this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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To be honest, it's kind of surprising that the prosperity gospel only took off fairly recently. "Get rich and feel good about it" is an easy sell.
There's a fantastic book called "Dominion: the creation of the western mind" that takes an academic, secular and factual approach to the early Church, as you might imagine, specifically in relation to our worldview here.
According to them, it took so long because of just how genuinely anti-wealth the bible is. It literally took centuries of work to push it round to the "gospel according business owners" we have today.
Ironically, a fair few of the reformations throughout the centuries were due to the wealth accumulated by the church and the outrage that could be drummed up by wild holy men, who would appear infinitely more saintly than a gold-clad bishop, all the way up to large parts of early protestant outrage.
It... Didn't? That's effectively the protestant work ethic is all about. Being successful on earth is supposedly a sign that you are in god's good graces.
Prosperity gospel just took that to 11
Not to mention, the whole covenant with Israel was basically prosperity gospel written on the scale of nation states- the promise was that as long as Israel obeyed and followed the Law, then god would bless them above all other nations.
The trouble was that Israel- as a nation- was extremely...uh... fickle. (see all the exiles and shit that happens because supposedly god is done with their shit.) it's mostly just an explanation why a supposedly blessed nation woulld be yeeted into exile- and was written near the end of the exilic period (pretty much as they were going home?)