Minor Thoughts from me to you

How important is good theology? Pretty important. Not only can bad theology give people a wrong picture of God, it can also cause them to do some pretty stupid things in the here and now. Take the "prosperity gospel" and the recent mortgage crash, for example. Time recently reported on the intersection between bad theology and bad economic decisions.

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants -- and hence, victims -- of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise -- that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life -- had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers."

... Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are "worthy of having more and doing more and being more." In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.

But Walton suggests that a decade's worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity's bloodstream. "The economic boom '90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message," he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. "Narratives of how 'God blessed me with my first house despite my credit' were common. Sermons declaring 'It's your season to overflow' supplanted messages of economic sobriety," and "little attention was paid to ... the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations."

It's sad. Americans have been richly blessed by God. America is the richest country in the world and our poor are wealthy than most of the "rich" in Africa. Our poor are fantastically well off compared to the poor in Asia, South America, or Central America. The Bible also has much to say about contentment. Rather than teaching their congregations to be both thankful for what they have and content with what they have, these pastors have been encouraging people's natural greed, covetousness, and discontent. As a result, many of these people have been directly hurt by the mortgage crash.

Not that these pastors need to be worried about my opinion. Ultimately, they will answer to God for how they've led His people. That's enough for me.