Everybody rightly makes fun of the pseudo-Christian preachers of a "prosperity gospel", when their message becomes too crude, short-termist and monetary - e.g. those US televangelists who state that if you contribute to their church, you will get a better paid jobs, or suchlike.
But the prosperity gospel in a "Lite" version is actually very common among Christians; I mean the belief that those who lead their lives in accordance with Christian beliefs and practices will survive and thrive in socio-economic ways.
For instance; proponents of PGL may state or imply that being Christian will help you to have a successful business, get the girl/s, be a "real" man, attract admiration from "real" men etc.
And the flip-side of Prosperity Gospel Lite are negative assumptions such as "get woke, go broke" and the assumption that leftist men are despised by the desirable girls. It is PGL to imply that conforming to the mainstream ideology usually leads to failure.
The major theme of justification for the PGL is that Christianity is the Truth, and that living in accordance with reality is likely to be more successful than a deluded existence of obedience to a false and virtual world.
At root, all this is false, because it is a roundabout way of asserting that Christianity is expedient.
It has never been true, except insofar as State Christianity was sometimes, in some places, sufficiently powerful, true and uncorrupt; that a life of faithful church-obedience could be a reliable route to worldly success.
But in our current overwhelmingly atheistic, materialistic, leftist world; the expedient path of worldly triumph leads away from Christianity - at least over the predictable short to medium-term.
Optimism about success in this world is one thing; being-Christian is another.
Christians need to be clear about what their religion actually is about, primarily and essentially; and that is our positive desire and intent to attain salvation: resurrected eternal life in Heaven.
Implications about this mortal existence flow backwards from this post-mortal intent.
There is no general reason why "being a Christian" would necessarily lead towards a "successful" (high status, wealthy, comfortable, pleasurable, healthy, pain-free) mortal life; and indeed there are plenty of reasons why it would not.
2 comments:
the easiest thing to do is defend a position that benefits us here and now. I see this with the LDS people. since the church offers (or used to), in some ways, a good community and family structure and all that, especially by comparison, the Gospel gets mistaken for these things. which explains why, even though it's deteriorating there too at rapid speed (from what i can see), they can't bring themselves to see it. a microcosm of the wider west. the world keeps getting nastier, and few seem to register the surreal horror of it all. Jesus said we would know the truth and it would set us free - and this for sure includes freedom from the lies we tell ourselves about the real state of things.
so i think there is a subtler form of this prosperity gospel lite, which is related to your point about 'optimism'. the idea that 'by becoming christian' (and in this case, what really matters is buying into the omni-ideas) you can achieve a certain level of psychic comfort. you don't have to face the nastiness, you can pretend it will all go away, or it's all a temporary illusion with no eternal consequence, because God is in total control of everything, evil has no real power, nothing can be really lost or destroyed or defiled in this life. and so one is able to keep living, pretending that the truth of things, obvious as it is, is not really true - because the omni ideology makes it impossible. perhaps the name here should be 'therapy gospel'.
it's as if they believe Frodo could not but destroy the Ring, in the end, so that there are no real stakes at all, and all the wounds and trauma will be erased as if they never happened. and then, of course, even after he does destroy the Ring, he would refuse to face what happened and was still happening in the Shire.
@Laeth - Yes!
Excellent comment.
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