Prosperity Theology's Dirty Little Secret

It’s common for evangelicals to decry so-called ‘prosperity theology’ or ‘health and wealth teaching’. Many of us have had to pick up the pieces of people, whose hopes have been raised, and then dashed, by false promises of financial provision or physical healing. For some, this has led to a rejection of Christianity as such, because they now identify the faith with this particular distorted deviation.

Essentially the criticisms come down to six categories:

• Casualties: many are led into debt or ill-health, through encouraging them to ‘name it and claim it’ in Jesus’ name, or to ‘confess positively’ that they have already been healed and delivered, when this is patently not true.
• Condemnation: when healing or provision fails to materialise, many then feel guilty that they don’t enough faith, thereby ending up feeling worse than they began: a doubling of their problems.
• Control: reducing faith to set of practical nostrums on self-improvement it turns Christianity into a self-righteous justification by works, our own efforts, rather than by Grace.
• Magical Thinking: the reduction of faith to a formula, a set of words, guaranteed to produce the effect we want, making God into a slot-machine for our desires.
• Materialism: an emphasis on financial prosperity, possessions and riches, a surrender to the consumerist idols of our age, measuring spirituality by our ‘success’ in worldly terms; which was the dominant first-century attitude as well, but challenged by Jesus. 
• Manipulation: often used to enrich the pastors, by exploiting naïve believers, through teachings about ‘sowing financial seed’, into their own ministry, to get blessings, which don’t materialise.

Prosperity teaching conforms to what many call the defining heresy of the church today: Therapeutic Moral Deism. This is an attitude, rather than a definite doctrine: that God exists for my benefit, to heal and provide for me, and that if I live right then he will do it; otherwise he will make no demands on me, especially when it goes against my desires.

This outlook is ideally suited to, and the product of, our late capitalist consumer society, focused on the individual self, and its wants, which are anyway largely manufactured by the same system that exists to meet them, at a price.

Prosperity teaching, however, has a dirty secret – that it contains a kernel of truth. Most heresies begin by taking a marginal element of Christianity and making it central, turning a minor into a major tenet, thus skewing the balance of the faith.

This happened, for example, with spiritual gifts, where conservative hierarchs forbade them, as in the second century Montanist Movement. Prophetic teacher, Graham Cooke, once remarked that some New Age practitioners began in the churches, but were discouraged, by anti-supernaturalist teachings.

Frequently, as women developed their healing ministry, they were ostracised by a male-only church leadership. For instance Mary Baker Eddy, was excluded by the mainstream churches, a woman preacher with a healing ministry; only later did she formulate distinct doctrines, establishing her own movement.

So what’s happening? More in the next post.