The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream

416 Pages·2016·2.14 MB·English

by  Chris Lehmann

THE MONEY CULT
Copyright © 2016 by Chris Lehmann
First Melville House Printing: May 2016
Melville House Publishing
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-509-4
Design by Marina Drukman
v3.1
To Deborah, without whom … nothing
In the Middle Ages priests spoke only of the other life; they
scarcely worried about proving that a sincere Christian can
be a happy man here below. But American preachers
constantly come back to earth and only with great trouble
can they take their eyes off it … It is often difficult to know
when listening to them if the principal object of religion is to
procure eternal felicity in the other world or well-being in
this one.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Pay to Pray
1. A Founding Faith
2. Nation Building
3. Free Will and Free Markets
4. Of Lost Tribes and Latter Days
5. The Businessmen Awake
6. Liberals at the End of History
7. Holy Abundance
8. A New Spirit of Capitalism
9. New Gospels of the Protean Self
10. Secret Histories
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Introduction
PAY TO PRAY
In the midst of a recent slew of personal trials, I got a hand-addressed
letter, in a gray greeting-card envelope. When I glanced at the envelope’s
Houston postmark, I scoured my memory to think of anyone I knew in
that sprawling east-Texas metropolis. Maybe one of the confidants I’d
corresponded with during my painful, still-pending divorce had moved?
Idly, I opened the envelope expecting to be greeted with some friend’s
report of a new job, new relationship, or new research sabbatical in the
Southwest.
Instead, the greeting card inside bore a simple inscription on its front:
the word “hope,” in a white reverse-type cursive script, just above a
name that, for many Protestant believers in America today, is a virtual
synonym for that elusive, serene condition: “Joel Osteen.”
Osteen is the beaming, gently drawling prophet of the new millennial
prosperity gospel—or the theology of abundance, as he’s more
decorously given to call it. Sermons from his Houston megachurch,
Lakewood—the former Compaq Center, a 16,000-seat sports arena
where the Houston Rockets once played—are broadcast to millions of
viewers every Sunday. And his core message is that the Christian God is
an indulgent, amply rewarding father, doling out unlimited success to
his devoted followers. “Why put limits on God?” is a frequent refrain in
Osteen’s preaching—and it’s meant to convey that God, in turn, intends
to place no limits on your own worldly success and achievement.
This was very much the message that came appended to my own
quasi-personalized greeting card. Beneath a hand-scrawled salutation,
the body of the card opened with a scripture quotation, from Proverbs
13:12: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a
tree of life.” Osteen then assured me that he and Victoria—his wife and
co-minister—“believe with all our hearts that God wants your dream to
come true.”
To speed God’s plan along, the Osteens proposed to recite a personal
prayer on my behalf. Perhaps, they said, my dream was “to have a
family or … see someone in your family healed.” Or “maybe it’s to have
a home or new job. Whatever your dream is,” the pitch continued, “you
must know God cares and so do we. I’ve enclosed a small card for you to
write your dream on and send back to us. We want to pray for you. We
believe in the power of prayer!”
That last exclamation seemed a bit defensive—as though I might
doubt the efficacy of the Osteens’ own faith in their chosen method. In
reality, though, it was the prelude to the main pitch: “As you write down
your dream, I am asking you to invest in a dream”—the further
expansion of the Osteen ministry. “Your gift will allow people to hear
the Gospel, experience the unconditional love of Jesus and discover
God’s plans for their lives. That’s a dream worthy of your best gift.” For
good measure, my anonymous pen-wielding correspondent in Houston
had appended a handwritten note: “Chris, Please give your best gift. The
message of hope is making a difference! God bless!”
Sure enough, alongside the blank index card that was to carry my
dream (together with my name and my email address) to the Osteen
ministry, there was a handsome form that offered a pair of premiums in
exchange for my prayer-enabling donation; a contribution of any size
would yield an “inspiring 4-message CD/DVD resource” called “With
You For You,” whereas a gift of more than $125 would net a special
leather-bound edition of Osteen’s Hope for Today Bible. On the reverse
side of the form, where you filled in your credit card information, you
were nudged further into setting aside monthly donations, to be
automatically debited on your card, with a helpful disclaimer explaining
that “IRS regulations permit you to deduct contributions in excess of the
fair market value of goods received from this ministry. Your full
contribution benefits the expansion of Joel Osteen Ministries.”
This random fund-raising encounter forms a perfect set piece in what
I’ve come to call the Money Cult: the frank celebration of wealth as a
