The Prosperity Gospel And Weber’s Protestant Ethic

This column is dedicated to the intersection of faith and politics. And while this area of reflection has developed considerably in popular culture, what is often ignored is the importance of how faith relates to economics.

The film American Gospel (2018) gave many American Christians an introduction into how important it is to think about how the Gospel relates to economics. This film documented what is known as the Prosperity Gospel as preached by the likes of Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, and others.

What is the Prosperity Gospel?

The Prosperity Gospel is commonly understood as a gospel of health and wealth. At least in its representations in American Gospel, prosperity preachers promise their listeners health and money in the present life. Disease and discomfort can be healed and prayed away. Poverty can be traded in for prosperity if only you just believe.

A lack of faith, however, keeps poor Christians poor. Thus, any material struggles that people suffer are not God’s fault. Those struggles are their own.

Extending the Prosperity Gospel

The Prosperity Gospel, however, is more expansive than people commonly think. It is not just preached by old televangelists. Rather, it is commonly celebrated by a plethora of pastors and lay Christians on a variety of issues. Here are a few of them.

1. The Prosperity Gospel and Health

Obviously, health is a large part of the Prosperity Gospel, though it is often overshadowed by proponents’ focus on money. Health is made a sign of good faith in large part because of how Jesus interacted with people in need of healing. Throughout the Bible, Jesus performed miracles on the blind, lepers, the sick, and the dead.

It was due to an abundance of faith that these miracles worked. However, if a person did not have faith, Jesus did not and could not perform miracles (see Mark 6:5-6).

2. The Prosperity Gospel and Wealth

The promise that the Prosperity Gospel makes that we are perhaps more familiar with is wealth. It is strange that wealth is made a key promise by prosperity preachers given that Jesus Himself was homeless, and most of the earliest Christians were quite poor.

God does make promises of prosperity to His faithful (Jeremiah 29:11). But these promises are not central to the Gospel message. Jesus did, after all, tell His disciples to give up everything and follow Him (Luke 18:22).

3. The Prosperity Gospel and National Wellbeing

Now to truly expand our understanding of the Prosperity Gospel. The promises of prosperity are often extended to nations. If nations obey God’s commands, they will be blessed with peace, wealth, and God’s hedge of protection. If a nation disobeys, however, they will be cursed and might even be deemed unworthy of continuation.

This political prosperity gospel is advocated for by many evangelicals, including Tony Evans in his now unlisted Kingdom Voting YouTube sermon series from 2020. The political prosperity gospel often justifies imposing Christian values onto society through legislation. After all, if the nation obeys, everyone will prosper. If they don’t, a nation risks God’s destruction.

However, this political prosperity gospel is not always used to justify imposing a Christian hegemony onto national life. Sometimes it is simply used to reinvigorate the faith of those who are already Christian. Under these versions of the political prosperity gospel, it is not the whole nation which must obey God in order to receive God’s blessings. Rather, it is through the authenticity of the Church residing in that nation that brings God’s blessings to the whole nation.

4. The Prosperity Gospel and Marriage

Another extension of the Prosperity Gospel deals with marriage. Kate Bowler’s The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities has sparked scholarly conversation on how the very presence and performance of pastor’s wives is a form of prosperity preaching.

Preacher’s wives are often endlessly objectified by their husbands (think the “hot wife” meme). They are also predominantly white, often skinny, and carry themselves as accessories to their husbands who spend their whole lives supporting their husband’s career.

From Progressive Christian Memes on Facebook

Though this may not be intentional on the part of these women celebrities, they play a role in shaping men’s expectations for marriage and women. If men can be faithful leaders just like their pastor, they can also obtain an objectifiable woman who will stand beside her husband’s goals, nodding along to what he says.

And by portraying themselves as a polished, unproblematic couple, a pastor and his wife are in essence sharing the good news of an easy and aesthetically pleasing marriage. If only you just have faith…

5. The Prosperity Gospel and Mental Health

This deserves its own subsection. Ryan Casey Waller wrote a brilliant book titled Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don’t Want to Talk About. Waller, a pastor and licensed psychotherapist, shares his experience in churches.

He observes that many Christians are severely unequipped to talk about mental health. Even today, pastors tell their congregants to give their depression and anxiety up to God, without giving any guidance as to how.

Post by JarethOfHouseGoblin on r/exchristian.

Not only are many Christians unskilled at talking about mental health. They actually turn mental health into a prosperity issue. If only people pray about it, or ask God to take their trauma or disorder away, they wouldn’t have to put up with their internal sufferings. If someone continues to be depressed, it is their own fault for not praying hard enough or trusting God to take their depression away.

It is unfortunate that so many of our pastors and influential voices within the Church are neurotypical. We need leaders who understand the inward life enough to speak on it with grace and truth, not with platitudes.

