Debunking the Prosperity Gospel

It’s a wonderful day to listen to a podcast, everybody, and this is Faithful on the Clock, the show where all the dinosaurs go raaaaawr to get your faith and work aligned. I’m your host, Wanda Thibodeaux, and I’ve got a fantastic episode for you today on the prosperity gospel. I’ll explain exactly what that is, how it connects to toxic positivity, and why you need to run as fast as you can away from it to help your career. Let’s expose the prosperity gospel for the dangerous doctrine it is, right now.

The prosperity gospel, which is sometimes called the health and wealth gospel, is a movement or ideology prominent in the Pentecostal or evangelical Christian church. And even though you can find versions of it in different places around the world, it really got its start in the United States after World War II. And so, you know, this was a time when the country and the world was still really trying to recover. And within the Pentecostal denominations of the Christian churches, a lot of people really wanted to connect with God more deeply. They really wanted to see and experience His power. And so churches started to hold services or meetings where the healing power of God was supposedly put on display. And really the first leader of this so-called Healing Revival movement was William Branham, who led some of the first meetings in Missouri in 1946. But this movement caught on, and there was another leader named Oral Roberts who kind of paved the way along with Branham. But Roberts was the guy who introduced a bunch of ideas around financial prosperity. And he came up with this so-called blessing pact, which asked people in the church to give his ministry money. And this set up what he called the seed-faith model, which was this idea that a person would give to a pastor, or plant a seed in the ministry with their money, and then they’d get some kind of material return. So, at that point, now you’ve got the concepts of investment and blessing kind of swirling together. And people like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker brought all of this to televangelism. So, today, some of the more prominent teachers of the prosperity gospel are Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes and Paula White. And you might hear them say things like, “Send your payment now and God’s gonna heal your diabetes,” or “Lord, I believe this campaign is gonna prosper. I claim victory over the competition in the name of Jesus!” Or maybe a pastor will say something like, “God’s ready to walk with you on an amazing wealth journey. Anything you give to the church, God’s ready. He’s gonna double that investment. Just think about how much more that’s gonna help.”

Now, I hope you already can see how money and the power of God got mismatched in all of this and how manipulative this all is. But I want to dive a little into the specific problems the prosperity gospel has and how to recognize it a little bit, OK? So, really the main belief is, give to get. That is, if you want God to bless you, you have to give to the church. And your blessing is going to be proportional to whatever you give, right? So, the more you give, the more you can expect in return from God. And in a way, that’s reminiscent of the old law, right? You want your sins forgiven, you want God to pay attention, you bring something to the temple and put what you’ve got in the money box, right? But we know that, through Jesus, we don’t have to do anything to be blessed but have faith. So, the prosperity gospel really warps the idea of the purpose of Jesus in a really bad way.

I want to point out to you right here that people who preach the prosperity gospel often will use specific verses to support what they’re teaching. And so, one of the verses they like to use is Matthew 7:7-8, which says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” And along with that, they’ll often pull out John 16:23:24, which says, “Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” And then the last popular verse prosperity gospel followers like to lean on is Jeremiah 29:11, which says, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” And so, the general interpretation of all of these verses taken together is, “Well, God wants amazing things for me, all I gotta do is ask. God can’t say no!” And that’s where you hear people say they just have to, quote unquote, name it and claim it. And they’ll say that if someone just has enough faith, they’ll get anything they want. Nice cars, physical healing, whatever it is, they’ll get it if they just believe. And how do you show your belief? This is the key. You toss money at the church and wait for the return on investment to come.

Now, let’s unpack this even more, OK? So, the first thing we have to look at is the context in which Jesus was talking to people. In Jesus’ time, you couldn’t just walk up to God. He wasn’t accessible like that. There were all kinds of rules with the temple, and the priests had to make atonement for the sins of the people. Only the High Priest could go into the Holy of Holies where God was. And He could do that only a single time each year. So, there was a boundary between God and his people, OK? And so when Jesus talks about asking and receiving, He’s not giving people a get-anything card. He’s trying to explain to them that the relationship with God that they’re used to is gonna be different. That old way is gonna end, and they’re going to be able to approach Him. There’s gonna be a level of intimacy where it’s OK to seek God out directly and have needs met. But what the prosperity gospel does is distort this message of a new kind of relationship. And it turns the relationship from one of intimacy to transaction. Essentially, God becomes like a vending machine where you put money into the church and expect something good to pop out. And I hope you catch it, but that way of thinking essentially flips the power dynamic between God and people. It allows them to make demands of God rather than to seek His purpose first, and if you believe that God is above everything, that just doesn’t work.

