Throughline - Prosperity gospel and the American dream

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

A lot of our everyday lives are shaped by the idea that if we really believe in something, it will happen. But where does that idea come from? And what does it have to do with the American dream? Today on the show, how the prosperity gospel has blended self-improvement, religion and capitalism into an everyday recipe for success – one that any of us can try. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randavid Fetach. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. This is Norman Vincent Peel. What I have in mind to do is to give a little discussion on this subject, how to make positive thinking work for you. Norman Vincent Peel is a bit of a theological outlier. Like a lot of these modern spiritual entrepreneurs, he kind of slandered around a bit. Born at the end of the 19th century,

it comes into the 20th, he's beating all of these big automakers, oil people. So he's right there in the middle of this sort of capitalist kind of thing. What is positive thinking? When he writes his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, you can still find probably in every used bookstore in the country. He's like, if you think positively, you're going to get all of these things.

Life can be wonderful. You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around and pull it down. The book is really just a series of success mantras. You can if you think you can. Drawn from scripture, God bless you and best wish you. God says it, I can have it, I believe it, that settles it. Get up every morning, look in the mirror, and repeat over and over again, you know, some variation of...

You can, whatever if you can dream up, think you can, trust, you can, is the first secret chief of success. Norman, Vincent Peel is very much a key apostle of prosperity, gospel belief. a gospel he began to preach in the 1930s. A kind of spiritual psychology of success. At this point, it is all about the self and all about feeling good. Self-help is a series of spiritual beliefs that we can somehow become better because of the power of mind. Basically, the message of the secret is the message that I've been trying to share with the world on my show for the past 21 years. The message is that you're really responsible for your life.

If you're thinking the prosperity gospel, self-help, what does that have to do with me? Consider this. Even if you've never stepped foot in a church or watched a single episode of Oprah. What? Hold up. Hold up. So much of our lives is shaped by the idea, the belief, that all you have to do to succeed is believe harder. And if you fall in hard times, well, better try harder.

It's all on you after all. And listen, I'm not saying the founders were preaching the prosperity gospel. But I do think that from the very beginning, the right to the pursuit of happiness set up this goal of individual happiness. And that's where the prosperity gospel came in and filled the void by creating a roadmap to that happiness based around self-improvement, religion, and capitalism. Today on the show, we're going back to the heyday of the movement, to the 1970s and 80s, when the gospel was streaming. into homes every day to hear how millions of Americans got sold on the idea that God wants you to be happy and rich. That's coming up after a short break. Jim and Tammy Fay Baker or, you know, Paul and Jan Crouch come on and look a certain sort of way,

and they were the ones that began to bring, you know, different kinds of preachers and things and introduce them to others. Anthea Butler is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an author of White Evangelical Racism, Politics of Morality in America. These shows in the 70s and 80s were important conduits for the A, B, C, and D list of all of these prosperity gospel preachers. Yay! Lay of a law. That would get a foothold in America.

And that's the way that most people saw them. You might be up late at night. I want to talk to you for a few moments about the law of the seed. And you see, you know, somebody preaching this message. And if you'll call during this telecast for you that support our ministry in any way. You need to make a vow of faith of $1,000. Oh, Bob, couldn't you say $25? No.

If you'll start now and get your seed of faith into the ground, it'll begin to grow and God begin to begin to move. And you'd send them something and they'd send you something back. and then you'd get on the mailing list. It's actually much more dangerous than televangelism was the mailing list. If you can get that person to write to your ministry, you could harass them forever. You know, it's like Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. You keep the money coming in.

You keep people hooked. By the mid-1980s, the number of Americans watching religious television had skyrocketed to nearly 25 million. prosperity gospel was everywhere. On TV, of course, but also in magazines on billboards and in self-help books. We can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world. In so many ways, the story of the prosperity gospel follows the rise of a certain kind of capitalism. A kind of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Government is not the solution.

to our problem, government is the problem. The short version is that it's the idea that free markets are the solution to all of our problems. The focus, like with Prosperity Gospel, is on personal advancement. More is more. It asks each individual citizen slash buyer to absorb all the responsibilities for making its promises true. This is Kate Boller. She's a historian at Duke University, an author of Blessed, a history of the American prosperity gospel. Harder you work, the more that's meant to prove its own reward.

If capitalism is unstable, it simply means that you need to adopt more flexible work hours, be willing to hustle it 2 a.m. Have you taken on a side project? Have you really managed to train? Chris Lehman is the author of Money Cult, and he describes this as, quote, sanctifying the market. The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes that is not to be questioned. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is no alternative. It's similar to the prosperity gospel in which when the system is meant to prove itself, it shifts the burden of responsibility away from, in this version, away from God

and onto the person who has failed to demonstrate the abundant life. The abundant life. fancy cars, expensive clothes, big houses. Things all prosperity gospel preachers make sure to flound. You need to show yourself in a certain kind of way so that people know that you're blessed and that in turn they can be blessed if they follow you because obviously you've got God's word that will tell them how they need to get this prosperity in their lives too. To me it's like God's plan for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, right?

