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The two questions really don't belong together. Health is an intrinsic part of the New Testament message. Lots of miraculous healings for blind men, lepers, and dead men. Wealth is NOT in the gospels at all. Exactly the opposite.
Wealth was invented by the medieval popes as a way of justifying their own wealth and avarice. They said Jesus was rich just like the popes, who inherited his wealth by apostolic succession. The Inquisition started when some heretics tried to point out that the real Jesus was poor and fiercely anti-wealth.
Good discussion. Rings true to my experience, and it's sometimes an uncomfortable fact to note that blacks are heavily overrepresented in Prosperity Gospel (but I think as a group it's still majority white), even after adjusting for income. The connection to poverty also rings very true.
I have a very poor and somewhat troubled (white) relative who actually lives very close to your neck of the woods, Ryan. And he was telling me about how he needs to use all his money to buy gold, based on his read of one verse or another of the Bible, and then he'll finally be a rich man. It's at least better than Powerball tickets or sending his money to a televangelist, so I wasn't sure how much I should try to dissuade him.
One thing that marks Osteen is that he himself is rich and uses his wealth to engage in conspicuous consumption. You can likely judge someone's attachment to the Prosperity Gospel largely by how he feels about that fact. To a full-throated Prosperity Gospeler, the normative reaction is something like, "That could be me!"
Of course, some people go the other way and say a pastor should be poor. I am fine with my pastor -- who has 8 kids and pastors to a middle-class audience -- being middle-class. We pay him enough to provide for that family at a mid-middle-class lifestyle. But I would have a big problem with him being wealthy and using his wealth as Osteen uses his.
The Douthat quote is a good one. There's something universal about the human drive to pray to God or the gods or the spirits for wealth and prosperity. So it has a tendency to show up in every religious tradition, including Douthat's own Roman Catholicism, but most often at a poorer and less educated/catechized "folk" level.
If the Reformed tradition is better about this, as Ryan points out, it's that, for one, to adhere strictly to the Reformed tradition isn't very "folk". You could say Pentecostalism is derived, ultimately, primarily from the Reformed branch of Protestantism (which is to say, not Lutheran, Anglican, or Anabaptist) and is one way it can turn out when that branch goes "folk".
But two, Calvin himself described self-denial as "the sum of the Christian life." Everything about the Reformed ethos militates against excessive material comfort and conspicuous consumption.
Kinda hard to square prosperity gospel theology with the actual gospel. Let’s call Joel Osteen and other prosperity gospel preachers what they really are - grifters.
Matthew 19:21-24 - Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Interesting survey, but your premise that the two questions "To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining wealth or prosperity? To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining health or healing?" are a kay indicators of committment to the prosperity gospel is incorrect.
I spent 4 years at a seminary that was led by many leading prosperity teachers. I've been in dozens of healing services with these big names you list in your study as representative of this false gospel. I've spent countless hours listening to their sermons and reading their books. I don't recall anyone ever claiming, "You need to read your Bible to understand, health, wealth, and prosperity." Mostly passages were cherry picked and the interpretation of the teacher is what counted. In most every case I encountered, people were instructed to read the "inspired" books written by the "anointed teachers" and follow their teachings. The Bible was secondary in grounding their belief. Experience and "faith" were FAR more useful than engaging the mind through Scripture reading. Even worse, many taught that Bible study is bad. I've heard more than one prosperity teacher say things such as, "seminary is a cemetery where people go to ruin their faith." I sat in a service once where "God's anointed prophet" said, "the only way to experience the blessing of prosperity is to stop thinking, stop using your mind, and just listen to the Spirit." For the prosperity teachers, the mind is the enemy of God's blessing. And if anyone attempted to correct their teachings by using Scripture, we were told that such people were only "grieving" the Holy Spirit.
In short, based on both my experience and several decades of studying this stuff, using the data to support your conclusion is unfounded. You put out a lot of excellent content, but to demonstration the causal connection you assert, I'd need to see evidence that these two questions form the foundation for prosperity teaching.
