Back in the fall of 1978, a month or so before I would turn in my
resignation from the SWP—a victim of the “turn”—I was selling the
Militant newspaper at the entrance to a grocery store in Kansas
City on a Saturday afternoon as a middle-aged, matronly looking
woman approached. She looked at me and smiled, then pointed to a
Buick sedan in the parking lot, and announced “See that car? Jesus
got me that car.”
This was my introduction to the “prosperity gospel”, the subject
of an eye-opening article (Mammon from heaven: The prosperity
gospel in recession) by Benjamin Anastas that appeared in the
March 2010 Harper’s. Like most articles in this very fine
magazine, it is behind a subscriber’s firewall but you can read it
on the Jehovah’s Witnesses website, of all places. Here’s a key
passage:
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “No one can serve two
masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or
else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot
serve God and Mammon.” Jesus slept in animal stalls and lived off
the charity of women. He left the world with no possessions, and
he cared especially for the least among us and the “poor in
spirit.” His only act of violence in the Gospels occurs when he
overturns the tables of the moneychangers and drives them out of
Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. “My house shall be called a house of
prayer,” He said. “But you have made it a den of thieves.”
In America—and, increasingly, around the world—an alternative
gospel has emerged, one in which Jesus was a small businessman and
entrepreneur, his disciples were men of relative wealth, and when
the Son of Man traveled, he didn’t go coach. This theology is
known as the “prosperity gospel,” and among its most common tenets
is the belief that God wants His children to enjoy health,
happiness, and wealth now and not as an eternal reward in Heaven.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/the-prosperity-gospel/
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