Weber’s Protestant Ethic

It is from this discussion of the Prosperity Gospel that we turn to the wider discussion of religion and economics. More specifically, we turn to a discussion of Christianity and capitalism. It is within this discussion that the Prosperity Gospel is situated and therein must be contextualized.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was a book published in 1904 and 1905 in two sections by Max Weber. Weber is considered one of the founders of sociology. And he is well-known for his work on the sociology of religion.

In The Protestant Ethic, Weber is thinking about a peculiar phenomenon that he saw around him. In Germany, Protestants had become extremely successful businessmen, while Catholics were lagging behind. It wasn’t so much an economic competition, though. Catholics just didn’t seem to care as much about wealth getting.

Protestants, however, were engrossed with what Weber called the “spirit of capitalism.” What this spirit means, essentially, is that gaining wealth is a good and an end in itself.

The Spirit of Capitalism

Capitalism must first be provisionally defined. It is a system that succeeds feudal economic systems. Under capitalism, individuals can become owners of private property. Employers employ employees, who produce goods to be consumed by consumers. To turn a profit, employers pay employees less than what their labor is worth (or they price products for more than what those products are worth, or a mixture of both).

Capitalism enables the commodification of things. Anything can become capital. An open lot can become paid parking. Clicking on this article becomes an opportunity for companies to advertise themselves to you. People can sell tumbleweeds online as decor. Bodies can be commodified for sex, and voices can be commodified for commercials.

Because capitalism is geared towards productivity, and because we are habituated within capitalist economy, our very lives come to be animated by the spirit of capitalism. The very way we relate to time is that time, as Benjamin Franklin said, is money. We are either wasting our time, or utilizing it “wisely” to produce something consumable.

As Weber says, this spirit is not just a facet of life. It is an “ethos” (24). Later, he writes, “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs” (25). However much a person is devoted towards this endless project of wealth attainment often directly impacts whether we see them as a good or decent person.

Already, we see that this spirit can animate something like the Prosperity Gospel. If material gain is truly seen as an end in itself, why wouldn’t it be God’s way of expressing His grace and blessings to those who believe in Him?

Christian Theology and Capitalism

As Weber argues, Protestant theology allowed such a spirit to flourish. The first “seed” of the spirit of capitalism lies in Martin Luther’s notion of the “calling.”

According to Luther, God has placed believers where they are for a purpose. They must use their situation, gifts, experiences, and opportunities to glorify Him. This doctrine opens up all of life as something that can be used to worship God. Including, for example, one’s career.

If one is called to glorify God in one’s career, then a career becomes much more than one’s place of work. It becomes an instrument of praise. For Weber, this offers motivation to excel at what one does. It sacralizes good work ethic.

The second theological seed of the spirit of capitalism is embedded in the Calvinistic doctrine of the proof of salvation. In Calvinism, believers are predestined for heaven or for hell. Since only God knows whether someone is truly saved, believers have little else to know they are saved except for the proofs of their salvation.

These proofs are their good works. As James shows in his epistle, faith without works is dead (James 2:17). By one’s fruits, one can be assured of one’s salvation.

Under Weber’s analysis, this intensified the sacralization of good work ethic that was present in Luther. Work was no longer a merely possible way that one could praise God. Rather, a true saint naturally glorifies God in every possible way, including in one’s work. Good works entails a good worker, because a worker must labor for God’s glory.

Therefore, under the sheer pressure to assure oneself of one’s own salvation, success in work and money-making becomes absolutely necessary. Failure in business and labor means a lack of faith (sounds familiar?) and thus returns a person to uncertainty about one’s salvation.

Weber and the Prosperity Gospel

Weber’s thesis came under fire almost as soon as The Protestant Ethic was published. But his basic argument shows us how intimate theology and economics can become. The Prosperity Gospel is just one iteration of how capitalism shapes theology.

As Christians, we are not told which economic system is the “right” one. But we are tasked with discerning our contexts. If we are not careful, we risk being shaped by our environment in harmful ways. We must instead inhabit our environments faithfully.

The crucial flaw of the Prosperity Gospel is that it blames sufferers for their sufferings. Because of this, the Prosperity Gospel helps us blame people with disease and disorders rather than the money-hungry manufacturers of unhealthy food, medicine, and polluted air.

It enables us to blame the poor for not pulling/praying themselves up by their bootstraps, rather than asking why their wages are unfair, or why they remain poor and downtrodden despite their strong faith and hard work.

Additionally, the Prosperity Gospel sacralizes the upper-middle class lifestyle and its accompanying ethics. It makes us forget that Jesus was not an upper-middle class suburbanite, and that He didn’t need status or aesthetic appeal to be holy.

We must recover a Christian appreciation of suffering and a prophetic witness against the structures and rulers that create that suffering. Otherwise, if capitalism structures our theology, we exchange our Christian appreciation of suffering for a love for more money and security. And we exchange our prophetic witness for ideologies which justify the endless extraction of our planet’s resources and creatures, and the exploitation of ourselves and our neighbors.