This week’s Time cover asks the question: “Does God want you to be rich?” The article addresses a new wave in popular Christianity sometimes known as prosperity theology, which-according to CNN.com-advances the idea that God rewards the faithful with wealth. CNN names Joel Olsteen, pastor of the 18,000-strong Lakewood Church in Houston, as a leader of the movement. The movement is quite popular, according to a Time poll quoted by CNN.com, “17 percent of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61 percent believed that God wants people to be prosperous.”
While God surely wants people to know he loves them and to lead fulfilling lives-spiritual prosperity-the idea that he necessarily rewards them materially for having strong faith is disturbing.
The very idea of prosperity theology undermines faith. Faith motivated by the assumption that it will be rewarded is not faith at all, but merely a manifestation of greed. At least one prosperity pastor, Joyce Meyer, makes it clear that prosperity theology is a sales pitch. CNN.com quotes her, “Who would want to get in on something where you’re miserable, poor, broke and ugly and you just have to muddle through until you get to heaven? I believe God wants to give us nice things.”
Also, should the reward not arrive, prosperity believers will likely decide that either God does not care for them or that religion itself is a sham. Even those who come to Christianity for other reasons, such as a belief in God’s universal love and mercy, may lose faith if they decide that their promised reward is not coming. Prosperity theology simply creates a chance for God to detectably fail, making it easy to reject him and Christianity’s powerful message of love and philanthropy for failing to come through as promised.
Prosperity theology’s scriptural foundations only aggravate the situation. Upholding all Scripture as the perfect word of God can lead to a brittle faith, a faith in a book rather than God, where doubt in one interpretation of a minor passage casts doubt on the whole validity of the entire Bible, the Christian doctrine and the existence of God. Prosperity theology gives the wobbly faithful an obvious place to test and likely shatter their entire faith.
Prosperity theology also implies that God manipulates the universe in minute detail, pulling strings and subverting our free will for petty favoritism. We are not puppets in God’s show. While he built the stage and directs the play, we are both the players and the playwrights. The play is ours to create and enjoy.
Frighteningly, assuming that God rewards the faithful with wealth leads logically to the idea that the poor are not faithful. Economic problems like losing one’s job may be viewed as punishment for falling out of God’s favor due to sin or lack of faith. For some evangelicals, this may be a motivation to minister to the poor, a clear sign that these people need God in their lives.
Personal experience tells me that people are more likely to damn the poor, either to marginalize them or maybe hoping to scare them toward God. Either way, being poor becomes synonymous with being either faithless or evil, making it easy to dehumanize and ignore them or justify their economic suffering as God’s will.
Believing God rewards faith or righteousness with prosperity also leads easily to the idea that the richer or more powerful someone is, the more righteous or faithful she is. Someone adopting this belief could easily justify any action by a wealthy or powerful person because they are clearly faithful and good. Might literally becomes right, and any who oppose the powerful are seen as opposing God’s will.
The idea is a scarily effective basis for an authoritarian theocracy. In a democracy, if widely adopted, it can lead to a feedback loop where a politician’s popularity grants him power and his increasing power drives his popularity because he seems more and more righteous and faithful.
Overall, prosperity theology creates an easily shaken faith that, if maintained, can lead to equating the less fortunate with faithlessness and evil. If widely adopted, its social and political implications are worrisome.
We must do our best not to lower God to our petty, materialist desires, and instead aspire to love him and each other as he loves us: unconditionally, without regard to worldly trifles or anything else.