FIVE
God Wants You
to Be Rich
The most eye-catching religious development of the late twentieth century was the revival of fire-and-brimstone Calvinism known as the Christian right. But while its foremost representatives, televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, hurled denunciations at “sinners” like gays and feminists and predicted the imminent end of the world, a friendlier approach was steadily gaining ground—positive thinking, disguised now as Christianity. Calvinism and positive thinking had last squared off in the nineteenth century, when positive thinking was still known as New Thought, and they did so again near the turn of the twenty-first century, not in public clashes but in a quiet fight for market share—television audiences, book sales, and ever-growing congregations. Promulgated from the pulpit, the message of positive thinking reached white-collar suburbanites who had so far encountered it only at work, as well as millions of low-wage and blue-collar people who had not yet encountered it at all.
By any quantitative measure, the most successful preachers today are the positive thinkers, who no longer mention sin and usually have little to say about those standard whipping boys of the Christian right, abortion and homosexuality. Gone is the threat of hell and the promise of salvation, along with the grim story of Jesus’s torment on the cross; in fact, the cross has been all but banished from the largest and most popular temples of the new evangelism, the megachurches. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of megachurches—defined as having a weekly attendance of two thousand or more—doubled to 1,210, giving them a combined congregation of nearly 4.4 million. 1
Instead of harsh judgments and harrowing tales of suffering and redemption, the new positive theology offered at megachurches (and many smaller churches) offers promises of wealth, success, and health in this life now, or at least very soon. You can have that new car or house or necklace, because God wants to “prosper you.” In a 2006 Time poll, 17 percent of all American Christians, of whatever denomination or church size, said they consider themselves to be part of a “prosperity gospel” movement and a full 61 percent agreed with the statement that “God wants people to be prosperous.” 2 How do you get prosperity to “manifest” in your life? Not through the ancient technique of prayer but through positive thinking. As one reporter observes of the megachurch message:
Often resembling motivational speeches, the sermons are generally about how to live a successful life—or, “Jesus meets the power of positive thinking.” They are encouraging, upbeat and usually follow on the heels of a music and video presentation. (After this, the last thing those in attendance want to hear is a sermon about “doom and gloom.”) One will often hear phrases such as “Keep a good attitude,” “Don’t get negative or bitter,” “Be determined” and “Shake it off and step up.” 3
Televangelist Joyce Meyer writes that “I believe that more than any other thing, our attitude is what determines the kind of life we are going to have”—not our piety or faith but our attitude. “It’s especially important to maintain a positive attitude,” she explains on her Web site, “because God is positive.”
Like many other proponents of the new theology, Meyer has good reason to be “positive.” Her ministries—which extend to weight loss and self-esteem—have made her the centimillionaire owner of a private jet and a $23,000 antique marble toilet. So egregious is the wealth of top positive-thinking evangelists—much of it, of course, tax-deductible—that in 2007 Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) launched an investigation, not only of Meyer but of televangelists Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. If these pastors have been incautious about displaying their wealth, it’s because, like secular motivational speakers, they hold themselves up as role models for success. Follow me, is the message—send money, tithe to my church, employ the methods outlined in my books—and you will become like me.
Joel Osteen of Houston’s Lakewood Church is hardly a high roller among the positive evangelists. He flies in commercial planes and owns only one home, but he has been dubbed the “rock star” of the new gospel and called “America’s most influential Christian” by the Church Report magazine. 4 Unlike many others who make their money by motivating people, Osteen has no history of painful obstacles overcome through sheer grit and determination. He inherited his church from his father, assuming the pulpit with no theological training after dropping out of Oral Roberts University. Once ensconced, he “grew” the church at a furious rate, till today it boasts a weekly attendance of forty thousand people and a weekly income of a million dollars. Osteen doesn’t collect a salary from his church—there are already three hundred people on its payroll—because he is apparently content to live off his royalties. His first book, Your Best Life Now, has sold about four million copies, leading to what was said to be an advance of $13 million for the sequel, Become a Better You.
