The Stand to Reason blog has
a interesting article dealing with the Prosperity Gospel from a lesson learned from a Vietnam POW. From the post:
In his 2009 book The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life
, Ben Sherwood describes an intriguing phenomenon known as the Stockdale Paradox (after Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranking P.O.W. of the Vietnam War), which suggests a counterintuitive link between optimism and survival:
When [interviewer Jim Collins] asked Stockdale to explain which American prisoners did not survive captivity in Vietnam, the admiral replied, “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.”
Collins was perplexed, but Stockdale explained that the optimists “were the ones who said ‘we’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go; and then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale went on: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (emphasis mine)
Note that according to Stockdale it isn’t optimism per se that leads to heartbreak and despair, but an optimism of baseless expectations for specific and immediate improvement. Although such optimism is always energizing at first, the excitement invariably sours to disillusionment as the optimist is faced with a stark incongruity between the world as it actually is and the world as he imagined it to be.
This lesson, of course, applies as much to spiritual survival as it does to the physical. The prosperity “gospel,” with its promises of material wealth and temporal bliss, leaves its believers vulnerable to the same kind of heartbreak described above.
Read the rest.
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