Has the Prosperity Gospel Contributed to the Financial Crisis?
October 6th, 2008
Jonathan Walton thinks so. He’s a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside. According to his research, one of the primary teachings of the prosperity movement, that God will “make a way” for you to enjoy a better life, has progressed into something even more dangerous. Walton believes that this kind of thinking has encouraged some church goers to believe, “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” He says the results have been “disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”
Walton goes on to say, “The economic boom ’90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message. 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.”
Will the current economic crisis challenge the prosperity message? Probably not. Walton predicts it will likely continue, since the promise of financial blessing is just as attractive when times are hard. Is there any other reason to denounce prosperity theology for the dangerous teaching that it is?