TIME Magazine has written about religion yet again.  This time it’s a piece called Does God Want You To Be Rich? – all about prosperity doctrine, or the teaching that God wants us to be happy and have stuff.

It’s an interesting article, slanted at times, painfully accurate most, holding a mirror up to the evangelical church in America.

It would be easy to jump in the parade and march to defeat the theology of Osteen and company, to call the prosperity preachers kooks for selling Jesus as a perpetually smiling Percocet popping grandpa with deep pockets.  But TIME’s finger is pointing in my chest too I think.

So some folks teach a God that wants us to have stuff and lots of it, and be beautiful and successful in the big house and nice car kind of way.  How’s that really any different from a church or Christian who…

  • says we’re to “worship God with excellence” and this means having the best lighting and best performers and best digital mixing console and best…?

  • has to dress up on Sunday morning, whether in slacks and a tie or in Diesel jeans and designer t-shirt, or they feel wrong (or less cool) somehow?

  • says God only wants ten percent of my income and wants me to spend the other ninety percent on me and mine.

  • demands “energetic”, “positive”, or “practical” teaching at all times in church?  (Practical, meaning I can use this to fix something like my finances or my kids right now in four easy steps.)

  • says “it was a total God thing” only when the house sells quickly or the paycheck is enough for the bills or the doctor says the test was negative – but never when the house sits on the market for two years, the paycheck isn’t enough and the doctor says, “It’s cancer”?

    Aren’t all these branches off the same tree: Viewing faith as a means to my ends and God as an always-pampering servant of mine.

    And non-Christians/non-religious/atheists aren’t off the hook either I suppose. (Why do I feel the need to add a smiley here for clarification of tone?) I wonder how all this applies to you.  I think it does.  Think about why you’re not religious/not Christian/atheist for me.  Religion seem too narrow minded for you?  Too unkind?  A real God wouldn’t be like the Christian God?  One way and all that junk?  Well, if there is a God, I mean just imagine there is for a minute, why would He have to be the kind of God you want Him to be?  Is it possible that there could be a God who said through Jesus “The way is narrow that leads to life” and “not everyone will find it” – is that possible, even though it makes you unhappy?  If God is really God, isn’t it likely and logical that He’ll do or say something sometime eventually that we humans, that you, that I, just don’t like?  Don’t think so?  Well, I wonder if you’re a prosperity preacher in atheist/universalist/non-religious clothing then.  I wonder.

    The pursuit of happiness.  It’s the thing that can make a church spend a million on a sound upgrade and the thing that keeps some others away from “organized religion” altogether.  God forbid God be or do anything that makes us unhappy.

    Yep.  With this big finger in my chest I don’t feel much like picking on Mr.Osteen this time.  Looks too much like the rest of us…to me.

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