Christianity, Crashes, and Special Experiences

Paul Harvey

Good stuff over at Immanent Frame:

First, a little follow-up on Darren's post from yesterday: "Christianity and the Crash," collects a number of scholarly responses to Hanna Rosin's article "Did Christianity Cause the Crash," from the December 2009 Atlantic. Our friends Anthea Butler and Jon Walton weigh in, along with Mark Taylor, Harvey Cox, and several others. Most point to the longevity and durability of the "prosperity gospel," and explore the issue in deeper ways than is possible in a magazine piece. I like Jon Walton's take:

To assert the relationship as causal, as several articles have, grants way too much credit to a motley crew of preachers while shifting our attention away from destructive governmental deregulatory policies and the pernicious speculatory financial practices of Wall Street. The financial sophistication of most of the prosperity preachers still remains at the level of how to collect more crumbled dollar bills in the bucket on Sunday. And, like most Americans, I am pretty sure Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar have little understanding of a derivative bubble or the implications of repealing the Glass Steagall Act. . . . . It seems there is plenty of blame to go around here. And I would prefer to start at the top and not the bottom.

The Study of Special Experiences: An Interview with Ann Taves, Nathan Schneider's interview with AAR President Ann Taves, explores the intersections in Taves's work between "religion" and "experience," and more broadly between the humanistic study of religion and the biological study of human experience. A brief excerpt:

NS: Why do you begin with the category of experience?

AT: For much of the twentieth century, scholars of religion considered “religious experience” central to the study of religion. In the last 20 years or so that approach came in for sharp criticism. Many scholars wanted to get away from it because it seemed to suggest an experiential essence of religion and turned instead to analyzing discourses about experience. But I don’t think we can afford to throw experience out, because embodied experience is where culture and biology meet.

NS: How can experience be resuscitated?

AT: I argue for a few basic moves. First of all, we have to take religious experience apart, to disaggregate it. Rather than “religious experience,” we can talk about “experiences deemed religious.” This better takes into account the process of how we make sense of experience—as religious or not—at many different levels, not all of them conscious. Next, I locate experience under the broader heading of consciousness studies, ranging from highly reflective, self-aware meta-consciousness to unconscious processes. Once we can put experience in that kind of framework, it is possible to look at the interpretive processes, or what I call attributional processes, to understand how certain kinds of experiences in certain kinds of contexts come to be understood as religious. I also explore what it means to ascribe or attribute religiousness to an experience across cultures and times, even in contexts where people aren’t using the word “religion” or some obviously related term to describe their experience.

God's Stimulus Package

Paul Harvey

Rev. Ike's passing and the financial crash of 2008 notwithstanding, the prosperity gospel rolls along, thanks to the likes of Rev. Kenneth Copeland and numerous others. Laurie Goodstein reports on this American perennial in today's NY Times. The nice conclusion to the piece:

“Any time a worried thought about money pops up in your mind,” Mr. Savelle continued, “the next thing you do is sow”: drop money, like seeds, in “good ground” like the preachers’ ministries. “Stop worrying, start sowing,” he added, his voice rising. “That’s God’s stimulus package for you.” At that, hundreds streamed down the aisles to the stage, laying envelopes, cash and coins on the carpeted steps.

Jon Walton calls the subjects of the piece "spiritual pickpockets." He also, in a separate piece, reports on the role of Kenneth Copeland and numerous other properity preachers in battling health care reform and spreading the urban myths about death panels and the like (something I can confirm after a survey of local AM radio here in the heartland of the libertarian/religious right, where our system of paying more and getting less apparently must be preserved, and the uninsured are the equivalent of the undeserving). That's one way to go viral, I guess. Jon points out the financial stake Copeland et all have in keeping their followers away from quality affordable health care:

But, then again, maybe Copeland’s own personal wealth is dependent on his follower’s bad health. If some of his “financial partners” had the privilege of receiving medical care for their illnesses, maybe they wouldn’t be as quick to put money at Copeland’s altar in hopes of their healing.

Religion and Politics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere


Jonathan Walton, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, has just published Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism with NYU Press.

Here's more:

Through their constant television broadcasts, mass video distributions, and printed publications, African American religious broadcasters have a seemingly ubiquitous presence in popular culture. They are on par with popular entertainers and athletes in the African American community as cultural icons even as they are criticized by others for taking advantage of the devout in order to subsidize their lavish lifestyles.

For these reasons questions abound. Do televangelists proclaim the message of the gospel or a message of greed? Do they represent the “authentic” voice of the black church or the Christian Right in blackface? Does the phenomenon reflect orthodox “Christianity” or ethnocentric “Americaninity” wrapped in religious language?