Osteen’s books are easy to read, too easy—like wallowing in marshmallows. There is no argument, no narrative arc, just one anecdote following another, starring Osteen and his family members, various biblical figures, and a host of people identified by first name only. A criticism directed at Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s applies just as well to Osteen’s oeuvre: “The chapters of his books could easily be transposed from the beginning to the middle, or from the end to the beginning, or from one book to another. The paragraphs could be shuffled and rearranged in any order.” 5 One of the best of Osteen’s anecdotes involves a man who goes on a cruise ship carrying a suitcase full of crackers and cheese because he doesn’t realize that meals are included with the price of his ticket. In other words, there’s plenty for everyone—wealth, delightful buffet meals—if only we are prepared to demonstrate our faith by tithing generously to the church. His worst anecdotes, however, make the eyes glaze over, if not actually close, like the one that begins: “Growing up, my family had a dog named Scooter. He was a great big German shepherd, and he was the king of the neighborhood. Scooter was strong and fast, always chasing squirrels here and there, always on the go. Everybody knew not to mess with Scooter. One day my dad was out riding his bicycle. . . .” 6
How to achieve the success, health, and happiness God wants you to have? Osteen’s proffered technique is lifted directly from the secular positive thinkers—visualization. Other positive evangelists often emphasize the spoken word as well, and the need to speak your dream into existence through “positive confessions of faith and victory over your life.” As Kenneth Hagin, one of the first positive preachers and a role model for Osteen, puts it: “Instead of speaking according to natural circumstances out of your head, learn to speak God’s Word from your spirit. Begin to confess God’s promises of life and health and victory into your situation. Then you can begin to enjoy God’s abundant life as you have what you say!” 7 For Osteen and Hagin, as for Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale before them, success comes mainly through “reprogramming” your mind into positive mental images, based on what amounts to the law of attraction: “You will produce what you’re continually seeing in your mind,” Osteen promises. “Almost like a magnet,” he writes, echoing Hill, “we draw in what we constantly think about.” As evidence, Osteen offers many small “victories” in his life, like getting out of a speeding ticket and finding a parking space—not just any space, but “the premier spot in that parking lot.” He suggests that the technique will also work “in a crowded restaurant”: “You can say, ‘Father, I thank you that I have favor with this hostess, and she’s going to seat me soon.’ ” 8
But Osteen’s universe is not entirely tension-free. Within his world of easy wish fulfillment an “enemy” lurks, and it is negative thinking: “The enemy says you’re not able to succeed; God says you can do all things through Christ. . . . The enemy says you’ll never amount to anything; God says He will raise you up and make your life significant. The enemy says your problems are too big, there’s no hope; God says He will solve those problems.” 9 Robert Schuller, another leading positive pastor, invokes the same “enemy,” advising his readers to “never verbalize a negative emotion” because to do so would mean “giving in and surrendering your will to an enemy.” 10 Neither of these preachers personifies the “enemy” as Satan or condemns negative thinking as a sin; in fact, they never refer to either Satan or sin. But the old Calvinist Manichaeism persists in their otherwise sunny outlook: on the one side is goodness, godliness, and light; on the other is darkness and . . . doubt.
The God of Victory
There is nothing to mark Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which I visited in the summer of 2008, as sanctified territory—no crosses, no stained glass windows, no images of Jesus. From my hotel room window, just across a six-lane highway from the church, it’s a squat, warehouse like structure completely at home among the high-rise office buildings surrounding it. In fact, it used to be the Compaq Center, home stadium of the Houston Rockets, until Osteen acquired it in 1999 and transformed the interior into a 16,000-seat megachurch. Entering through an underground parking lot, I arrive in a cheery child-care area decorated with cartoon figures and lacking only popcorn to complete the resemblance to a suburban multiplex theater. Even the sanctuary, the former basketball court, carries on in this godless way. Instead of an altar, there is a stage featuring a rotating globe and flanked by artificial rocks enlivened with streams or what appears, at least, to be flowing water. I can find nothing suggestive of Christianity until I ascend to the second-floor bookstore—a sort of denatured and heavily censored version of Barnes and Noble, prominently displaying Joel Osteen’s works, along with scores of products like scented candles and dinnerware embossed with scriptural quotes. Here, at last, are the crosses—large ones for wall hangings and discreet ones on vases, key chains, and mugs or stitched into ties and argyll socks.
