Early Pentecostal congregations emphasized the manifestation of miracles, spontaneous healings, and speaking in tongues. This modern embrace of “signs and wonders” cracked open the door for evangelical prosperity ministries of the 1970s, which variously endorsed tithing, prayer, and affirmation as means to wealth attraction. This approach proved massively popular. It is today estimated that of America’s twelve largest churches, three are prosperity oriented: Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston; T.D. Jakes’s Potter’s House in Dallas; and Tommy Barnett’s Phoenix First in Arizona. Some of the nation’s most popular media ministers are also, in some measure, prosperity oriented, such as Kenneth Copeland, Eddie Long, Benny Hinn, Paul and Janice Crouch, and Joyce Meyer.
To be sure, many contemporary evangelical worshippers are critical of the prosperity gospel. And theological disputes persist among prosperity gospelers themselves. Evangelical critics of the prosperity gospel generally (and rightly) trace its roots to New Thought, which for them is cause for deep concern. New Thought, when it is heard-of at all in the evangelical culture, is considered a “quasi-Christian heresy,” as Christian scholars David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge put it in a critical history of the prosperity gospel. “Although the New Thought movement is unknown by name to most contemporary Christians,” Jones and Woodbridge wrote, “the prosperity gospel consists largely of the ideas of the New Thought movement repackaged with new faces, new technology, new venues, and a slightly altered message.”
Their analysis was astute. While today’s prosperity megachurches are far bigger and better known than even the largest Unity or New Thought congregations, there is no question that New Thought provided the template for the prosperity gospel, often down to specific phraseology. Compare, for example, the words of Unity minister Edwene Gaines, from a talk she delivered in the 1980s before several hundred attendees at a Tucson Unity church, to sentiments heard in 2006 from Georgia-based prosperity minister Creflo Dollar, a popular prosperity gospeler whose television audiences number in the millions:
GAINES: You are a child of God, now it’s time to grow up. What do children of God do when they grow up? What do they become? What do children of cats, when they grow up, [become]? They become cats. What do children of God do, when they grow up? They become gods.
DOLLAR: If cats get together, they produce what? [Congregation: “Cats!”] So if the Godhead says “Let us make man in our image,” and everything produces after its own kind, then they produce what? [Congregation: “Gods!”] Gods. Little “g” gods. You’re not human. Only human part of you is this flesh you’re wearing.
Positive Heresy?
A large and popular evangelical movement called Word of Faith attracts particular controversy today among critics of the prosperity gospel. Rising to popularity in the late 1960s through the ministry of Kenneth E. Hagin, Word of Faith theology espouses “positive confession.” Positive confession entails repeating, in affirmation style, certain Biblical passages for health, wealth, or the fulfillment of personal needs. Word of Faith ministers include some of the past century’s best-known (and often most controversial) evangelists, including Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
The Word of Faith movement got its inception in the theology of E. W. Kenyon, a Massachusetts-born minister and writer who began his career in the late nineteenth century. A New Englander, Kenyon honed his style at the Emerson School of Oratory in Boston in 1892. The two-year Emerson School featured an immersive program of literature, writing, and oration. It was not connected to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but was founded by a Unitarian-Universalist minister, C. W. Emerson. The school was steeped in New Thought. One of E. W. Kenyon’s instructors during his 1892–1893 academic term (the only one he attended) was Ralph Waldo Trine, the author of In Tune with the Infinite. Kenyon’s fellow students included motivational hero Elbert Hubbard and his wife, Alice, a New-Thoughter and suffragist. Hubbard later returned as a faculty member. Another graduate with high pedigree in New Thought was philosopher and Quimby-chronicler Horatio Dresser. And a top instructor during Kenyon’s academic year was Leland Powers, a Christian Scientist who went on to found the School of the Spoken Word, an oratory college that Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes attended in 1908.
