Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
of the Gilded Age revealed a subtle change in emphasis, from hard work to high spirits. Animal spirits became a central theme in this emerging gospel of success. They were a means for reaffirming the celebration of the self, which (some said) had been disdained too long due to inherited puritan habits of
The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
by Mehrsa Baradaran · 14 Sep 2017 · 520pp · 153,517 words
had corresponded and intended to meet before Garvey immigrated to America, but Washington died before they could meet. Garvey enthusiastically embraced capitalism and preached a gospel of success that included self-mastery, hard work, and selfsufficiency, all of which he promised would result in black wealth and power. He echoed Andrew Carnegie when
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch · 1 Jan 1978
the Moralist (New York: Doubleday 1961), , , p 372. . 54 273. Cotton Mather A Christian at His Calling (1701), reprinted in Moses Rischin, ed.. The American Gospel of Success (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), pp. 23, 25, 28; John Cotton, "Christian Calling" (164), reprinted in Perry , Miller and Thomas H Johnson, eds.. The Puritans (New
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow · 1 Jan 1997 · 1,106pp · 335,322 words
another. In many ways, John D. Rockefeller exemplified the enterprising young businessman of his era. Thrifty, punctual, industrious, he was a fervent adherent of the gospel of success. He could have been the hero of any of the 119 inspirational tracts soon to be penned by Horatio Alger, Jr., books that bore such
Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson · 7 Feb 2017 · 416pp · 108,370 words
then they seek the reason. For better or worse, this very book belongs loosely to a genre of nonfiction that a critic might call a “gospel of success.” Most of these books resell common sense. The author takes a piece of conventional wisdom that the reader has already intuited and repackages it inside
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to find patient zero, the person who started the trend, because they decide he must be very special.” This sort of thinking creates a worthless gospel of success, Watts says. If a dinosaur movie succeeds in May, a thousand articles are written to claim there is something special about the allure of dinosaurs
The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman · 14 Oct 2023 · 567pp · 171,072 words
in overcoming failure. His early experiences would later become the basis for his optimism in the face of gloomy business forecasts. He would preach a gospel of success that would become as much a part of the future IBM as would its “think” signs. His and his father’s many business setbacks also
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square way in which you men are working.”27 T.J. Watson rose again from a seemingly career-destroying crisis. His personal faith in the gospel of success stirred the moribund CTR to life. 2 THINK On January 25, 1915, T.J. Watson gave a pep talk to the wary employees at the
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved
by Kate Bowler · 6 Feb 2018 · 118pp · 37,928 words
THERE’S A BRANCH OF CHRISTIANITY that promises a cure for tragedy. It is called by many names, but most often it is nicknamed the “prosperity gospel” for its bold central claim that God will give you your heart’s desires: money in the bank, a healthy body, a thriving family, and
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started hearing stories about a different kind of faith with a formula for success, and by twenty-five I was traveling the country interviewing the prosperity gospel’s celebrities. Eventually, I wrote the first history of the movement from beginning to end. I spent years talking to televangelists who claimed spiritual guarantees
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televangelism. Their media empire toppled when Jim was convicted of financial fraud, and the scandal cemented in most people’s minds the idea that the prosperity gospel was fundamentally about gold faucets, thick mink coats, and matching his-and-her Mercedes Benzes. And I did discover that the
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prosperity gospel encourages people (especially its leaders) to buy private jets and multimillion-dollar homes as evidence of God’s love. But I also saw the desire
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things that go bump in the night. They wanted a modicum of power over the things that ripped their lives apart at the seams. The prosperity gospel is a theodicy, an explanation for the problem of evil. It is an answer to the questions that take our lives apart: Why do some
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others tumble all the way down? Why do some babies die in their cribs and some bitter souls live to see their great-grandchildren? The prosperity gospel looks at the world as it is and promises a solution. It guarantees that faith will always make a way. I would love to report
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that what I found in the prosperity gospel was something so foreign and terrible to me that I was warned away. But what I discovered was both familiar and painfully sweet: the promise
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no matter how many times I rolled my eyes at the creed’s outrageous certainties, I craved them just the same. I had my own prosperity gospel, a flowering weed grown in with all the rest. Married in my twenties, a baby in my thirties, I won a job at my alma