The Osteens—Joel and his copastor and wife, Victoria—when they step forth on the stage for Sunday service to a standing ovation are an attractive couple in their forties, but Joel is not quite the “walking advertisement for the success creed” I had read him described as. 11 He is shorter than she is, although on his book cover he appears at least two inches taller; his suit seems too large; and, what is also not evident in the book jacket photos, his curly, heavily gelled black hair has been styled into a definite mullet. She wears a ruffled white blouse with a black vest and slacks that do not quite mesh together at the waist, leaving a distracting white gap. In one way, the two of them seem perfectly matched, or at least symmetrical: his mouth is locked into the inverted triangle of his trademark smile, while her heavy dark brows stamp her face with angry tension, even when the mouth is smiling.
The production values are more sophisticated than the pastors themselves. Live music, extremely loud Christian rock devoid of any remotely African-derived beat, alternates with short bursts of speech in a carefully choreographed pattern. Joel, Victoria, or a senior pastor speaks for three to five minutes—their faces hugely amplified on the three large video screens above and to the sides of the stage—perhaps ending with a verbal segue into the next song, then stepping back as the chorus and lead singers move to center stage. All the while lights on the ceiling change color, dim and brighten, and occasionally flash, strobelike, to the beat. It’s not stand-up-and-boogie music, but most of the congregation at least stands, sways, and raises an arm or two during the musical interludes, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of themselves on the video screens as the cameras pan the audience. “Disney,” mutters the friend who has accompanied me, the wife of a local Baptist minister. But this is just a taping, and the twelve thousand or so of us in the sanctuary (the seats do not fill at either Sunday morning service) are only a studio audience. The real show, an edited version of what we are watching, will reach about seven million television viewers.
Inadvertently, I have come on a Sunday of immense importance to the Osteens, one of the greatest turning points, they aver, in their lives. In the preceding week, a court had dismissed charges against Victoria for assaulting and injuring a flight attendant. The incident occurred in 2005, when they boarded the first-class cabin of a flight bound for Vail, the ski resort, only to leave—or be thrown off —the plane after Victoria raised a fuss over a small “stain” or “spill” on the armrest of her seat. She demanded that the flight attendant remove the stain immediately, and when the flight attendant refused because she was busy helping other passengers board, Victoria insisted, allegedly attempting to enter the cockpit and complain to the pilots. Victoria ended up paying a $3,000 fine imposed by the FAA, and the matter would have ended there if the recalcitrant flight attendant had not brought suit demanding 10 percent of Victoria Osteen’s net worth in compensation for alleged injuries, including hemorrhoids and a “loss of faith” due to her mistreatment by a leading evangelist.
My friend’s husband, the Baptist minister, had predicted when we had coffee on Saturday that the Osteens’ Sunday service would make no mention of the whole ugly business. Why would they want to revive the image of Victoria behaving, as another attendant on the plane had testified, like a “combative diva”? He was wrong. Both Sunday services are given over to Victoria’s “victory” in court. When Joel steps forth at the beginning of the service, he covers his face with his hands, peekaboo fashion, for several seconds, and when he removes them his eyes are red and his smile is in temporary remission. He then takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket and rubs his eyes vigorously, although no tears are visible on his magnified video image. “It’s not just a victory for us,” he announces. “It’s a victory for God’s kingdom,” hence the entire service will be a “celebration.” As the service proceeds, he tells us that he spent his time at the trial writing out scriptural quotes and shows us the yellow legal pad he used. He shares a long, muddled anecdote about how he had ended up wearing the suit he intended to testify in although he hadn’t known he was going to testify on that particular day, because he couldn’t “find another suit,” leaving us to think that he owns no more than two. More ominously, he tells us that God “is against those who are against us.”
When Victoria takes center stage, she’s as triumphant as David doing his victory dance through the streets of Jerusalem, even briefly jumping up and down in joy. The “situation,” as she calls it, was difficult and humiliating, but “I placed a banner of victory over my head”—figuratively, I assume, and not as an actual scarf. Oddly, there are no lessons learned, no humility acquired through adversity, not even any conventional expressions of gratitude to her husband for standing by her. This seems shabby even by the standards of that other positive preacher Robert Schuller of Orange County’s megachurch, the Crystal Cathedral. When he had a similar altercation with a first-class flight attendant in 1997—such are the hazards of commercial air travel when you are accustomed to having your own servants—he ended up apologizing in court. But for Victoria, the only takeaways are that “we can’t be bogged down by circumstances” and “don’t lick your wounds,” which echo Joel’s constant exhortations to be “a victor, not a victim.” In fact, sometime in the interval since the incident, God had revealed that he wanted her to write a book, and—good news!—it will be coming out in October, followed by a children’s book a few months later.