It gives the illusion that everybody can get this and that, you know, that there is equality when there really isn't. It's very compelling to people who come from, you know, there are immigrants to America because it folds right into this American exceptionalism and the American dream. I mean, one of the questions I get a lot is how much, how much were the preachers, snake oil salesmen, and how much were they deeply sincere and not just sincere, perhaps,

but like how much did they truly believe that what they were doing could transform other people's lives? Kate Bowler, a practicing Christian herself and a historian, spent a decade going to services, getting to know parishioners and their prosperity gospel preachers, investigating the relationship between the two. I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of them, and I think the answer really varies. I have met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in Florida, and I have met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this could very materially transform people's lives.

I'm thinking of a church I went to an inner city church, and the megachurch pastor who had a Rolex and a mansion and all that, also simultaneously believe that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job and they are that partner. that creates a stable family home. So in one version, you could say, well, it just robs people of their money, promises them things, and can't possibly deliver.

In other versions, we call it the redempt and lift effect, which is that when you stabilize people's lives, you encourage them to network, save, take care of their home life, and are able to redeem and lift, is what they describe. And why do the parishioners, seeing how well off the preachers are, keep giving them money.

Well, in the minds of parishioners, it doesn't matter if the preacher is sincere or not. What matters to them is whether God is good and God has set up the rules by which they too can have those good things. And so in that way, the preacher is its own show and tell, but doesn't inherently matter

to the faith lives of the people in the pews. The sort of constant in American religion is this kind of anxiety about your destiny, and, you know, it reflects broader trends in a market-dominated society. We're forced to believe in invisible causality in this economy. Stock market is now down 21%. 43%. All of the major technology sectors.

Apple's under pressure. Yahoo down 8.5%. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the crash. And what all this says, though, is don't be afraid. is good. Don't be afraid. You'll do your best. And on the other side of this, there may be ups and downs, but I am going to bring you to a better future. Nearly two trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug and people wonder, where's the bottom? It turns out this is deeper than most people. Let's just say this is the moment where we're going to talk about

prosperity gospel and the banking industry as, you know, in collusion with each other in certain kinds of ways. So I want to tell a story. And that story. is about 2008 and the belly up of everything in the financial markets and especially the foreclosure market. And one of the places where this happens, you know, in a huge way was Atlanta. Black people were told, you know, that they should buy homes. Predatory lenders gave, you know, these kind of balloon loans to people who were in churches. So in other words, you were encouraged by your, you know, televangelist pastor. You can just buy a home because, you know, here we've got this loan officer here today

is going to talk to you and God's going to bless you with the house. And then all these people went belly up in 2008 and lost their homes. For people who are constantly on the cusp of losing everything, which we were reminded again in the pandemic, we're looking for the person with a formula. For some, that person might be a Tony Robbins or an Oprah. Brothers, like me, it's the business minds of Shark Tank. They're self-made business experts worth billions.

And still others turn to preachers or politicians who seem to have it all figured out. You know, I said the other day because so many people, they carry around the art of the deal, because they're begging, they're begging their politicians, please, please read the art of the deal when you negotiate with China and with Japan and with Mexico. and with Vietnam. And I think this is crucial for right now. It flows into a kind of Christian nationalism.

It means that God is especially favoring, you know, the nation as a special place. And so the people who live in it who follow after this particular kind of thing are going to be more blessed than anybody else in the world. I think people crave, even if they might hate it, they crave a gospel where the responsibility always falls back on them, because it's always the one thing we can control is ourselves. So if you preach an empowered individualism, you've got a gospel you can believe in, which is always us.

That's it for this week's show. If you want to hear the full story about the prosperity gospel, check out the full-length episode, God wants you to be rich. And join us next week when we take a deeper look at the Constitution. The rights it includes, and those it does not. So I guess when I think of that phrase, like the Constitution doesn't tell you all the rights that you have because it doesn't know. It's both like, well, that's wonderful. The Constitution sort of acknowledges that it doesn't know right there in the Ninth Amendment, right?

It acknowledges that it's something that can grow and change. But it also, like, it also points to the fact that the Constitution not only left a lot of people out, but, like, actively committed crimes against people. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Morgadam and edited by Christina Kim and Julia Redpath with help from the throughline production team. Music by Ramtinada Bluey and his band, Drop Electric.

Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Rand Abd al-Fattah. Thanks for listening.