"It is important to point out there is a drop off in regards to the question about health and healing from the bottom end of the economic spectrum to the top, but it’s much smaller than the measure that focuses specifically on money."
That makes sense for at least two reasons.
First, "To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining health or healing?" is ambivalent. The wording, with "attain" in there, does have a prosperity-gospel flavor, so it's reasonable to use the question as a prosperity-gospel proxy. But it should be a poorer proxy than the question about wealth. People can seek spiritual healing whether or not they expect it to restore them to medical health. For example, people who feel unfairly blamed for their poor health may seek spiritual (but not medical) healing in meditating on scripture passages reminding them that your suffering *isn't* always evidence of your sin – just about the opposite of what prosperity theology implies.
Second, wealthy people, who may be understandably skeptical that they owe their wealth to "positive thinking" (rather than more workaday attributes like having more opportunities and making better use of them) seem considerably less skeptical about the influence of positive thinking on health. While high-SES folks are more likely to respond to intractable illness by asking "Have you done CBT to it?" than "Have you done Scripture to it?", either can be a form of the glorified toxic positivity that the prosperity gospel, in either its explicitly religious or its secular form, is known for.
The sample universe is defined as people who "primarily read the Bible as their sacred text".
What does that mean, exactly? Does it include everyone who considers the Bible to be their primary sacred text, or only the subset who regularly read the Bible? How regularly?
I guess I'm puzzled that the only religious activity being tracked here for health- or wealth-seeking seems to be looking for insight in specific Bible verses, which is something many Christians do but many others don't.
Wouldn't praying for wealth, or attending a service in the hope of wealth, or donating to a church based on the pastor's promise that the donation will come back sevenfold, also count as markers of prosperity theology for Christians who don't do self-directed Bible study?
If we estimate 50% using the 2021 number, even though there appears to have been a large decline, it looks like a significant portion of Christians are being left out of this survey. This leads to another question: are Christians who read the Bible regularly more or less likely to believe in the prosperity gospel? I’m guessing less likely, but curious how different the two groups may look.
"Does it include everyone who considers the Bible to be their primary sacred text"?
It should include everyone who responded to the survey by identifying the Bible as their primary sacred text, however little they actually read it. I couldn't easily track down the survey question establishing this population. Maybe Ryan can post it?
The prosperity gospel isn’t a problem in mainline Protestant and reformed evangelical churches, because prosperity already exists among these communities.
Interesting analysis. As an old brokerage ad once aired, "we earn money the old fashioned way, we earn it." What the different elements seem to show is that the people less likely to earn their way to prosperity: lower income people, those with more limited schooling, unfortunately some ethnic minorities, seek other ways of becoming more prosperous than they are or they have seen others become. It would be very interesting to see if the GSS asked questions about purchasing lottery tickets or attending the casinos or racetracks or even picking their own stocks instead of buying mutual or index funds with a lower but more secure return. Since every place now has casinos, the patrons seem to subdivide into those who want to be entertained for an hour or two until their $100 limit runs out, and those who go with the hope of making $200. The cruise ship has people being entertained. My regional racesino has people seeking their windfall. If the GSS asks those questions, it would be interesting to see if the same groups of people seek a chance windfall in lieu of the more traditional ways high earners generated their ample salaries. I would be remiss without indicating the famous Jewish source that rejects this prosperity gospel. It comes from a body called the Mishna, a compendium of Law with one section of wisdom literature inserted, seemingly out of place, called Pirke Avot. Ben Zoma, whose wisdom appears in our upcoming Seder, noted "who is rich? one who attains pleasure from his portion."
The two questions really don't belong together. Health is an intrinsic part of the New Testament message. Lots of miraculous healings for blind men, lepers, and dead men. Wealth is NOT in the gospels at all. Exactly the opposite.
Wealth was invented by the medieval popes as a way of justifying their own wealth and avarice. They said Jesus was rich just like the popes, who inherited his wealth by apostolic succession. The Inquisition started when some heretics tried to point out that the real Jesus was poor and fiercely anti-wealth.