I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman, who happened in this case to be African American. The crowd, which is about two-thirds black and Latino and appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically, many raising their arms, palms up, to the deity who engineered her triumph. Maybe they hadn’t followed the case or maybe they are just trying to snatch a little of Victoria’s victory for themselves, because the message to this largely working-class congregation seems to be that they, too, will triumph, as Victoria has, because that is God’s promise to them. It just may take a little time, because theirs seems to be a forgetful God, who has to be “reminded” of his promises, Joel told us. “Remember your promises,” one of the songs goes, “remember your people, remember your children,” as if addressing a deadbeat dad. Focus on what you want, in other words, and eventually, after many importunings, God will give it to you.
There are traces of the old Christianity at Lakewood Church—or perhaps I should say traces of religion in general—lingering like the echoes of archaic chthonic cults that could still be found in classical Greek mythology and ritual. “God” makes many appearances, often as “God in Christ Jesus,” and Victoria refers often to anointings with oil—something she says she had wanted to do to “that whole courtroom.” Joel makes much of the fact that a turning point in the trial occurred on “8/8/08,” which he claims has some biblical numerological significance. At a small group meeting (very small, about twelve people in a room with 108 seats) I attended on Saturday evening, the speaker endorsed the Jewish dietary laws, or at least the avoidance of pork and shellfish, although most Christians believe that these laws were lifted two thousand years ago by Peter and Paul. But where is Christianity in all this? Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, “If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also”?
Even God plays only a supporting role, and by no means an indispensable one, in the Osteens’ universe. Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction—that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes—you have granted humans omnipotence.
All of these departures from the Christian tradition have already been noted with shocked disapproval—by Christians. My Baptist friends in Houston can only shake their heads in dismay at Osteen’s self-serving theology. On scores of Christian Web sites, you can find Osteen and other positive pastors denounced as “heretics,” “false Christians,” even as associates of the devil, sometimes on highly technical grounds (Joyce Meyer has put forth the idiosyncratic view that Jesus served time in hell to spare us from that experience), but more often for the obvious reasons: they put Mammon over God; they ignore the reality of sin; they reduce God to a servant of man; they trivialize a spiritually demanding religious tradition. On a 2007 60 Minutes segment on Osteen, a theology professor, Reverend Michael Horton, dismissed Osteen’s worldview as “a cotton candy gospel” that omits Christianity’s ancient and powerful themes of sin, suffering, and redemption. As for the central notion of positive theology—that God stands ready to give you anything you want—Horton describes this as “heresy,” explaining that “it makes religion about us instead of about God.”
Secular Roots
Whatever decorative touches positive preaching retains from the Christian tradition, its genealogy can be traced more or less directly to nineteenth-century New Thought. New Thought has its own extant denominations, like Christian Science and the smaller Unity Church, which arose in 1891 and, like Christian Science, was based on Phineas Parkhurst Quimby’s teachings. Kansas pastor Will Bowen, author of A Complaint Free World and inventor of the purple complaint-free wristband, is a Unity minister, as is Edwene Gaines, who illustrates in her book, The Four Pillars of Prosperity, a breathtakingly bossy attitude toward God. When the two hundred dollars she needed for a plane ticket failed to materialize, she writes, “I sat down and gave God a severe talking-to. I said, ‘Now look here, God! . . . As far as I know, I’ve done every single thing that I know to do in order to manifest this trip to Mexico City. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. So now I’m going to go right down to that travel agent and when I get there, that money had better be there!’ ” 12
Other streams feeding into modern positive theology can also be traced, ultimately, to the teachings of that nineteenth-century Maine clockmaker Phineas Quimby. Norman Vincent Peale, as we have seen, drew on New Thought sources, and his most prominent successor today is Robert Schuller, who in 1958 enlisted Peale himself to help build up the congregation of Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. Like Peale, Schuller teaches a form of mental reprogramming based on visualization, affirmation, and repetition, only he marks it as his own by calling it “possibility thinking” instead of “positive thinking.” But by the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of pastors were finding their way to New Thought without any help from Peale. Kenneth Hagin, considered the father of the Word of Faith movement, sometimes called “Word Faith” or the “prosperity gospel,” derived his ideas from the work of the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century evangelist E. W. Kenyon, whose ideas in turn have been painstakingly traced back to secular New Thought by D. R. McConnell. 13 Among Hagin’s acolytes were Joel Osteen’s father, John Osteen, as well as the first African American televangelist, Fred Price. Introduced to Hagin’s work by a friend, Price later wrote, “I went home that night and read every single book [by Hagin] and I was changed forever. It was like the scales came off my eyes.” 14 The Word of Faith message resonated powerfully with African Americans, who were eager to see the gains of the civil rights movement transformed into upward mobility. Another prominent prosperity preacher was the Harlem-based Frederick Eikerenkoetter, or “Reverend Ike,” who had been a traditional fundamentalist until the midsixties, when he discovered what he called “Mind Science,” derived from his reading of New Thought literature. 15 Sporting an enormous pompadour, he taught that poverty resulted from a wrong attitude and proved the correctness of his own thinking by acquiring a fleet of Cadillacs appointed in mink.