Watch This! seeks to move beyond such polarizing debates by critically delving into the dominant messages and aesthetic styles of African American televangelists and evaluating their ethical implications.

With an early focus on Rev. Ike and initial versions of the prosperity message, Walton places the contemporary phenomenon of black religious broadcasting in historical perspective, demonstrating that the types of syncretic and sensational black Christian practices witnessed on today's airwaves have been brewing within African American storefronts and on black religious radio for the majority of the twentieth century. He goes on to illumine the diversity of theology and social thought among popular black religious broadcasters in order to delineate the differences among figures often lumped together as monolithic.

In so doing, Watch This! provides a principled ethical analysis that situates televangelists against a larger cultural backdrop, evaluating them according to their own self-understandings and ecclesial agendas. From T.D. Jakes to Bishop Eddie Long to Pastor Creflo Dollar, Walton argues that despite their emphasis on social and economic advancement in the African American community, these leaders ministries frustrate their own liberatory aims and unwittingly reinforce class, racial, and gender injustices in America.

Such a nuanced examination of black religious broadcasting is certain to enrich our understanding of this prevalent and pervasive form of popular and political culture.


A regular writer for Religion Dispatches, you should check out his blog as well.


In other news, Billy Graham is the subjct of a new book by Steven P. Miller. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South situates the noted evangelist in the South in order to explore his role in the politics of the region and the nation as a whole.


Here's more:

While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration.

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment.

Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

Our Turn to Prosper

Paul Harvey

Matt Sutton's review of It's a New Day, Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement was just featured as the Book of the Week review at Books and Culture. The book focuses especially on African American and female ministers who have become prominent in Pentecostal-charismatic movements. Billingsley aims to portray these people mostly through their own words and stories, Sutton says, and succeeds in doing so. Sutton raises some important questions that naturally arise from this survey:

Billingsley has done an admirable job of identifying many of the key players in the charismatic movement, but he never sufficiently addresses the more interesting question of why so many of the most influential African American and female ministers in the United States have embraced the prosperity gospel. What does it mean that these ministers would move from a traditionally world-denying creed to one that not only tolerates the accumulation of wealth but actually celebrates consumption? What does this illustrate about religion in the United States?

. . . Neither the civil rights nor the feminist movements explain the success of the Word of Faith gospel. Instead, these leaders' promotion of conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of wealth as divinely mandated, rather than devilishly inspired, may illuminate better than anything else what is driving the success of their movement. Against all odds, they have created a faith that affirms rather than challenges the materialism and extravagances of American culture. Indeed, it is a new day.

Poor Richard and God's Profits

PAUL HARVEY

Sarah Posner, author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, follows the machinations of the "Word of Faith" theologians -- James Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, et al. -- whose over-the-top fundraising techniques and other questionable practices have drawn scrutiny from Congress. An excerpt from the book can be found here (showing that "Word of Faith preachers often give lip service to their church's community service projects yet worship at the altar of hyperindividualism and unregulated capitalism" -- sound familiar?).

Unlike Ted Haggard, gay sex scandals from some insiders have not been able to bring these guys down. Why? Health and wealth theology is just too deeply interwwined with the American religious fabric. Every evangelical generation throws its heroes up the pop charts.

While listening to Posner being interviewed on the radio, I was, conveniently for thinking about blog entries, reading Jill Lepore's latest essay in the New Yorker: "The Creed: What Poor Richard cost Benjamin Franklin." Franklin's irrepressibly punning and scatological humor fed right into the health and wealth gospel of future generations. Americans missed the joke and took the moral. Lepore writes:

Franklin finished his little essay ["The Way to Wealth"} at sea, on July 7, 1757. When he reached England, he sent it back on the first westbound vessel. It was published as the Preface to “Poor Richard Improved, 1758,” although it was soon reprinted, in at least a hundred and forty-five editions and six languages even before the eighteenth century was over, usually with the title “The Way to Wealth.” “It long ago passed from literature into the general human speech,” Carl Van Doren wrote in 1938, in an extraordinarily elegant biography of Franklin. This year marks the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of “The Way to Wealth,” among the most famous pieces of American writing ever, and one of the most willfully misunderstood. A lay sermon about how industry begets riches (No Gains, without Pains), “The Way to Wealth” has been taken for Benjamin Franklin’s—and even America’s—creed, and there’s a line or two of truth in that, but not a whole page. “The Way to Wealth” is also a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.

How's this for a TBN Special: A Frankin re-enactor delivering Franklin's iconic, and ironic, morals to an audience just divested of wallets.

He could start with: Serving God is Doing good to Man, but Praying is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen.

Or: He that lives upon Hope, dies farting (or "fasting," depending on whether you think it was a printer's error -- either one will do).