Decrying the Prosperity Gospel of Americanized Christianity
It’s just one more mainstream debasement of Jesus’s subversive ethos
Have you ever noticed how reckless self-promoters can give away a larger game, with their flamboyant version of a trick that was supposed to be hidden in banal, established corruptions?
Think of how Donald Trump’s populism drew attention to the fact that the GOP’s been fleecing its voters for decades.
When enacted, traditional Republican economic policies benefit only the wealthy few, and the GOP’s social conservative rhetoric was meant to attract blue-collar voters. The reason Trump has managed to turn the Republican Party into a cult of personality is that he’s reckless enough to enact the social policies too, as he did by politicizing the Supreme Court until it reversed Roe vs Wade. In their confusion and desperation, the American rural masses want something as nonsensical as an anarchistic, libertarian theocracy, and Trump’s ham-fisted demagoguery reminds us that mainstream Republican politicians have only been more low-key fraudsters over the last century.
Similarly, the prosperity gospel, promoted by televangelists like Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen is overtly an Americanized reworking of Christianity, but this overtness calls attention to how…