Contemporary Word of Faith preachers encourage a sense of brash entitlement, as in this commercial for the Atlanta-based Creflo Dollar’s videotape series Laying Hold of Your Inheritance: Getting What’s Rightfully Yours, described by religious scholar Milmon Harrison:
“Yo quiero lo mio!” a young Hispanic woman unflinchingly demands. She seems to be looking right at me across the distance between her as a televised image and me as a bleary-eyed, early-Sunday-morning-before-church channel surfer. “I want my stuff —RIGHT NOW!” a professionally dressed African American man demands, bouncing boxer-style on his toes for extra emphasis. An African American woman signs the phrase with an intensity that mirrors that of the spoken words. So forcefully do they convey a sense of authority and urgency as they lay their claim to their “stuff ” that I find myself caught up in the collective effervescence of the moment. It is all I can do to keep myself from adding mine to their chorus of voices. “YEAH, I WANT MY STUFF RIGHT NOW, TOO!” 16
Mary Baker Eddy would not have put it so baldly, but she had articulated this vision of an all-giving God, or universe, just waiting for our orders, more than a century earlier.
With Christian Science and the Unity Church, positive thinking had carved out a home within American Protestantism more than a hundred years ago. So why did it suddenly became such a prominent force at the end of the twentieth century? One possible explanation is simple contagion: churches are influenced by secular trends, and certainly by the 1990s there was no dodging the positive thinking available in the business literature, the self-help books, and even weight-loss plans. Joel Osteen, for example, might have picked up the tenets of positive thinking from his father or in conversations with Houston businessmen or from any number of books available in the business sections of airport bookstores. Most observers agree, though, that there has been a trend within Protestantism that increasingly disposes it toward the old New Thought, and that trend is the “church growth movement.” Starting in the eighties and accelerating in the last two decades, churches have increasingly sacrificed doctrinal tradition to embrace growth for its own sake, and positive thinking turns out to be a crucial catalyst for growth. Of the four largest megachurches in the United States, three offer the “prosperity gospel.” 17 The other, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, although hostile to the crass prosperity gospel, is definitely within the positive theology camp—long on “purpose” and opportunity, short on sin and redemption.