Good discussion. Rings true to my experience, and it's sometimes an uncomfortable fact to note that blacks are heavily overrepresented in Prosperity Gospel (but I think as a group it's still majority white), even after adjusting for income. The connection to poverty also rings very true.
I have a very poor and somewhat troubled (white) relative who actually lives very close to your neck of the woods, Ryan. And he was telling me about how he needs to use all his money to buy gold, based on his read of one verse or another of the Bible, and then he'll finally be a rich man. It's at least better than Powerball tickets or sending his money to a televangelist, so I wasn't sure how much I should try to dissuade him.
One thing that marks Osteen is that he himself is rich and uses his wealth to engage in conspicuous consumption. You can likely judge someone's attachment to the Prosperity Gospel largely by how he feels about that fact. To a full-throated Prosperity Gospeler, the normative reaction is something like, "That could be me!"
Of course, some people go the other way and say a pastor should be poor. I am fine with my pastor -- who has 8 kids and pastors to a middle-class audience -- being middle-class. We pay him enough to provide for that family at a mid-middle-class lifestyle. But I would have a big problem with him being wealthy and using his wealth as Osteen uses his.
The Douthat quote is a good one. There's something universal about the human drive to pray to God or the gods or the spirits for wealth and prosperity. So it has a tendency to show up in every religious tradition, including Douthat's own Roman Catholicism, but most often at a poorer and less educated/catechized "folk" level.
If the Reformed tradition is better about this, as Ryan points out, it's that, for one, to adhere strictly to the Reformed tradition isn't very "folk". You could say Pentecostalism is derived, ultimately, primarily from the Reformed branch of Protestantism (which is to say, not Lutheran, Anglican, or Anabaptist) and is one way it can turn out when that branch goes "folk".
But two, Calvin himself described self-denial as "the sum of the Christian life." Everything about the Reformed ethos militates against excessive material comfort and conspicuous consumption.
Kinda hard to square prosperity gospel theology with the actual gospel. Let’s call Joel Osteen and other prosperity gospel preachers what they really are - grifters.
Matthew 19:21-24 - Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
Interesting survey, but your premise that the two questions "To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining wealth or prosperity? To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining health or healing?" are a kay indicators of committment to the prosperity gospel is incorrect.
I spent 4 years at a seminary that was led by many leading prosperity teachers. I've been in dozens of healing services with these big names you list in your study as representative of this false gospel. I've spent countless hours listening to their sermons and reading their books. I don't recall anyone ever claiming, "You need to read your Bible to understand, health, wealth, and prosperity." Mostly passages were cherry picked and the interpretation of the teacher is what counted. In most every case I encountered, people were instructed to read the "inspired" books written by the "anointed teachers" and follow their teachings. The Bible was secondary in grounding their belief. Experience and "faith" were FAR more useful than engaging the mind through Scripture reading. Even worse, many taught that Bible study is bad. I've heard more than one prosperity teacher say things such as, "seminary is a cemetery where people go to ruin their faith." I sat in a service once where "God's anointed prophet" said, "the only way to experience the blessing of prosperity is to stop thinking, stop using your mind, and just listen to the Spirit." For the prosperity teachers, the mind is the enemy of God's blessing. And if anyone attempted to correct their teachings by using Scripture, we were told that such people were only "grieving" the Holy Spirit.
In short, based on both my experience and several decades of studying this stuff, using the data to support your conclusion is unfounded. You put out a lot of excellent content, but to demonstration the causal connection you assert, I'd need to see evidence that these two questions form the foundation for prosperity teaching.
Very interesting.
Wouldn't Christians who never read the Bible still tend to answer "The Bible" to that first question, though?
"It is important to point out there is a drop off in regards to the question about health and healing from the bottom end of the economic spectrum to the top, but it’s much smaller than the measure that focuses specifically on money."
That makes sense for at least two reasons.
