Prosperity gospel and the American dream

A lot of our everyday lives are shaped by the idea that if we really believe in something, it will happen. But where does that idea come from? And what does it have to do with the American dream? Today on the show, how the prosperity gospel has blended self-improvement, religion and capitalism into an everyday recipe for success – one that any of us can try. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  This is Norman Vincent Peale. What I have in mind to do is to give a little discussion on this subject, how to make positive thinking work for you.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  Norman Vincent Peale is a bit of a theological outlier. Like a lot of these modern spiritual entrepreneurs, he kind of slandered around a bit.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  Born at the end of the 19th century and comes into the 20th, he's meeting all of these, you know, big automakers, oil people. So he's right there in the middle of this sort of capitalist kind of thing.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  What is positive thinking?

• 1:27Speaker 04

  When he writes this book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which you can still find probably in every used bookstore in the country, he's like, if you think positively, you're going to get all of these things.

• 1:37Speaker 05

  Life can be wonderful. You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  The book is really just a series of six S mantras.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  You can if you think you can.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Drawn from scripture.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  God bless you and best wishes.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  God says it, I can have it, I believe it, that settles it.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Get up every morning, look in the mirror and repeat over and over again, you know, some variation of.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  You can whatever if you can dream of, think you can, trust you can is the first signature of success.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Norman Vincent Peale is very much a key apostle of prosperity gospel belief.

• 2:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  A gospel he began to preach in the 1930s.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  A kind of spiritual psychology of success. At this point, it is all about the self and all about feeling good.

• 2:40Speaker 06

  Self-help is a series of spiritual beliefs that we can somehow become better because of the power of mind.

• 2:46Speaker 05

  Basically, the message of The Secret is the message that I've been trying to share with the world on my show for the past 21 years. The message is that you're really responsible for your life.

• 2:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  If you're thinking, "The prosperity gospel, self-help, what does that have to do with me?" Consider this: even if you've never stepped foot in a church or watched a single episode of Oprah...

• 3:10Speaker 05

  What? Hold up, hold up.

• 3:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  So much of our lives is shaped by the idea, the belief, that all you have to do to succeed is believe harder. And if you fall in hard times, well, better try harder. It's all on you after all.

• 3:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And listen, I'm not saying the founders were preaching the prosperity gospel. But I do think that from the very beginning, the right to the pursuit of happiness set up this goal of individual happiness. And that's where the prosperity gospel came in and filled the void by creating a roadmap to that happiness based around self-improvement, religion, and capitalism.

• 3:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, we're going back to the heyday of the movement, to the 1970s and 80s, when the gospel was streaming into homes every day to hear how millions of Americans got sold on the idea that God wants you to be happy and rich. That's coming up after a short break.

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• 5:43Speaker 04

  Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, or, you know, Paul and Jan Crouch, come on and look a certain sort of way. And they were the ones that began to bring, you know, different kinds of preachers and things and introduce them to others. Anthea Butler is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of White Evangelical Racism: Politics of Morality in America. These shows in the 70s and 80s were important conduits for, you know, the A, B, C, and D list of all of these prosperity gospel preachers.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  That would get a foothold in America. And that's the way that most people saw them. You might be up late at night. I want to talk to you for a few moments about the law of the seed. And you'd see, you know, somebody preaching this message. And if you'll call during this telecast for

• 6:37Speaker 05

  For you that support our ministry in any way. You need to make a vow of faith of $1,000. Oh, Bob, couldn't you say 25? No.

• 6:46Speaker 05

  If you'll start now and get your seed of faith into the ground, it'll begin to grow and God begin to move.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  And you'd send them something and they'd send you something back. And then you'd get on the mailing list. It's actually much more dangerous than televangelism was the mailing list. If you can get that person to write to your ministry, you could harass them forever. You know, it's like Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. You keep the money coming in. You keep people hooked.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  By the mid 1980s, the number of Americans watching religious television had skyrocketed to nearly 25 million. Prosperity Gospel was everywhere.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  On TV, of course, but also in magazines, on billboards and in self-help books. We can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world. In so many ways, the story of the prosperity gospel follows the rise of a certain kind of capitalism.

• 7:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  A kind of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

• 8:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  The short version is that it's the idea

• 8:05Speaker 06

  that free markets are the solution to all of our problems. The focus, like with prosperity gospel, is on personal advancement. More is more. It asks each individual citizen slash buyer to absorb all the responsibilities for making its promises true.

• 8:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Kate Bowler. She's a historian at Duke University and author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  The harder you work, the more that's meant to prove its own reward. If capitalism is unstable, it simply means that you need to adopt more flexible work hours, be willing to hustle at 2:00 a.m., have you taken on a side project? Have you really managed to-

• 8:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Chris Lehman is the author of Money Cult. And he describes this as, quote, "sanctifying the market."

• 8:55Speaker 03

  The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes that is not to be questioned. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, "There is no alternative."

• 9:07Speaker 06

  It's similar to the prosperity gospel in which, when the system is meant to prove itself, it shifts the burden of responsibility away from, in this version, away from God and on to the person who has failed to demonstrate the abundant life.