So, now you have an ideology that’s essentially telling people that God is a path to all of the material things of the world. And that’s a problem, because Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:19-21 that we’re not supposed to store up treasures on the earth. Now, that’s not to say that money can’t be a blessing. If you look at the wealth of King Solomon, that’s a great example where God chose to reward faith with assets. And I talked about that way back in Episode 9 of the show, Sewing Deeper Pockets. But the key is, we’re not supposed to love the gift more than the Giver. Solomon got that part right. And what happens is, people who follow the prosperity gospel stop focusing on what’s coming after this world. They focus on living their best life right now. And what’s even worse is that they allow the notion that wealth is proportional to your faith to create division in the church. And so, you’ll hear people use the prosperity gospel to blame poor people for being poor. They’ll say the poor person’s poverty is evidence that the poor person doesn’t believe in God well enough. So, then the wealthy people have an excuse to say that they’re the ones who are favored by God, when in reality, the Bible teaches that you can have suffering even when God loves you.

I’ll leave some links in the show notes that’ll give you more verses to take a look at around this. But I wanna shift gears a little and tie this to two big ideas. The first idea is the concept of manifestation by mindset. And in business circles, what you’ll hear people say is that you can do or get anything if you have the right attitude. All you have to do to be successful is think a certain way and good things will come to you. And to me, there’s a real parallel between this and the prosperity gospel in that everything comes back to what you believe. In the prosperity gospel, it’s the way you think around God, the faith you have around contributing to the church that manifests your blessings.

And then the second big idea you’ll find in business that connects to the prosperity gospel is toxic positivity. In toxic positivity, you do not focus on anything bad, right? And in the prosperity gospel, that’s all you’ll hear. Everything is unicorns and rainbows, and rather than talk about how we need to repent, prosperity gospel leaders only wanna talk about what you can get in the future. Everything is prophecy. And anybody who doesn’t focus on the beautiful vision you’ve got, well, they’re just a naysayer, and you have to reject them. So, if you put this in terms of modern psychology, now what you’ve got going on is really just denial working as one big defense mechanism. Because if someone comes up to you and expresses a legitimate concern, you can just toss out what they’re saying and act like they don’t even exist. And the whole reason you do that is to protect the belief you have that you’re a good person who deserves a bunch of good stuff. And the reason you want to do that is because feeding your ego feels better than acknowledging life is messy and unfair. It’s all about trying to avoid what’s unpleasant and hard to tolerate.

What I want you to recognize is that, if you are prone to follow the manifestation by mindset concept, or if you’re the kind of person who tends not to confront the negative things in your office, then you probably are at a really high risk for falling prey to prosperity gospel teaching. Because they all kind of go hand-in-hand, right? It’s super easy to slide from one to the other. And if that happens, you’re probably not going to be thinking about whether you’re serving God the way He wants. You’re gonna be thinking about how your job and God can serve you, and you’re gonna be focused on enjoying the things of the world instead of a real, intimate, everything-hangs-out relationship with God. And it makes you blind to and leads you away from the plans and opportunities He has for you that are better and more glorifying to Him.

But the question is, how do you prevent yourself from slipping into these ideologies, right? How do you make sure that you’re staying grounded and not taking power away from God in a disrespectful way? Because rejecting these mindsets is not easy. They play right into the desires everybody has for security and power and comfort. And the answer I have for that is pretty simple. Even as you acknowledge what you want or are dreaming about, make sure you’re asking God what He wants. Because you’re human, right? You’re gonna imagine what could be sometimes. But the mistake so many people make is that they assume that their vision and God’s vision are aligned. And often, that is just not the case. We take the positive feeling we have around our wants and dreams and we struggle to understand why He wouldn’t be on board with something that gives us joy. And so we just assume that He must be the source of those wants and dreams, or that He’s completely aligned with the path we’ve laid out for ourselves. And again, you know, it comes back to always asking yourself, do I love the gift, or do I love the Giver. Because I’m gonna tell you, when you really love the Giver, all of the gifts could go poof. They could all disappear right now or tomorrow or whenever and you wouldn’t worry about it at all. Because you know that God is more valuable than those things, so you’re willing to just let it all go and see what’s better. And then, I think the final piece is to remind yourself that money is always a means to get somewhere for God. It is not the goal or where you are going, OK? And if you remember that money always should be active for some bigger purpose beyond yourself, if you’re always asking what an asset is achieving or how it’s working, that goes a long way to ensure you stay mindful of loving other people.

So, now that I’ve tossed all of that at you, I’ll invite you to join me in a prayer.

Lord, when we enter our careers and companies, the lure of wealth is super real. And Lord, we just need Your help to not pervert the resources that are around us. I pray that, if people ask for something under the prosperity gospel mindset and You know it’s not right for them, they won’t take that as meaning You’ve abandoned them or don’t care. Keep us humble and don’t let us forget Who’s in power. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.

I went a little long because I feel like this issue is one of the biggest potential snares Christian professionals can run into. But I’ll just take a second to tell you, I really do appreciate every single one of you out there who’s taken time out for this show. It’s encouraging for me, you know, every episode, to see that you have listened, and it’s a big part of why I keep going. In the next show, I’m focusing on the story of the Good Samaritan. We know that story teaches us to be compassionate to anyone who needs help, but what can it teach us about why people sometimes stop reaching out for help in the work context? Until that’s ready for you in another two weeks, be blessed.