First, "To what extent did you read the Bible to learn about attaining health or healing?" is ambivalent. The wording, with "attain" in there, does have a prosperity-gospel flavor, so it's reasonable to use the question as a prosperity-gospel proxy. But it should be a poorer proxy than the question about wealth. People can seek spiritual healing whether or not they expect it to restore them to medical health. For example, people who feel unfairly blamed for their poor health may seek spiritual (but not medical) healing in meditating on scripture passages reminding them that your suffering *isn't* always evidence of your sin – just about the opposite of what prosperity theology implies.
Second, wealthy people, who may be understandably skeptical that they owe their wealth to "positive thinking" (rather than more workaday attributes like having more opportunities and making better use of them) seem considerably less skeptical about the influence of positive thinking on health. While high-SES folks are more likely to respond to intractable illness by asking "Have you done CBT to it?" than "Have you done Scripture to it?", either can be a form of the glorified toxic positivity that the prosperity gospel, in either its explicitly religious or its secular form, is known for.
The sample universe is defined as people who "primarily read the Bible as their sacred text".
What does that mean, exactly? Does it include everyone who considers the Bible to be their primary sacred text, or only the subset who regularly read the Bible? How regularly?
I guess I'm puzzled that the only religious activity being tracked here for health- or wealth-seeking seems to be looking for insight in specific Bible verses, which is something many Christians do but many others don't.
Wouldn't praying for wealth, or attending a service in the hope of wealth, or donating to a church based on the pastor's promise that the donation will come back sevenfold, also count as markers of prosperity theology for Christians who don't do self-directed Bible study?
The questions used for this analysis are posed like this:
(In the past year,) To what extent did you read [scripture] to learn about attaining health or healing?
A prior question asked:
In the past year, which scripture have you read most often, the Bible, Torah, Koran or some other scripture?
The respondents answer to that question fed the [scripture] option in the PG questions.
I restricted the sample to only those who said that they read the Bible the most in the prior year.
For reference: 94% of folks who answered that question read the Bible as their primary text. So, I excluded 49 respondents from this analysis.
This is a really good point. I was curious how many Christians read the Bible regularly so I looked it up and found this pandemic era article on it: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/april/state-of-bible-reading-decline-report-26-million.html
If we estimate 50% using the 2021 number, even though there appears to have been a large decline, it looks like a significant portion of Christians are being left out of this survey. This leads to another question: are Christians who read the Bible regularly more or less likely to believe in the prosperity gospel? I’m guessing less likely, but curious how different the two groups may look.
"Does it include everyone who considers the Bible to be their primary sacred text"?
It should include everyone who responded to the survey by identifying the Bible as their primary sacred text, however little they actually read it. I couldn't easily track down the survey question establishing this population. Maybe Ryan can post it?
The prosperity gospel isn’t a problem in mainline Protestant and reformed evangelical churches, because prosperity already exists among these communities.
Interesting analysis. As an old brokerage ad once aired, "we earn money the old fashioned way, we earn it." What the different elements seem to show is that the people less likely to earn their way to prosperity: lower income people, those with more limited schooling, unfortunately some ethnic minorities, seek other ways of becoming more prosperous than they are or they have seen others become. It would be very interesting to see if the GSS asked questions about purchasing lottery tickets or attending the casinos or racetracks or even picking their own stocks instead of buying mutual or index funds with a lower but more secure return. Since every place now has casinos, the patrons seem to subdivide into those who want to be entertained for an hour or two until their $100 limit runs out, and those who go with the hope of making $200. The cruise ship has people being entertained. My regional racesino has people seeking their windfall. If the GSS asks those questions, it would be interesting to see if the same groups of people seek a chance windfall in lieu of the more traditional ways high earners generated their ample salaries. I would be remiss without indicating the famous Jewish source that rejects this prosperity gospel. It comes from a body called the Mishna, a compendium of Law with one section of wisdom literature inserted, seemingly out of place, called Pirke Avot. Ben Zoma, whose wisdom appears in our upcoming Seder, noted "who is rich? one who attains pleasure from his portion."