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were fifteen and thought we would never die. — I DON’T THINK I knew enough about longing ten years ago, when I started investigating the prosperity gospel. I had just bought a little house with the man I love—filled it with books, IKEA furniture, and a soft dog with legs as
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youth. My life was something I could mold, or at least correct with a surge of determination. It was the same unlimited confidence that the prosperity gospel calls “victory.” (And I might have chalked up my successes to my own hard work and a little luck.) Nothing was broken yet that could
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. CHAPTER 2 Object Lesson MY BODY HAD FAILED ME before. I was twenty-eight and working on my dissertation, a book-length treatment of the prosperity gospel and the final step on my way to being a professor, when one afternoon my fingers suddenly slowed and then stopped at the keyboard. I
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-hundred-page dissertation to write. Every day I tried voice dictation software, but it skipped all over the paragraph and garbled most of the words. “Prosperity gospel” always read “perspiring gospel” but “THIS COMPUTER IS RUINING MY LIFE!” always seemed to come out perfectly. Eventually my creeping depression convinced Toban and my
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way people bought tidy mansions with extra guest rooms in case a refugee sponsored by the church needed to stay a night. Christmas cards were prosperity gospels writ miniature, stacks of pictures of a family in matching denim sitting on lightly distressed couches in fields of waving wheat. Does every field in
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their bare feet in the tall grasses. Fair would mean that life rewarded the good and punished the bad, or at least pretended to. The prosperity gospel has a very simple way of explaining why life as it is must be inherently just. As it is told, God established a set of
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questions about all things prosperity. “It really works! Just look at yourself!” I broke into a wide smile. I was studying the prosperity gospel, but that day I was the prosperity gospel. I had become living proof, at last. We have words to evaluate how likely it is that our attempts to harness the
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cats and ladders and spilling the salt are put in a box dubbed superstition, and failed prophecies are classified as fantasies or delusions. But the prosperity gospel asks you to set aside your doubts and bet it all on God’s supernatural power to reach down and remake the world according to
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’s time. Waiting is the language of Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Except that the prosperity gospel usually makes believers into farmers with “seed faith” sown in the ground, sitting in church, waiting for the rain and the harvest. One Sunday I
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at him with the delusional love of a mother who knew he was going to be beautiful. And he was. My first book, on the prosperity gospel—my other baby—had come out only months before Zach was born, so I spent this time in that sweet postbook haze that scholars love
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my life. And if anyone is a notary, we can make it official. Thanks for supporting me until I got to this, my own little prosperity gospel. My 150-person American Christianity class caught wind of the note and sent me a giant gift basket filled with onesies and T-shirts for
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wrapped his strong hands around mine and said, quietly: “I wore this clerical collar to impress you. And also to get through hospital security.” The prosperity gospel understands the power of touch perhaps better than anyone except maybe Catholics, who are always making everything into something you can run through your fingers
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oil to rub on your forehead, fake gold coins to tuck into your shoes, or any number of things to put under your pillow. The prosperity gospel is a faith meant to be touched and held. I start to surround myself with things. Toban builds a little shelf to go beside the
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vehicle of God’s grace. Like the lamb in Sunday school artwork, I am an adorable woolly passenger on Jesus’ shoulders. To believers in the prosperity gospel, surrender sounds like defeat. They write books with titles like Deal with It! to remind readers that there is nothing so difficult that God cannot
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, just setups. There are no trials, just tests of character. Tragedies are simply opportunities to claim a bigger, better miracle. I often wonder if the prosperity gospel’s never-give-up spirit produces resilient believers. Does it make happier people? Do people find themselves emboldened, shielded from the trials of daily life
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just know that everything is going to work out!” Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can master the future with our words and attitudes. I can barely admit to myself that I have almost no choice