spiritual virtue in American Protestantism. The Osteen operation, no
slouch in divining the soft spot in a marketing appeal, knew that I might
be in search of some badly needed life affirmation—and, perhaps, new
spiritual support: I had, the month earlier, attended the couple’s “Night
of Hope” rally in the Washington Nationals’ stadium, on an assignment
from Salon.com. And it’s true that in my own personal distress, I had
picked up their cleverly packaged appeal under the vague impression
that it might contain, if not a message of hope, then at least a welcome
personal missive.
What I got instead was, in many ways, what the core message of
popular Protestant faith has boiled down to in post-meltdown America: a
contract to pray my way into a better life in exchange for a “best gift”
that would ideally be somewhere north of $125—or better yet, a tax-
deductible tithing arrangement of indefinite duration. Such appeals are
now so common in the materially expansive faith of Protestant culture in
America that they pass unremarked; the Osteens send out countless such
fund-raising pitches, and our pulpits and bestseller lists abound with a
gospel of spiritually self-made success. For the most part, all this glides
serenely above the pinched and unyielding conditions of our actual
political economy, which now largely confines the spread of prosperity
to the already-prosperous. The message of a great deal of Protestant
worship in the Osteen era plays a crucial role in mediating this awkward
contradiction; why question any of the cartelized and cronyist
arrangements that make up the market culture we casually idolize, when
it is so self-evidently the handiwork of the Creator? By minting the
promise of individual salvation into a precept of economic advancement,
today’s prophets of prosperity bypass entirely matters of economic
justice as they pertain to Christian morality—while also embodying a
new gospel of success that conflates material reward and punishment
with the eternal, prophetic kind.
Protestant piety in the United States has had an often fulsome,
occasionally fraught relationship to the quest for material wealth, but
never before has it transacted a vision of spiritually sanctioned
prosperity on such a blunt pay-to-play basis on such a vast scale. In the
not-so-distant past, Oral Roberts—the most prominent prosperity
minister in the postwar era—was treated as a late-night TV punchline for
mounting a bald fund-raising pitch around the threat that the Lord
would be calling Roberts home if he failed to meet his allotted quota of
$8 million to rescue his eponymous Oklahoma-based university from a
sea of red ink. Now, however, the link between the personal discipline
exacted by one’s faith and the promised expansion of one’s bottom line is
so casually reiterated in the evangelical world that it’s become banal. In
bestselling tracts such as Osteen’s Become a Better You, Bruce Wilkinson’s
Prayer of Jabez, T. D. Jakes’s Strength to Stand—to say nothing of the
voluminous back catalog of evangelical success literature, from Bruce
Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows to Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman
in the World—true Christian observance is linked directly to individual
wealth.
The Growth Gospel
There are countless ways to dismiss the individual spiritual
entrepreneurs of the Osteen persuasion. They can be aspiring political
power brokers, in the vein of Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell.
They can be garden-variety TV hucksters, like Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker. They can be purveyors of healing prayer and off-the-rack success
mantras like Benny Hinn or Robert Schuller. Or they can be manic
strategists of megachurch expansion, such as Rick Warren. In most of
these scenarios, prosperity preachers are mere charlatans and hustlers,
and their followers are credulous boobs; like the passing manias for
certain social-media trends or mortgage-backed securities, they’re taken-
for-granted bubble indicators in the nation’s marketplace of religious
ideas.
But to characterize them like this is to miss the larger theological and
practical Protestant embrace of market values—and a good deal of
American religious history in the bargain. For one thing, the familiar
caricature of the prosperity-minded minister-on-the-make is almost
completely an individual character portrait, rather than a critical
rendering of the institutional practices and ideas that lend such
characters their charisma in the first place. Deriding high-profile
preachers as nothing more than hucksters who prey on popular fears and
superstitions may satisfy the very broad dictates of left-leaning secular
cultural superiority, but it tells us almost nothing about what the
followers of the new gospels of wealth actually think and believe—let
alone how the Money Cult’s distinctive gospel influences the culture at
large.
These changes turn up most palpably in the numbers on American
church growth. Three of the nation’s four largest megachurches ply a
prosperity message, and the Mormon Church—which, as we shall see
later, is a crucial vanguard faith in the Money Cult—has grown at a