Corporate Churches
Size has always been a criterion for the success of a faith, although not the only one. Especially in the mainstream denominations, ministers seemed content for years to preach the same gospel, in the same church building, accompanied by the same music, even if this meant an increasing concentration on burying a dying congregation. The decline of mainstream church membership in the latter part of the twentieth century prodded a new generation of self-styled “pastorpreneurs” to try a fresh approach based on “strategic thinking” and “the aggressive goals of business.” 18 Looking out on the American suburbs, they felt like missionaries facing a heathen population. Here were millions of people who professed to be believers yet remained “unchurched.” In the “church growth movement” that had begun to emerge in the midfifties, energetic pastors drew on the experience of real missionaries in places like India, asking themselves, in effect, “How can we make our religion more congenial to the natives?” or, in the American setting, “What does it take to fill our parking lots?” To critics of growth for its own sake, and there are many—see, for example, the series “Is Church Growth the Highway to Hell?” on the Web site Church Marketing Sucks—an Atlanta Baptist church responded in a pamphlet: “A church gets big because its spirit is big. . . . Nobody ever started a business without hoping that someday, if he or she worked hard enough, it would be a big success. That is the American dream, isn’t it?” 19
In the new business-oriented approach to Christianity, you didn’t start by opening a church and hoping that people would be drawn in by newspaper announcements of the services. You started by finding out what people wanted from a church. Pastors Robert Schuller, Rick Warren, and Bill Hybels did the groundwork for their megachurches by conducting surveys of potential parishioners, and what they found was that people did not want “church,” or at least anything like the church they had experienced in childhood. If this were corporate market research, the company might have thrown up its hands and decided to abandon the product line, but enterprising pastors concluded that they simply had to reconfigure the old product. Hard pews were replaced with comfortable theater seats, sermons were interspersed with music, organs were replaced with guitars. And in a remarkable concession to the tastes of the unchurched—or, as they are also called, “seekers”—the megachurches by and large scuttled all the icons and symbols of conventional churches—crosses, steeples, and images of Jesus. Crosses, in particular, according to religious historian Randall Balmer, might affect the unchurched as they do vampires: they could “intimidate or frighten visitors.” 20
To further assuage the theophobia of the public, megachurches are typically designed to fit seamlessly into the modernist corporate-style environment that they inhabit. Gothic cathedrals were designed to counter the mundane world with a vision of transcendence, and to engage the imagination with the rich details of their ornamentation. The Protestant Reformation threw out the gargoyles and images of tortured saints but retained, in church design, a clean-lined rebuke to the secular world. Not so the megachurches, which seem bent on camouflaging themselves as suburban banks or school buildings. Surveying megachurches in 2005, the architect and writer Wytold Rybczynski found them, like Lakewood, “resolutely secular” in design. He wrote of Willow Creek Community Church, outside Chicago, for example, that “it doesn’t look like a place of worship, but what does it look like? A performing-arts center, a community college, a corporate headquarters? . . . Inspiring it’s not. It’s the architectural equivalent of the three-piece business suit that most nondenominational pastors favor.” 21
And that is apparently the desired result—to “lower the threshold between the church and the secular world,” as journalist Frances Fitzgerald writes, and reassure the “seeker” that he or she has not stumbled into some spiritual dimension different from that occupied by the standard bank or office building. To the Christian artist Bruce Bezaire, that is precisely what’s wrong with corporate-style churches: “While we might legitimately contemplate the degradation of a culture’s sense of Beauty when it has turned away from God, I’m concerned about the church’s understanding of God when it has turned away from Beauty. What does stepping into a gray drywall box contribute to our experience of reverence, joy, exaltation, worship?” 22 But for others, the corporate camouflage seems to work. A member of the Lakewood congregation, a semiretired schoolteacher, told me that because she had been forced to go to Catholic school as a child and “hated everything about it,” she was completely comfortable in the visually desolate environment of Lakewood, adding, “Church is not a building, it’s in your heart.”
When pastors surveyed their catchment areas, they found that what people did want was entertainment—rock or rocklike music, for example—and they wanted an array of services like child care and support for people dealing with divorce, addiction, or difficult teenagers. Missionary churches in the Third World had long ago learned to attract people with bits of local music and culture, as well as with church-affiliated schools and health services. In line with consumer demand, today’s megachurches are multiservice centers offering pre-and after-school programs, sports, teen activities, recovery programs, employment help, health fairs, support groups for battered women and people going through divorce, even aerobics classes and weight-lifting rooms. American churches—mega and not so mega—have filled in with the kinds of services that might, in more generous nations, be provided by the secular welfare state.