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and found my way back into the sun even though, really, I have done nothing at all. It has all been done for me. The prosperity gospel has a word for that feeling that God is on your side. It’s called “favor” in a very particular sense. When a man stands
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get what we want,” writes one woman, as if chiding me for asking for dessert. It reminds me of the many times in studying the prosperity gospel that I was chided for complaining. The moratorium on negative speech is so thoroughgoing that I only really saw one giant display of insubordination. I
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determines your destiny!” says Jane from Idaho, and I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy. Because of my background in the prosperity gospel, I receive hundreds of letters from those inside the movement. These are people who, crushed by the weight of solution-focused theology, have been unable
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bitter seed has been planted in a young father who must take his brain-dead child off life support while his extended family, steeped in prosperity theology, rails against him for his inability to prevent his child’s death. I receive so many stories like this, the laments of bereaved parents who
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you. You are etched in every memory. If I could, I would stay with you forever. BY KATE BOWLER Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel ABOUT THE AUTHOR KATE BOWLER is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. A graduate of Yale Divinity School and Duke University, Bowler is the
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author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and son. katebowler.com Facebook.com/katecbowler Twitter: @KatecBowler To inquire about booking Kate Bowler for a
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips · 31 Mar 2008 · 422pp · 113,830 words
different breed of suasion—is the importance of Christian fundamentalism, of evangelical preoccupation with personal salvation, and of widespread “God wants you to be rich” prosperity gospeling, in making the 2000-2008 Republican national electorate a coalition uniquely willing to accept a period of speculative indulgence and conspicuous favoritism to the upper
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merits “Bullnomic” attention in this arena, though, is the further evidence in 2006 and 2007 of Americans turning to success-ethic belief systems—to the “prosperity gospel” and to “name it and claim it” and “God wants you to be rich” theology. Economic hopes were imitating religious conviction. To many mainstream Christian
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, this trend pulled Christianity further toward an unacceptable materialism. Some even found hints of blasphemy. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, dismissed the prosperity gospel as “baloney: It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth.”32 Arguably, though, such religion was
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to several of America’s fastest-growing denominations, was—as it had been in the twenties—the fertile seedbed of the new twenty-first-century “prosperity gospel.” If the rest of Protestantism found money a theological taboo, prosperity doctrine rose to the opportunity. It blended Pentecostal emotion over God’s gifts with
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and 2007, as Americans declared less respect for U.S. institutions and high ratios identified the United States as being on the wrong track, the prosperity gospel metastasized beyond the usual Pentecostal setting. According to a fall 2006 Time cover story (“Does God Want You to Be Rich?”), of the four biggest
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voting was often over 90 percent Republican, and whereas Hispanic Catholics were lopsidedly Democratic, Hispanic Pentecostals leaned Republican.34 In addition, some of the black prosperity gospel churches in metropolitan Atlanta were Republican strongholds, based on a unique fusion of rap music with a doctrine of money, power, and respect.35 Houston
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Methodist megachurch pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell, who gave the benediction at George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2005 inaugurals, was a prosperity lite preacher.36 Should prosperity gospel adherents opt to group together in a newly formed denomination, its membership would be among the nation’s largest. Bestselling books in vivid forms of
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mail-order business, and ‘your job is to declare what you would like to have from the catalog.’ ”38 Even New York City boasted new prosperity gospel churches, notably the northern branch of Creflo Dollar’s Atlanta temple to Mammon. In lower Manhattan, former commodities trader Dan Stratton, author of Divine ProVision
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God’s Kings for Financial Conquest, served as founder and pastor of the professionals-oriented Faith Exchange Fellowship.39 Alabama is not known as a prosperity gospel stronghold, but in 2003 the state held a very relevant referendum on a tax reform program put forward by Republican governor Bob Riley, who favored
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the Jesus of the book of Matthew. Revealingly, beyond the Pentecostal orbit, the only major U.S. denomination that has something akin to its own prosperity gospel—the five-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons—is also the most overwhelmingly Republican in politics and ideology. Utah
