Did the "prosperity gospel" cause the crash?

Hanna Rosin speculates in The Atlantic that the prosperity gospel may have contributed to the subprime mortgage meltdown. She cites a former high-roller from Wells Fargo who claims that managers targeted church sponsored wealth-building seminars -- even offering financial incentives to pastors for every person who took out a mortgage. Maybe it isn't a coincidence that areas of the country hit hardest by the collapse of the real estate bubble are also areas where the health and wealth gospel is the strongest. Rosin also shows how new variants of the prosperity gospel are becoming popular in predominantly Latino congregations. She profiles Pastor Fernando Garay of Casa del Padre in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”

Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

I can see how the "gospel" preached by Garay might appeal to someone who's just arrived in the U.S. with nothing but the shirt on his back. It's using Jesus as a ladder to the middle class, or if his faith is strong enough, a big house and the keys to a Benz. It's a twist on the gospel of the self-made man ("God helps those who help themselves") that appealed to earlier generations of European immigrants, and still appeals to those that have achieved their slice of the American dream through hard work. Both are perversions of the gospel revealed in the Bible.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

What's being described in Rosin's depressing article is what Luther called the theology of glory. Michael Horton has described it this way: "How can I climb the ladder and attain the glory here and now that God has actually promised for us after a life of suffering?" In opposition to that is the theology of the cross -- "the story of God’s merciful descent to us, at great personal cost, a message that the Apostle Paul acknowledged was offensive." It still is.