Monday, October 06, 2008

A Bad Economy, Bad Mortgages, and The Prosperity Gospel

Here is an interesting article from Time.com: Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess. From the article:
Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers."
Read the whole thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Again, I'll bring up the covetousness-promoting line of Michael Douglas' character Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987):

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Of course...no, it's not. But when these prosperity false prophets promote it attached to Bible verses taken grossly out of context, mix in a bunch of Satan's original lie to mankind, "You will be like gods," and we have so-called Christianity PROMOTING greed. Sad, it is.