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emphasis on finance is not altogether wholesome. It would be unfair to broadly tie Mormonism and the prosperity gospel to the gestation of Bullnomics, but it is not unfair to suggest an unfortunate cousinship between prosperity theology and the Bush administration’s unsuccessful promotion of the conservative “Ownership Society” or “Opportunity Society,” which insisted
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and price revolutions first second Prins, Nomi Private Equity Council private equity firms program insurance Program on International Policy Attitudes Prosperity: Fact or Myth (Chase) prosperity gospel protectionism Public Citizen Public Opinion Foundation Purpose-Driven Life, The (Warren) Putin, Vladimir Putnam, Adam Qasim, Abdul Karim Qatar Rachman, Gideon Ramirez, Rafael Raymond, Lee
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Reagan, Ronald Reagan administration recession Reconstruction Finance Corporation Regan, Donald Reich, Robert Reid, Harry religion Bullnomics and prosperity gospel and U.S. elections and religious Right Republican Party, U.S. bailouts of 2008 and Christian fundamentalists and deregulation and energy policy of political dynasties
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell · 14 Jun 2021 · 244pp · 73,700 words
written by the famous minister Norman Vincent Peale, who ran a conservative Protestant church in New York City called Marble Collegiate. There, Peale preached the “prosperity gospel” to a congregation of mostly wealthy, influential Manhattanites—including, and especially, a young Donald Trump. (By no coincidence, Trump grew up to become a hard
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presidents all publicly lauded Amway and the Direct Selling Association in general as a commendable, profoundly patriotic enterprise.* Rich DeVos’s seventeenth-century interpretation of prosperity theology suggests that if you are not rich, then God does not love you. As he declared, “The free-enterprise system . . . is a gift of God
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senator in his thirties whom the Los Angeles Times once called the state’s “strangest politician.” Like most other MLM founders, Patrick was big on prosperity theology and New Thought, and he was famous for turning inspirational mottoes minacious: “Tell [recruits] they’re going to be happier, healthier, wealthier, and receive what
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—that working harder and faster, never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel. This Amway-esque ambiance is subtler in some studios than it is in others, but across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body fat percentage
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when, a few months after our interview, Sparkie the SoulCycle instructor became a distributor for “nontoxic” skincare MLM Arbonne, #bossbabe Instagram posts and all.) The prosperity gospel says that if you don’t succeed in becoming the picture of flawless fitness—if you don’t acquire the six-pack and the inner
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
by Ingrid Robeyns · 16 Jan 2024 · 327pp · 110,234 words
the poor. They think of themselves as the rightful leaders, as evidenced by the fact that they are rich. Some, such as the adherents of prosperity theology, go a step further, and, backed up by a skewed interpretation of Protestant doctrine, believe that their wealth shows their high degree of moral worthiness
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Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, second edition, with a new preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 11. On prosperity theology, see britannica.com/topic/prosperity-gospel and Tara Isabella Burton, “The Prosperity Gospel, Explained: Why Joel Osteen Believes That Prayer Can Make You Rich,” VOX, September 1, 2017, vox.com/identities/2017/9/1
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/15951874/prosperity-gospel-explained-why-joel-osteen-believes-prayer-can-make-you-rich-trump. 12. Jens Beckert, “Durable Wealth: Institutions, Mechanism, and Practices of Wealth Perpetuation,” Annual Review
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xx, 208, 209 property-owning democracy 213 public property transferred to private sector 209 rights 119–20 as social institution 118 tax 70, 118–20 prosperity theology 173 Protestant doctrine 173 public goods xx, 14, 34, 68, 119, 137, 146, 163, 168, 177, 209, 211 public–private partnerships 42, 103, 167 purchasing
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg · 20 Jun 2016 · 709pp · 191,147 words
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
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Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
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Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
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The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
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To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
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Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
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Fantasyland
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Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
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Team Human
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