History Of The American Prosperity Gospel

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book reviews

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Kate Bowler

Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2013). xi + 337 pp. $34.95 hardback.

The prosperity gospel has attracted many names in the United States, not all of them complimentary: the “faith” or “word of faith movement” is used alongside “positive confession,” “health and wealth,” “people that love” (ptl), “pass the loot,” and so on. This range of epithets indicates the moral ambivalence (or distaste) many have felt towards prosperity ideas, from within as well as beyond Christian circles, but also the ambiguities of what is actually being described. Is it a gospel, a movement, a confession, a loose network, a form of piety—or all or none of the above? Such questions of identity are compounded by two further issues. First, there is the considerable length of time that prosperity-related ideas have been extant in the United States, ranging at the very least from the New Thought Metaphysics of the nineteenth century through varieties of positive thinking in the middle of the twentieth, toward the more therapeutic varieties that are now on offer in airport bookstores as well as megachurches. Second, as Kate Bowler points out in her very well-researched book, there is the fact that few of the leading lights of the movement wish to be “stereotyped” as prosperity preachers: most would probably deny theyarefaith or prosperity preachers (249).

Bowler stays admirably calm in the face of such moral ambivalences, orga- nizational ambiguities, and shifting historical trajectories. As she says of the prosperity gospel: “Though it is hard to describe, it is easy to find” (3). Her research strategy is both multi-facetedand pragmatic. She has combed archives and web-sites but also carried out much direct observation, including visit- ing a quarter of all the American prosperity-oriented megachurches, attend- ing major conferences, conducting face-to-face as well as phone interviews, and carrying out longer fieldwork within the Victorious Faith Center (vfc), an 80-member-strong African American prosperity church in Durham, North Carolina. She has amassed a vast amount of data, but the book carries its descriptive burden lightly: it is well-written, establishing connections and seek- ing suggestive patterns while presenting an admirably nuanced picture of the ways in which people are attracted to prosperity ideas. Bowler, rather like the people she describes, is good at producing memorable phrases—one of my favorites is her description of the prosperity gospel as “a low-flying theology, hovering just above people’s daily needs and desires” (132). Her words are not meant to be pejorative, but to capture the down-to-earth character of peo- ple’s attachments—and one that can articulate a language of aspiration that speaks “of materialism and transcendence in the same breath” (235). Another

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significant feature of the book is its depiction in diagrammatic form of the net- works through which important prosperity preachers have moved, focusing on intersections constituted by preachers attending the same conferences. These diagrams help to support one of her arguments, namely, that the prosperity “movement” must be seen more in terms of shifting networks, which contain the flexibility to overlap with fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, the religious right, the black church, and more recently Hispanic congrega- tions. Such flexibility is also reflected in her distinction between what she calls “hard prosperity” stances, which judge people by their immediate material cir- cumstances, in contrast to “soft prosperity,” which appraises believers with a “gentler, more roundabout,” assessment (7–8).

How are such orientations “American”? For Bowler, they have flourished in the past and present of the u.s. in part because their New Thought roots have helped to uncover “the hidden truth that people in the United States longed to hear—that divinity was lodged somewhere in their beings and that their secret powers demanded expression” (36). And while at times the prosperity gospel has functioned almost as the “Pentecostal twin” of u.s. civil religion, it has done so less by emphasizing manifest destiny and more by deifying a version of the American Dream, embodied in upward mobility, accumula- tion, hard work, moral fiber, and the economic structures on which individual enterprise has stood. Thus “prosperity” has implicated economics but has not been confined to it, and has helped to bolster a culture of optimism that has taken into account numerous forms of well-being and progress. However, once more, the generalizations are always nuanced. For instance, “It must always be remembered that faith, health, and victory were a side dish for some and a main course for others” (251) just as the prosperity gospel has thrived more in some areas than others: the sun belt and the mid-west more than the North East, with urban centers providing a particularly fertile ground for the newer megachurches.

This book contains, if you will forgive the pun, a “wealth” of information. I do inevitably have some constructively critical comments. Bowler’s penultimate chapter—on the theme of “victory”—does not hold together especially well, as it largely seems to contain a number of disconnected themes (gender, aes- thetics, economic recession, and so on) that are left uncovered by other parts of the book. While she tends to emphasize the inherent individualism of the prosperity message, such a view downplays the more complex ways in which prosperity feeds into notions of mutual engagement and exchange within the context of a community of believers. From a social scientific point of view, I think her text avoids direct engagement with some of the theoretical frame- works that have been used to analyze prosperity as pious practice (admittedly

PNEUMA 36 (2014) 457–512

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some readers may find this omission a virtue). Nevertheless, overall this is an excellent text, revealing much about prosperity but also religion in the United States in general.

Simon Coleman

Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario

[email protected]

PNEUMA 36 (2014) 457–512

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