Reflections on the American Prosperity Gospel
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- Updated Mar 02, 2023
The American church operates with a heavy emphasis on God’s blessing and favor. We gauge much of our spiritual “success,” just like everything else in our culture, by how smoothly our lives are going or how much health and wealth we acquire. Even in a country that is overflowing with abundance, this prosperity-based gospel leaves us with a shallow, incomplete faith that wavers when life begins to happen to us.
I grew up with an incomplete understanding of the gospel, as there was an over-emphasis on God’s blessings without a full explanation of what blessing looks like. I saw God as a giver of good gifts (and he is), but for me, those gifts looked like things on my Amazon Wishlist, success, wealth, health, and avoiding suffering like a bad habit.
Growing up in the church, I didn’t hear much about Christ-followers who struggled deeply but remained committed. There wasn't much talk about how my gift-giving God operated in countries where poverty, sickness, and starvation abounds.
Isn’t the same God who loves and provides for me there with them?
Why am I sleeping in this safe, cozy bed with loads of food in my cabinets, and they are unsure how to live through another day?
I still struggle to break free from a picture of God at work in my life that isn’t connected to material wealth and comfort. The emphasis on these things is so deeply ingrained in our culture it’s hard to disconnect our faith from the American paradigm that equates all success with fortune and fame. The other part of this is that I am selfish and want more for myself. No matter how noble and selfless I strive to live (with Jesus’ help), there is still that self-seeking part of me that is looking to get ahead just a little bit more.
Being wined and dined by the Holy Spirit appeals to a very deep part of our sin nature.
That’s why it’s so hard to move past our view of a God who gives, to a God who is for us in every circumstance.
I always loved Jesus, even from a very young age when I really didn’t have the capacity to begin to learn exactly who he was. I inherited childlike faith from my parents and grandparents, that trusted the Lord long before I was alive. But, when I was a young adult, newly married and then becoming a mother at 25, the wobbly foundation that had just seeped into how I saw God became woefully insufficient to carry me through the challenges of adulthood.
Being a mother of a newborn made me acutely aware of the fleeting nature of life. New life opened my eyes to the reality that none of us can escape death. How could a gift-giving God allow us to live and parent under a ubiquitous death sentence? What I believed in was missing something very important.
Then I developed a chronic anxiety and depression disorder and began to experience marriage turbulence that left me feeling gutted and alone. One plus one was no longer equaling two. I had never met a believer that struggled with mental health issues. I felt fundamentally broken.
My husband and I had waited until we were married to be together, we prayed and fasted before joining our lives together, and we were each other's great faith step forward. We did this thing right, so why were we struggling for years on end? Where was God’s promise that we had waited for?
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All and all, this season awakened my naive heart to two realities: we all die, and we all suffer.
Suffering is normal. Yet, it was not something I heard preached, sung, or read all too much about as a young person that had grown up in the church. I realized that if this inherited faith was going to be worth clinging to, I needed to know more. Jesus must be more than just a loving genie. Not one of us can escape pain and suffering. Our faith must be big enough for those moments, or honestly, it’s pretty useless.
I have sought the Lord; he has been gracious and kind to help me see who he is more clearly. The picture, I think, will always be a hazy one until I see him face to face in heaven. But the ground I am standing on as a believer is getting firmer. I think that’s the journey we all must go on in order to stay faithful to him for a lifetime.
Many are falling away from their faith because they haven’t been given a foundation that is strong enough to confront death and suffering. Narratives in the church are starting to address the nights we all face in our different ways, but work is still left to be done. Many of us are ill-equipped to face the trials, persecution, and suffering that is promised to us as long as we are in the land of the living.
Some Biblical Thoughts That Point Us Away from the Prosperity Gospel
God is gracious and just.
God’s fairness would look like the immediate death of all humanity. We do not want to serve a fair God. We serve a gracious and just God. As long as we have breath in our lungs, his grace is present in our lives to get us through that day to the next one (Proverbs 10:16, Romans 3:23, Lamentations 3:22-23).
God allows suffering.
Suffering is a normal part of life and does not indicate distance from the Lord. Suffering is unavoidable. We will each, at some point, face grief, loss, disappointment, failure, trauma, health issues, death, and more in this life. God tells us we will face suffering and trials of many kinds. The Bible actually tells us to rejoice when they come because they produce perseverance in us. God tells us he listens to us in these moments. He is with us in these seasons. He uses our pain. Following Jesus is not an exemption from a life marked by suffering, and sometimes it’s even an invitation to a life of suffering for his glory (James 1:2-4, Psalm 22:24, Romans 8:18).
Death is not the end of the story.
Death freaks me out. It probably freaks you out, too, if you are completely honest. As a parent, the thought of losing one of my children literally rattles something deep in my core. One day that I was really just asking God how he could be good and allow us to die, he whispered a sweet reply to my heart. He reminded me that he did do something about death. He did something radical and weird that I, in my short-sighted mind, can’t even fully understand. He sent his Son so we could have life after death. These tiny humans I worry so fervently for are actually eternal beings! And while I still desire to be spared the great grief of parting early from them in this life, I can live outside the grip of my relentless fear because I look ahead knowing the best is yet to come (Revelation 21:4, Romans 14:8, John 11:25-26).
The Christian faith is about relationships. Christianity is not a merit-based system.
I think that it’s human nature to keep trying to gravitate toward the way of the Pharisees. They knew the law, followed the law, and only saw the law, rather than the Maker of the law. It’s just so much simpler that way. It is so nice and tidy to believe that if we are good, then good things will happen to us. It’s a lot easier to sell than the verses that tell us that it rains on the just and the unjust. Churches can never make a real promise that God will do something material for you if you offer God x, y, and z.
God is a mysterious, autonomous, and all-knowing being that works so individually in all our lives. That’s why it’s possible for him to be good to the Iranian Christian who is called to die for his faith just as he is good to me, who has yet to ever experience that kind of persecution. What he offers us both is a relationship. That’s the whole deal. Give your life to him and be in his family. When we give our lives to him, we are promised to have a Father God there at all the meals. You have one you can pray to whenever you're afraid, or life doesn’t make sense. Sure, sometimes that means he responds with a miracle, but other times he just is there in the desert season with you and allows us to go through the tough thing. The point is just that we have each other through it all. That’s the whole of the story of God. He is the one who made us because, from the beginning, his desire has been to be with us (John 3, Revelation 3:20, Ezekiel 36:26).
The Bible and many scholars have so much more to say about our God and how he is so much more than a gift-giver. His plan for us is much greater than just allowing us to enjoy an easy life. The part that keeps many people away from Jesus is the reality that following Him takes grit and commitment, and it’s a journey that we have to remain committed to for as long as we are given life on this Earth. May God give us the strength and wisdom to find him each day, no matter what our circumstances.
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