Prosperity theology

"During my years of research, I talked to televangelists who offered spiritual guarantees that viewers would receive money from God’s own hands, I held hands with people in wheelchairs praying at the altar to be cured. They, too, thought faith contained an implicit promise of earthly reward. I thought I was trying to understand how millions of North Americans had started asking God for more than subsistence. How they seemed to want permission to experience the luxuries of life as a reward for good behavior."

"Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?"

"I saw the prosperity of the wicked."

"They spend their days in prosperity, And suddenly they go down to Sheol."

"To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil." Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limit less increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christians efforts."

"Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”"