and “little attention was paid to … the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations.”
With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants’ fortunes. Says Walton: “You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology.” But he predicts they will persevere, since God’s earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.
A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer’s note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. “Last Sunday,” it read, “You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace.”
And pray that the credit market doesn’t tighten any further.
Topics: Uncategorized |
October 4th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Nice Site layout for your blog. I am looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Humes
October 6th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I saw that article too. Is time magazine saying that the housing/market crisis should be blamed on Pentecostals? Pentecostals and the Prosperity Gospel are very different. Jonathan Edwards was basically a pentecostal. Old Lights vs New Lights. I don’t think Joel Olsteen is pentecostal? I would agree that the heretical Prosperity Message has led sheep into the wolves of the mortgage industry. Time magazine had a full page picture of billy graham not too long ago, and the “M” of time, formed two horns on his head. I hate the prosperity message, but appears to blame the housing/market crisis on Christians.
I think if they criticized Todd Bentley of God.tv, that would be legitimate. The brownsville gospel surely included prosperity messages due to the shear size of the awakening, as I’m sure the Great Awakening did. But the Brownsville revival was no god.tv sensation. Or is monasticism the only correct religion?
October 7th, 2008 at 10:59 am
No I don’t think that the magazine is saying anything should be blamed on Pentecostals, but its just saying (in essence) that some Pent’s have been duped by extremely bad theology. That point was expressed by the two Pentecostal scholars which they refer to. It’s also been brought out by Gordon Fee, who is perhaps the most significant Pentecostal scholar of our time. He wrote a book called the “Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospel.” Furthermore, it’s pretty sad that a secular magazine is making that point when so many Christians have no clue, excluding you and me of course, hehe.
Pentecostal’s and the prosperity gospel are indeed different, but it just so happens that the prosperity gospel is usually expressed in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles. Wait, let me correct myself, primarily in Charismatic circles. To be sure, there is a difference between classic Pentecostals and Charismatics. The former have regarded that speaking in tongues is the initial physical evidence of Baptism of the Holy Spirit, while the latter believe that different gifts may be evidence of Baptism of the Holy Spirit.
That said, I think Jonathan Edwards was more Charismatic than Pentecostal. Instead of viewing tongues as some kind of “evidence” (as if we need “evidence” to “prove” our “faith”) he instead focused on the Fruit of the Spirit as evidence of Christian discipleship. This was his whole argument in the Religious Affections. This is, I think, a major distinction.
I think you’re right, too; Joel Osteen is a Charismatic goofball with bad doctrine. This prosperity gospel will fall into ruin because it is false and contradicts the teaching of Jesus, the history of Christian tradition, and the very notion of God’s Holy character.