Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston seats 16,000 and boasts a membership of nearly triple that number. His books — with titles like Break Out: Five Keys to Go Beyond Your Barriers and Live an Extraordinary Life, Become a Better You, Your Best Life Now, and It's Your Time — sell millions of copies; their message of affirmation and hope has made Osteen the most visible face of an increasingly prominent American religious movement that also includes noted pastors Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes, and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. Kate Bowler's Blessed offers readers an in-depth look at the curious marriage of Christianity, capitalism, self-help, and positive thinking known as the “Prosperity Gospel.”
As with all religious phenomena, the Prosperity Gospel has a history. Chapter 1, “Gospels,” traces that history from 19th-century New Thought through early 20th-century Pentecostalism and African-American religion. A pantheon of American religious entrepreneurs — Phineas Pimberton Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, E. W. Kenyon, Father Divine, Dale Carnegie — embody the Prosperity Gospel's grounding of its message in the “generative power of positive thought” (14) and an intense devotion to “a God of abundant supply” (34). Subsequent chapters, succinctly titled “Faith,” “Wealth,” “Health,” and “Victory,” trace key components of the Prosperity Gospel's message and carry the story down to the present day.
The post-World War II economic boom abetted the equation of faithfulness and economic success, while Norman Vincent Peale's theology of positive thinking dovetailed with the rise of a therapeutic culture during the 1950s and 1960s. The 1970s and 1980s saw an increasing role played by televangelists (e.g., Jim and Tammy Bakker, Robert Schuller, Jimmy Swaggart, and Pat Robertson), facilitated by a dense set of personal networks that connected prosperity preachers in “a newly stabilized base of publications, conferences, associations, and television programs” (82), as well as the Prosperity Gospel's growing appeal to African-American and Latinos. The theology remained largely the same: “Give and get. Divine prosperity rested on a simple exchange” (132). A key part of any story of televangelism in America, of course, is the televangelist scandals of the late 1980s, which threatened to undermine the entire movement. Bowler details both the widespread discrediting of televangelism in the wake of the scandals, as well as the ways in which prosperity preachers emerged to newfound prominence from those dark days, aided in no small part by the economic recovery of the 1990s.
Prosperity has always been a multifaceted concept; it was never simply about economics and wealth. Prosperity preachers also articulated a theology of health and well-being, based on the idea that Jesus has delivered humans not only from poverty but from sickness, “a mental contagion” spread by “wrong thinkers” that could be combatted by a “spiritually healthy mind” (145). A variety of practices, ranging from neuropathy to fasting, sought to illustrate the connection between body and spirit, and a “bilingual” approach that “acknowledge[d] two intersecting processes — medical and miraculous” (171) played a key role in the development of a prosperity gospel of health.
The book's final substantive chapter provides a big-picture overview of the ways in which prosperity preaching permeates American religion, appealing in particular to African-American, Latino/as, and women. Bowler elaborates the challenges posed by the “Great Recession” to prosperity preaching, and lays out the convergences between prosperity and end-times theology as well as Christian Zionism. Prosperity's “narrative of sweeping confidence” (220), she shows, brought together “Protestantism and the principles of positive thinking” (228) in a powerful synthesis that “cultivated and sanctified desire” (234). The global popularity of prosperity theology — its increasing appeal to converts in the Global South — serves as a coda to the book's tracing of its roots and development in the American experience.
In addition to its substantive contributions to the understanding of American religion, Blessed is a methodological tour de force. At the risk of understating the power and coherence of the book's central narrative, what follows after the text's conclusion is almost equally as impressive: a series of detailed and comprehensive appendices that will be essential for any serious scholarship on the Prosperity Gospel from this point onward. Bowler provides an elaborate table of the nation's 100 or so largest prosperity churches and information about their leadership and membership figures. Even more importantly, another appendix provides an extensive and multipronged discussion about defining terms. After all, congregations and pastors do not generally refer to themselves as part of the “Prosperity Gospel,” and so demarcating the parameters of the term is a tricky undertaking. Bowler analyzes sermon content for key terms and provides an exhaustive consideration of how to identify “prosperity” churches.
The book also includes a number of detailed personal network maps showing the extensive connections that tie prosperity preachers together in the informal but substantive complex known as the “Prosperity Gospel.” Its account of the Prosperity Gospel is both exhaustive and, at times, intensely personal. This study was not conducted at arm's length; Bowler personally visited nearly a quarter of the nation's prosperity mega-churches, attended many prosperity conferences, and even accompanied faith healer Benny Hinn and a group of 900 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2008. First-person accounts based on countless hours of interviews and attendance at services illuminate points made throughout the book; congregants are allowed to speak in their own voice, and those voices are always accorded sensitivity and respect.
It is hard to do justice, in the space of a brief review, to the riches that Blessed offers to its readers. It will surely become the resource against which all future studies of the Prosperity Gospel will be measured. Scholars of American religion are deeply in Kate Bowler's debt for her critically sympathetic (and sympathetically critical) portrait of this powerful religious movement.