This was the atmosphere surrounding E. W. Kenyon. The Word of Faith pioneer later came to see New Thought as a heresy. In 1945 he characterized New Thought, Unity, and Christian Science as “libel upon the modern church”—yet he also insisted that the “amazing growth” of these metaphysical faiths posed a “challenge” to which Christianity had to answer. Hence, he ventured to establish his own “spiritual science,” which emphasized healing and help from God. Still employing the classic New Thought formula, Kenyon urged followers to turn away from the evidence of their senses and affirm God’s will that they be happy.
“Basically you are a spirit,” he wrote in 1939, “and spirit registers Words just as a piece of blotting paper takes ink.” There is no question that Kenyon’s Word of Faith theology emerged from his exposure, and response, to the metaphysical currents he encountered at the Emerson School.
Some of Kenyon’s ideological offspring are unabashed about their positive-thinking connections. Minister Kenneth Hagin Jr., son of the Word of Faith movement’s pioneer Kenneth E. Hagin, wrote in 1984: “Somebody will argue, ‘You’re talking about positive thinking!’ That’s right! I am acquainted with the greatest Positive Thinker who ever was: God! The Bible says that he called those things that be as though they were …”
“Praise the Lord for This Car”
Where did Word of Faith evangelists get the idea that God is a “positive thinker” who wishes material happiness for man? Many Word of Faith devotees point to the Scriptural passage 3 John 2: “I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”
Some of the sharpest critics of Word of Faith theology came from Oral Roberts University, but minister Oral Roberts himself—a figure of almost unrivaled influence in evangelism in the latter twentieth century—pointed to his discovery of 3 John 2 as a turnaround in his religious life. That Biblical passage, he explained, led him to see God not as a punitive figure but as a source of joy and prosperity. Roberts’s discovery opened the door to a new, positive-themed Christian expression in the second half of the twentieth century.
Roberts’s transformation began when he was a twenty-nine-year-old pastor at a church in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1947. The young minister’s life was one of financial embarrassment and dollar stretching. He often rode the bus to his classes because he could not afford gas. The family routinely had to remove items it could not afford from the shopping cart at the grocery checkout. Oral and his wife, Evelyn, struggled to make payments on a rundown car and a home filled with wornout furniture. With two children to support, Oral asked the church board to increase his fifty-five-dollar weekly salary. But, to his humiliation, the board responded with a demand for an itemized list of his expenses, down to how many haircuts he had a month (it was two). The young pastor was torn between a “feeling of destiny” and the depressing outer reality of living near the poverty line, as many southern preachers did. Oral grew depressed and took to praying late into the night.
One morning he rushed from the house to catch a bus and realized that he had forgotten his Bible. He went back inside and grabbed the book, which fell open to 3 John 2: “I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper.” For Oral the words flicked on a light. “Evelyn,” he told his wife, “we have been wrong. I haven’t been preaching that God is good. And, Evelyn, if this verse is right, God is a good God.”
His wife saw this as the point that “opened up his thinking.”
Oral soon managed to buy a new car through the help of a local friend. Possessing a brand-new Buick was a signature moment for the family. Evelyn told her husband, “We have got to hold hands and praise the Lord for this car.” Cynics might roll their eyes, but for the Roberts family the new automobile w
as a symbol of possibilities. And much else followed. Oral soon moved to a bigger congregation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he gained national notice for his healing crusades and a popular book, If You Need Healing—Do These Things! The years immediately ahead took him around the world as a revival speaker and healing crusader. His tent meetings attracted hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom would wait in long lines to be touched and prayed over for their illnesses. Many reported healings, though with little in the way of medical evaluation or follow-up.
Oral’s meetings formed the basis for popular television programs that brought him into millions of households by the late 1950s, making him the best-known minister in the world next to Billy Graham. In 1963, a little more than fifteen years after his family had to scrape the bottom of his paycheck to pay the grocery bill, Roberts opened Oral Roberts University in Tulsa.
“I Don’t Believe in the Judgmental Gospel”
Seen from a certain perspective, it was peculiar that Roberts latched on to 3 John 2 that morning in 1947. Read in context, the passage is simply a greeting that the apostle John used to open a letter to a friend. It is a salutation and not a doctrinal statement. But according to some interpretations of Scripture, each line is a God-given statement of Truth—and this was Roberts’s approach.