But megachurch pastors took a further step that no missionary would have contemplated. A missionary might have accommodated to the local population with stylistic changes and the addition of social services, but only as a means to preach the “word,” the core beliefs of Christianity regarding sin and salvation. Even in the interest of attracting more parishioners, he would not have gone so far as to adopt reincarnation or the notion of plural deities. Not so the pastorpreneurs, who have been willing to abandon traditional Christian teachings insofar as they might be overly challenging or disturbing. One thing that church market research revealed was that people definitely did not want to be harangued about sin and made to feel in any way bad about themselves. If you have only one day a week not given over to work or errands and laundry, you probably do not want to spend even an hour of it being warned of imminent punishment in hell. Megachurches and those aspiring to that status needed a substitute for the more demanding core of Christian teachings, and that has been, for the most part, positive thinking—not because it is biblically “true” or supported by scripture but because it produces satisfied “customers”—as some megachurch pastors refer to them—like the megachurch member who told the Christian Science Monitor, “We love it. We don’t miss a Sunday. The message is always very positive and the music is great.” 23 Most positive preachers see no tension between their message and traditional Christian doctrine. God is good, so he wants the best for us, or, as Joyce Meyer puts it, “I believe God wants to give us nice things.” 24
A positive message not only sold better to the public than the “old-time religion” but also had a growing personal relevance to pastors, who increasingly came to see themselves not as critics of the secular, materialistic world but as players within it—businessmen or, more precisely, CEOs. This is not an idle conceit. While old-style churches—“minichurches,” perhaps we should call them— handled budgets in the low six-figure range, megachurches take in and spend millions of dollars a year and employ hundreds of people, making their pastors the equivalent of many CEOs in the sheer scale of the enterprises they head up. Size alone dictates a businesslike approach to church management, and most megachurch pastors took their organizational model directly from the corporate playbook. For example, the Economist reports that at Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek Community Church:
The corporate theme is not just a matter of appearances. Willow Creek has a mission statement (“to turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ”) and a management team, a seven-step strategy and a set of ten core values. The church employs two MBAs—one from Harvard and one from Stanford—and boasts a consulting arm. It has even been given the ultimate business accolade: it is the subject of a Harvard Business School case-study. 25
Megachurch pastors may even consort with real CEOs and be flattered to think of themselves as companions to these hard-headed men of the world. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church has been mingling with the “masters of the universe” at Davos for years, and in a New Yorker article Malcolm Gladwell quoted him as saying:
“I had dinner with Jack Welch last Sunday night. . . . He came to church, and we had dinner. I’ve been kind of mentoring him on his spiritual journey. And he said to me, ‘Rick, you are the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’m Rupert’s pastor! Rupert published my book!’ ” Then he tilted back his head and gave one of those big Rick Warren laughs. 26
The top pastors no doubt look to Jesus for guidance, at least they freely invoke his name, but they also look to secular management consultants and gurus. In his book PastorPreneur, Reverend John Jackson cites the positive-thinking guru Stephen Covey. Bill Hybels is an admirer of Peter Drucker and, at least as of 1995, had a poster hanging just outside his office quoting the questions that management expert urged businesspeople to ask themselves: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” There are plenty of Christian-oriented “church growth” consultancies for pastors to turn to also; in fact, a small industry has arisen to advise aspiring pastors on everything from parking lots to events management, and some of the more successful megachurches, like Saddleback and Willow Creek, have spawned ancillary businesses as church growth consultancies themselves, offering training seminars, Web sites, and conferences for the pastors of lesser churches. But no one denies the role of secular inspiration in megachurches—if the distinction between sacred and secular even makes sense here. Robert Schuller likes to include celebrity guests in his services, and they have included well-known motivational speakers and the CEO of Amway. As one ambitious pastor told the New York Times: “Corporations are teaching us to look to the future and dream dreams.” 27
The more pastors functioned as CEOs, socialized with CEOs, and immersed themselves in the lore of corporate management, the more they were likely to think of themselves as fellow CEOs. Business leaders needed to think positively in order to sell their products and increase their market share; so too did enterprising pastors. A growing number of them are nondenominational, meaning they cannot turn to a centralized bureaucracy for financial or any other kind of support. Facing uncharted territory and a skeptical population of the unchurched, they depend entirely on their own charisma and salesmanship, which in turn often depends on positive thinking. Osteen, for example, attributes his acquisition of the Compaq Center not only to God but also to his ability to visualize this bold move: “I began to ‘see’ our congregation worshiping God in the Compaq Center in the heart of Houston.” He advises anyone interested in prosperity to do the same: “Get rid of those old wineskins. Get rid of that small-minded thinking and start thinking as God thinks. Think big. Think increase. Think abundance. Think more than enough.” 28
Churches are not the only institutions to have become more “corporate” in recent decades, in their appearance, management, and techniques for growth. Universities have been corporatized, hiring MBAs as administrators, evolving from Gothic to blank modernist design, adopting aggressive marketing techniques, and, as noted earlier, occasionally bringing in motivational speakers. At a meeting of another kind of nonprofit a few years ago—one devoted to expanding women’s economic opportunities—I was surprised to find it “facilitated” by a hired team-building coach who had us start by breaking into small groups to “bond” over our dreams and “most embarrassing experiences.” Even labor unions, the historic antagonists of corporations, are likely today to employ corporate styles of management and—what would have been unthinkable to the kind of old-fashioned organizer who struck up conversations with workers in bars or at factory gates—to use surveys and focus groups to shape their appeals to potential recruits. Everywhere you go, you are likely to encounter the same corporate jargon of “incentivizing,” “value added,” and “going forward”; the same chains of command; the same arrays of desks and cubicles; the same neutral, functionalist disregard for aesthetics; the same reliance on motivation and manufactured team spirit.
