Market Crashes and the Gospel of Individualism

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and through line. I'm Randab ata . Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty and the purs,uit of happiness in the US that began two hundred and fifty years ago This is Norman Vincent Peel . What I have in mind to do is to give a little discussion on this subject , how to make positive thinking work for you . Norman Vincent Peel is a bit of a theological outlier. Like a lot of these modern spiritual entrepreneurs, he kind of slandered around a bit. Born at the end of the nineteenth century and comes into the twentieth. He's beating all of these big automakers, oil people. So he's right there in the middle of this sort of capitalist kind of thing What is positive thinking ? When he writes this book The Power of Positive Thinking, which you can still find probably in every used bookstore in the country, he's like, if you think positively you're going to get all of these things . Life can be wonderful. You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasshole around and pull it down. The book is really just a series of success mantras . You can , if you think you can drawn from scripture, God bless you and best bless you . God says it. I can have it , I believe it, that settles it. Get up every morning, look in the mirror and repeat over and over again, you know, some variation of you can, whatever you can dream of. Think you can't trust . You can as the first achieve of success. Norman Vincent Peel is very much a key apostle of prosperity Gospel belief, a gospel he began to preach in the nineteen thirties a kind of spiritual psychology of success . At this point, it is all about the self and all about feeling good. Self help is a series of spiritual beliefs that we can somehow become better because of the power of mind. Basically, the message of the secret is the message that I've been trying to share with the world on my show for the past twenty one years, the message is that you're really responsible for your life. If you're thinking, The prosperity gospel, self help, what does that have to do with me? Consider this. Even if you've never stepped foot in a church or watched a single episode of Oprah . What? Hold up , hold up . So much of our lives is shaped by the idea, the belief that all you have to do to succeed is believe harder . And if you fall in hard times, well, better try harder. It's all on you after all . And listen, I'm not saying the founders were preaching the prosperity gospel . But I do think that from the very beginning, the right to the pursuit of happiness set up this goal of individual happiness. And that's where the prosperity gospel came in and filled the void by creating a roadmap to that happiness based around self improvement, religion, and capitalism . Today on the show, we're going back to the heyday of the movement to the nineteen seventies ies and eight , when the gospel was streaming into homes every day to hear how millions of Americans got sold on the idea that God wants you to be happy and rich . That's coming up after a short break Jim and Tammy Fay Baker or Paul and Jan Crouch come on and look a certain sort of way and they were the ones that began to bring kinds of preachers and things and introduced them to others. Andthe Butler is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an author of White Evangelical Rac ism, Politics of Morality in America These shows in the seventies and eighties were important conduits for, you know, the ABC and D list of all of these prosper ity gospel preachers. That would get a foothold in America . And that's the way that most people saw them. You might be up late at night. I want to talk to you for a few moments about the law of the seed. Seed means to see, you know, somebody coming this message and if you'll call during this telecast for you that support our ministry in any way, you need to make a bow a fee of a thousand dollars. Oh, Bob, couldn't you say twenty five , no ? If you'll start now and get your seed of faith into the ground, it'll begin to grow and God begin to move . And you'd send them something and they'd send you something back and then you get on the mailing list that's actually much more dangerous than televangelism was the mailing list. If you can get that person to write to your ministry, you could harass them forever. You know, it's like hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave . You keep the money coming in . You keep people hooked . By the mid nineteen eighties, the number of Americans watching religious television had skyrocketed to nearly twenty five million . Prosperity gospel was everywhere on TV, of course, but also in magazines, on billboards, and in self help books. We can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world . In so many ways, the story of the Prosperity Gospel follows the rise of a certain kind of capitalism . A kind of capitalism known as neoliberalism . Government is not the solution to our problem . Government is the problem The short version is that it's the idea that free markets are the solution to all of our problems . The focus, like with prosperity gospel, is on personal advancement , more More is more . It asks each individual citizen slash buyer to absorb all the responsibilities for making its promises true. This is Kate Bowler. She's a histor ian at Duke University and author of Blessed, a history of the American Prosperity Gospel . The harder you work , the more that's meant to prove its own reward if capitalism is unstable, it simply means that you need to adopt more flexible work hours, be willing to hustle at two AM. Have you taken a side project? Have you really managed ? Chris Lehman is the author of Money Colt, and he describes this as quote s anctifying the market. The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes that is not to be questioned . As Margaret Thatcher famously said there is no alternative. It's similar to the prosperity gospel in which when the system is meant to prove itself, it shifts the burden of responsibility away from in this version, away from God and onto the person who has failed toate demonstr the abundant life . The abundant life. Fancy cars, expensive clothes, big houses , things all prosperity gospel preachers make sure to flaunt. Need to show yourself in a certain kind of way so that people know that