Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, a friend who happens to not be a Christian and I met to hang out at a local Barnes and Noble. My friend decided that she wanted some coffee, so while she waited in line at the Starbucks there, I found myself perusing the magazines on display at the coffee shop. That week’s edition of the Atlantic didn’t take long to catch my eye. The cover story was: “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” The “crash” they were referring to, of course, was the 2008-09(-10?) economic meltdown. The article, which can be found here, basically argues that the prosperity gospel led many American Christians to continue to spend regardless of circumstance in order to earn their way into God’s favor, since, as the article says, “the rich are closer to God.” For those of you not familiar with the prosperity gospel, it is the idea, found mostly in fundamentalist and Pentecostal circles, that God desires to bless His children economically as much as spiritually. Therefore, a Christian who can spend more money and attain a higher standard of living and wealth has found better standing with God. Of course, this is one of the silliest versions of Christianity I’ve ever heard of. It was the same for my friend too.

Being a professed non-Christian, my friend always has interesting things to say about religion, politics, and Christianity. At this point, it seemed that all three intersected. So I asked her how she felt about the Atlantic’s claim and explained to her the prosperity gospel. Immediately she piped back that all of that was absurd. She said that she thought that Christianity was all about giving up what one had and sacrificing for the poor, not about buying Mercedes and $500,000 houses. Basically, she saw the prosperity gospel to be an aberrant form of Christianity.

In the end, the article never really answers its own question. It makes no claim as to whether Christians are responsible for the recession. And, after all, it seems like this is a silly claim anyways. I seriously doubt that Christians have enough purchasing power to send the American economy into a downward spiral. Rather, I think the article hints that this kind of “spend, spend!” attitude, found amongst all Americans, led in part to the recession. The article also makes reference to the fact that much of religion’s beliefs these days see a disparity between reality and expectation, which is why proponents of the prosperity gospel have no problem with the fact that God is obviously not “blessing” most of them right now. This is an issue for another day. My main point, however, is this: if a non-Christian can easily and immediately see that the prosperity gospel is not compatible with the gospel of Christ, then maybe it should be easier for most of us to see that it is an offense to the Kingdom of Christ as well. We would do well to remember that.