But it could be argued that a special affinity has grown up between corporations and the churches, especially megachurches, that goes beyond superficial similarities. In the last couple of decades, while churches were becoming more like corporations, corporations were becoming more like churches—headed up by charismatic figures claiming, or aspiring to, almost mystical powers of leadership. Commenting on the trend toward charismatic, or, as they call it, “transformational” leadership, two management professors have written that “much management practice is indeed moving beyond a purely metaphorical similarity to the rituals and mindsets of religious devotion.” They argue that corporations increasingly resemble what are commonly known as cults—organizations that demand total acquiescence to a seemingly divinely inspired leader. 29 Not only have megachurch pastors taken corporate CEOs as role models, but CEOs have sometimes returned the favor, as in the mutual admiration between Rick Warren and his CEO friends. In an article on the megachurch phenomenon, the Economist noted:
Indeed, in a nice reversal businesses have also started to learn from the churches. The late Peter Drucker pointed out that these churches have several lessons to teach mainline businesses. They are excellent at motivating their employees and volunteers, and at transforming volunteers from well-meaning amateurs into disciplined professionals. The best churches (like some of the most notorious cults) have discovered the secret of low-cost and self-sustaining growth: transforming seekers into evangelicals who will then go out and recruit more seekers. 30
So, from a seeker’s point of view, what is the difference between a megachurch and the corporation at which he or she works? Visually, not much: the megachurch looks like a corporate office building or headquarters; its pastor is more likely to wear a business suit than clerical robes; religious symbols and icons have been stripped away. In addition, both institutions offer, as their core philosophy, a motivational message about getting ahead, overcoming obstacles, and achieving great things through positive thinking. To further enhance the connection between church and workplace, some leading pastors make a point of endorsing “free enterprise” and its demands on the average worker. Schuller warns against using the fact of being “disadvantaged” or subjected to racial prejudice as “an excuse to keep from trying.” 31 Osteen writes that “employers prefer employees who are excited about working at their companies,” and to those who feel they’re not paid enough to feel “excited,” he counsels: “You won’t be blessed, with that kind of attitude. God wants you to give it everything you’ve got. Be enthusiastic. Set an example.” 32
But there’s one immediately obvious difference between the megachurch and the corporate workplace: church is nice. No one will yell at you, impose impossible deadlines, or make you feel inadequate. Smiling volunteers greet you as you enter on Sunday morning, and after the service you may get to shake the CEO’s—that is, the pastor’s—hand. There is child care, as well as all the support groups and services. Best of all, even if you fail to tithe at the generally recommended 10 percent, even if you are guilty of frequent absenteeism or lack the time to volunteer, even if you lapse back into what was once known as sin and now understood as “negativity,” you will not be asked to leave. And this may be an important part of the megachurches’ appeal: they are simulacra of the corporate workplace, offering all the visual signs of corporate power and efficiency, only without the cruelty and fear. You cannot be downsized from church.
So the seeker who embraces positive theology finds him-or herself in a seamless, self-enclosed world, stretching from workplace to mall to corporate-style church. Everywhere, he or she hears the same message—that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But always, in a hissed undertone, there is the darker message that if you don’t have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame. Positive theology ratifies and completes a world without beauty, transcendence, or mercy.