For him the passage cracked open a new perspective on religion: God’s role was not to punish but to heal. “I don’t believe it is the will of God that man be sick,” he told journalist Will Oursler in 1957. “It cannot be the will of God that man suffer. It cannot be the will of God that man endure poverty and despair.”
Roberts insisted that Christian ministers focus not (or not exclusively) on a sin-and-salvation model of worship, but on a joyous, therapeutic type of worship that asserted: “In the Word of God you can find the answer to every problem.” Roberts specifically distanced himself from the style of evangelist Billy Graham, in favor of an emphasis on forgiveness and joy. “I don’t believe in the judgmental gospel that Billy preaches,” he said in 1972. “I ran away from it as a boy. Billy meets the needs of a lot of people.… I reach other needs.” Among those followers who had been raised in a punitive brand of worship, Roberts’s message of “positive faith” arrived with the same kind of liberating shock that New Thought had delivered to an earlier generation.
While Roberts could never be described as anything like a religious liberal, many critics, disdainful of his gung-ho fund-raising methods and faith-healing revivals, failed to note the flexibility of his approach. In the area of faith-healing, where Roberts made his name in the 1940s and 1950s, he discouraged the worst excesses of the movement, encouraging followers never to eschew mainstream medical care and to follow up with doctors. Roberts acknowledged the psychological dimension of what happened during his tent revivals. Indeed, his notions about a collaborative relationship among religion, psychology, and medicine sometimes foreshadowed the tone of later advocates of body-mind health, such as Norman Cousins, Andrew Weil, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. In 1956, Roberts told a reporter visiting one of his healing crusades: “I hope God lets me live another 30 years, for I think by then we’ll see an unbelievably close alliance between science and the kind of healing I encourage.”
One prominent evangelical supporter noted Roberts’s capacity to view religion “wholistically,” using a variant of holistic—a term rarely heard in evangelical circles. “Gradually the Spirit began to show me,” Roberts said in 1974, “that in the Bible healing is for the whole man. It’s for the body, it’s for the soul, it’s for the mind, for finances. It’s for any problem that needs to be healed.”
Given Roberts’s theological eclecticism and emphasis on buoyant faith, it is not surprising that the language of positive thinking permeated his books, sermons, and articles. One of his closest friends and confidants, North Carolina businessman S. Lee Braxton, was deeply attached to positive-thinking literature, which he began pressing upon Roberts as the minister was making his name in the late 1940s. Braxton identified Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People as “the book that really put me in business.” Speaking at Braxton’s funeral in 1982, Roberts noted that every year since 1949 he had reread one of the motivational books that Braxton had given him, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger.
Typical passages from Roberts’s writings came straight from the positive-thinking playbook: “Whatever you can conceive, and believe, you can do”;* “Like Begets Like”; “Expect a Miracle”; “Change your outlook on life”; “God is your source”; “Give that it may be given to you”; and “I am in tune with God”—this last echoing Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite. Reader testimonials in Roberts’s Abundant Life magazine featured headlines such as “A Raise, Plus a Bonus”; “New Job as General Manager”; “A Bonus Surprise from Day to Day”; and “Sales Have Tripled.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Roberts ministry placed considerable emphasis on prosperity—overshadowing the healing emphasis of earlier days. At times, Roberts’s prosperity methods were indistinguishable from New Thought. In 1983, after a camp meeting with Word of Faith pioneer Kenneth E. Hagin, Roberts counseled followers to create a “Decree List” of desires. “By definition,” he wrote, “DECREE means to determine, to decide, or to MAKE UP YOUR MIND what you want God to do in your life, then set your heart upon it by your faith.… When you or I DECREE a thing according to God’s word, we have God’s AUTHORITY behind that DECREE.” This was New Thought 101.