• 9:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  The abundant life. Fancy cars, expensive clothes, big houses. Things all prosperity gospel preachers make sure to flaunt.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  You need to show yourself in a certain kind of way so that people know that you're blessed and that, in turn, they can be blessed if they follow you. Because obviously, you've got God's word that will tell them how they need to get this prosperity in their lives, too. To me, it's like God's plan for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, right? It gives the illusion that everybody can get this and that, you know, that there is equality when there really isn't. It's very compelling to people who come from, you know, they're immigrants to America because it folds right into this American exceptionalism and the American dream.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  I mean, one of the questions I get a lot is how much, um, how much do, were the preachers snake oil salesmen and how much were they deeply sincere? And not just sincere, perhaps, but like, how much did they truly believe that what they were doing could transform other people's lives? Kate Bowler, a practicing Christian herself and a historian, spent a decade going to services-

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Getting to know parishioners and their prosperity gospel preachers, investigating the relationship between the two.

• 10:37Speaker 06

  I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And I think the answer, it really varies. I have met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in Florida. And I have met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this could very materially transform people's lives. I'm thinking of a church I went to, an inner-city church. And the megachurch pastor who had a Rolex and a mansion and all that also simultaneously believed that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job and they are that partner that creates a stable family home.

• 11:22Speaker 06

  So in one version, you could say, well, it just robs people of their money, promises them things and can't possibly deliver. In other versions, we call it the redempt and lift effect, which is that when you stabilize people's lives, you encourage them to network, save, take care of their home life and are able to redeem and lift, is what they describe.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  And why do the parishioners, seeing how well-off the preachers are, keep giving them money?

• 11:52Speaker 06

  Well, in the minds of parishioners, it doesn't matter if the preacher is sincere or not. What matters to them is whether God is good and God has set up the rules by which they too could have those good things. And so in that way, the preacher is its own show and tell, but doesn't inherently matter to the faith lives of the people in the pews.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  The sort of constant in American religion is this kind of anxiety about your destiny. And, you know, it reflects broader trends in a market-dominated society.

• 12:28Speaker 06

  We're forced to believe in invisible causality in this economy. The stock market is now down 21%.

• 12:36Speaker 07

  All of the major technology sectors, Apple's under pressure, Yahoo down eight and a half percent, Cisco six and a half percent. It was the worst day on Wall Street since.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  And what all this says, though, is don't be afraid, God is good. Don't be afraid, you'll do your best, and on the other side of this, there may be ups and downs, but I am, I am going to bring you to a better future.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Nearly two trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug, and people wonder, where's the bottom? It turns out.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, let's just say, this is the moment where we're going to talk about prosperity gospel and the banking industry as, you know, in collusion with each other in certain kinds of ways. So I want to tell a story, and that story is about 2008 and the belly up of everything and the financial markets, and especially the foreclosure market. And one of the places where this happens, you know, in a huge way was Atlanta. Black people were, were told, you know, that they should buy homes. Predatory lenders gave, you know, these kind of balloon loans to people who were in churches. So in, in, in other words, you were encouraged by your, you know, televangelist pastor, you can just buy a home because, you know, here we got this loan officer here today is going

• 13:51Speaker 04

  to talk to you and you could, God's going to bless you with the house. And then all these people went belly up in 2008 and lost their homes.

• 14:00Speaker 06

  For people who are constantly on the cusp of losing everything, which we were reminded again in the pandemic, we are looking for the person with a formula.

• 14:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  For some, that person might be a Tony Robbins or an Oprah. For others, like me, it's the business minds of Shark Tank. And still others turn to preachers or politicians who seem to have it all figured out.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  You know, I said the other day, because so many people, they carry around The Art of the Deal because they're begging, they're begging their politicians, please, please, read The Art of the Deal when you negotiate with China and with Japan and with Mexico and with Vietnam.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  And I think this is crucial for right now. It flows into a kind of Christian nationalism. It means that God is especially favoring, you know, the nation as a special place. And so the people who live in it, who follow after this particular kind of thing, are going to be more blessed than anybody else in the world.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  I think people crave,

• 15:14Speaker 06

  even if they might hate it, they crave a gospel where the responsibility always falls back on them. Because it's always the one thing we can control is ourselves. So if you preach an empowered individualism, you've got a gospel you can believe in, which is always us.

• 15:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. If you want to hear the full story about the prosperity gospel, check out the full-length episode, "God Wants You to Be Rich." And join us next week when we take a deeper look at the Constitution, the rights it includes and those it does not.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  So I guess, I guess when I think of that phrase, like the Constitution doesn't tell you all the rights that you have because it doesn't know. It's both like, well, that's wonderful. The Constitution sort of acknowledges that it doesn't know right there in the Ninth Amendment, right? It acknowledges that it's something that can grow and change. But it also like, it also points to the fact that the Constitution not only left a lot of people out, but like actively committed crimes against people.

• 16:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's next week. Don't miss it.

• 16:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadem and edited by Christina Kim and Julia Redpath with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.

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• 17:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.