WWJD

Created
Wed, 25/10/2023 - 06:00
Updated
Wed, 25/10/2023 - 06:00
Elle Hardy author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (yikes!!!) wrote this for TNR about a new war on the poor by Evangelical Christians: A God who does his best work in the dark hours is integral to the story of American evangelical Christianity. The stuff of country music songs and conversions in roadside motels, Jesus tends to come to people at their lowest and loneliest. The only problem is that some of God’s most pernicious modern apostles understand this all too well. At a time when fewer and fewer believers are going to church, it is consumption, in these dark times, that illuminates a deeply antisocial shift in evangelical Christian beliefs. Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return. The prosperity gospel might sound as old-fashioned—and feel as familiar—as a preacher in a three-piece suit, but a new and cynical version is making a comeback across ministries both old and new; among people who go to church and those who get their faith online. Enter the church and, more specifically, preachers who specialize in the “health and wealth” form of faith. Quietly, outlets such as television channel INSP, the rebrand of Jim Bakker’s PTL Television Network, have become a fixture in the top 20 highest-rating channels in the nation. With viewership increasing 1,171 percent since 2010, the network that runs John Wayne films by day and Joel Osteen sermons…