Journalists often focused on whether Roberts’s first loyalty was to mammon. Roberts certainly enjoyed good restaurants and golf courses, and he had a large family home in Tulsa and a getaway house in California. But he opted to live out his final years in a fairly ordinary Orange County condo. Even during his peak years in the 1970s and 1980s his lifestyle was no more opulent than that of a bestselling author. He drove Cadillacs, not Lamborghinis. He went fishing but not yachting. He ate in good restaurants but didn’t partner in any. His Oklahoma ranch was no bigger than those owned by other denizens of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce. Roberts lived very comfortably but not extravagantly. His activities were far more austere than those of a rising generation of prosperity ministers.
Gaming the System
It is natural to assume that the massive prosperity ministries were built on cynicism alone. They were not. When looked at quickly, the prosperity ministries seem to be products of guile. When they are looked at closely, a more kaleidoscopic perspective emerges. To understand the American religious experience of the late twentieth century, it is necessary to grasp the coexistence of sincerity and chicanery that motivated some of its flashier figures.
When sexual and financial scandals toppled Jim Bakker’s multimillion-dollar PTL ministry in 1987, Bakker—a far less serious figure theologically than Oral Roberts—explained his and wife Tammy Faye’s opulent lifestyle: “We preach prosperity. We preach abundant life.” He felt that in order to point the way toward a God-centered prosperity, he was right, indeed obligated, to display it—and blindly so. In 1989, Bakker was convicted of defrauding PTL donors, to whom he had promised lifetime hotel stays and time-shares in resorts that never got built. An appellate court, however, threw out Bakker’s forty-five-year sentence in 1991, and he was eventually released to a halfway house after serving about five years. The appellate court ruled that the federal judge who had sentenced Bakker, Robert “Maximum Bob” Potter, had been improperly influenced by his own religious views, which resulted in his making a series of denigrating comments about Bakker from the bench.
Unknown to most of their detractors, the Bakkers eschewed Christian-right politics and maintained an ardently nondenominational ministry. They spoke frankly and sympathetically about AIDS before any other media ministers. Bakker’s son, Jay, is today an evangelist known for his defense of gay marriage. For television viewers, Jim and Tammy Faye’s shows were a kind of spiritual comfort food, featuring inspirational talks, dancing dogs, and wacky musical production num
bers, with no doom-and-damnation podium pounding. To many PTL followers, Jim and Tammy Faye’s descent made them seem less like a power-hungry Lord and Lady Macbeth than a beleaguered, fallen Lucy and Ricky of evangelism, unable to ethically manage and wield the religious empire that grew beneath them.
A harder breed of media evangelists arose in the early twenty-first century. They sidestepped scandal not so much because they were more virtuous than their predecessors, but because they possessed greater financial savvy and used take-no-prisoners legal strategies. The next generation of prosperity ministers so closely resembled lavishly paid CEOs, and frequently lived with such visible extravagance, that in 2007 Iowa senator Charles Grassley, a Republican and then–ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, authorized an investigation into six of the most prominent tax-exempt media ministries. Grassley questioned whether the megachurches’ fund-raising networks, highly compensated pastors, and myriad of eminently profitable business apparatuses violated their tax-exempt status as religious ministries.
Of the six megachurches investigated by Grassley’s finance committee from late 2007 to early 2011, only two cooperated: Joyce Meyer Ministries, based in Missouri, and Benny Hinn Ministries, based in Texas. Leaders of the remaining four, who often refused the committee’s most basic requests for information, were Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries of Texas; Creflo and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International in Georgia; Randy and Paula White of Without Walls International Church of Florida; and Bishop Eddie Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church of Georgia.
The Joyce Meyer and Benny Hinn ministries vowed to practice better financial transparency, but the other four megachurches dismissed the committee’s activities, calling its inquiries intrusive and violative of religious freedom. Senate investigators were left with little choice but to accept such stonewalling. Grassley’s staffers acknowledged that they had neither time nor resources to issue and enforce subpoenas. What’s more, many potential informants told the committee that they were too frightened to testify, fearing “retaliation by the churches,” including harassing lawsuits.
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