you're blessed and that in turn , they can be blessed if they follow you because obviously you've got God's Word that will tell them how they need to get this prosperity in their lives too. To me, it's like God's plan for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps , right? It gives the illusion that everybody can get this and that you know, that there is equality when there really isn't. It's very compelling to people who come from, you know, they're immigrants to America because it folds right into this American exceptionism and the American dream . I mean, one of the questions I get a lot is how much do were the preachers snake oil salesmen and how much were they deeply sincere and not just sincere perhaps, but like how much did they truly believe that what they were doing could transform other people's lives. Kate Bohler, a practicing Christian herself and a historian spent a decade going to services, getting to know parishioners and their prosperity gospel preachers , investigating the relationship between the two . I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of them, and I think the answer really varies . I have met people who are likely at this moment , defrauding a widow in Florida . And I have met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this could very materially transform people's lives. I'm thinking of a church I went to an inner city church and the mega church pastor who had a rolex and a mansion and all that also simultaneously believed that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job and they are that partner that creates a stable family home. So in one version, you could say, well, it just robs people of their money, promises them things and can't possibly deliver . In other versions we call it the redempt and lift effect, which is that when you stabilize people's lives , you encourage them to network, save, take care of their home life and are able to redeem and lift is what they describe. And why do the parishioners, seeing how well off the preachers are, keep giving them money? Well, in the minds of parishioners, it doesn't matter if the preacher is sincere or not. What matters to them is whether God is good and God has set up the rules by which they too can have those good things . And so in that way the preacher is its own show and tell, but doesn't inherently matter to the faith lives of the people in the pews . The sort of constant in American religion this kind of anxiety about your destiny and you know, it reflects broader trends in a market dominated society . We're forced to believe in invisible causality in this economy. The stock market is now down twenty one percent forty three percent. All of the major technology sectors, Apples under pressure, Yahoo down eight and a half percent. It was the worst day on Wall Street and what all this says though is don't be afraid, God is good . Don't be afraid, you'll do your best. And on the other side of this, there may be ups and downs, but I am going to bring you to a better future. Nearly two trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug and people wonder, where's the bottom? It turns out that 's just say this is the moment where we're going to talk about prosperity gospel and the banking industry as in collusion with each other in certain kinds of ways. So I want to tell a story. And that story is about two thousand eight and the belly up of everything and the financial markets and especially the foreclosure market. And one of the places where this happens , you know, in a huge way was Atlanta. Black people were told, you know, that they should buy homes, predatory lenders gave, you know, these kind of balloon loans to people who were in churches. So in other words, you were encouraged by your, you know, televangelist pastor . You could just buy a home because, you know, here we got this loan officer here today is going to talk to you and you could God's gonna bless you with the house and then all these people went belly up in two thousand eight and lost their homes For people who are constantly on the cusp of losing everything, which we were reminded again in the pandemic , we're looking for the person with a formula . For some, that person might be a Tony Robbins or an Oprah . Brothers, like me, it's the business minds of Shark Tang. And still others turn to preachers or politicians who seem to have it all figured out . You know, I said the other day because so many people they carry around the art of the deal because they're begging they're begging their politicians , please, please read the art of the deal when you negotiate with China and with Japan and with Mexico and with Vietnam. And I think this is crucial for right now. It flows into a kind of Christian nationalis m . It means that God is especially favoring the nation as a special place . And so the people who live in it, who follow after this particular kind of thing are going to be more bl essed than anybody else in the world . I think people crave , even if they might hate it, they crave a gospel where the responsibility always falls back on them because it's always the one thing we can control is ourselves . So if you preach an empowered individualism, you've got a gospel you can believe in , which is always us. That's it for this week's show. If you want to hear the full story about the prosperity gospel, check out the full length episode God Wants You To Be Rich . And join us next week when we take a deeper look at the Constitution , the rights it includes and those it does not . So I guess when I think of that phrase like the Constitution doesn't tell you all the rights that you have because it doesn't know, it's both like, well, that's wonderful. The Constitution sort of acknowledges that it doesn't know right there in the Ninth Amendment, right? It acknowledges that it's something that can grow and change . But it also like it also points to the fact that the Constitution not only left a lot of people out, but like actively committed crimes against people . That's next week. Don't miss it . This episode was produced by Keanna Moradem and edited by Christina Kim and Julia Redp ath with help from the through line production team, music by Ramtin Ada Louie and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kaine, Irene Nagucci, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsey McKenna. I'm Randab . Thanks for listening