Didn’t Jesus say something about feeding the poor and helping them?
Boy! They got them hook, line, and sinker!
They fit right in with the new Republican party!
The new religion “I got mine! S**w you!”The Evangelicals Calling for War on Poor People
A new, antisocial strain of the prosperity gospel is making its way into pulpits and breeding new hostility toward the least fortunate Americans.
The New Republic
By Elle Hardy
October 23, 2023A God who does his best work in the dark hours is integral to the story of American evangelical Christianity. The stuff of country music songs and conversions in roadside motels, Jesus tends to come to people at their lowest and loneliest. The only problem is that some of God’s most pernicious modern apostles understand this all too well. At a time when fewer and fewer believers are going to church, it is consumption, in these dark times, that illuminates a deeply antisocial shift in evangelical Christian beliefs.
Chief among the new doctrines is the idea that God rewards “seeding”—that is, the “sowing” of financial donations to churches, or favored online preachers—with a material harvest in return. The prosperity gospel might sound as old-fashioned—and feel as familiar—as a preacher in a three-piece suit, but a new and cynical version is making a comeback across ministries both old and new; among people who go to church and those who get their faith online.
A recent survey by Lifeway Research found that 52 percent of American churchgoing Protestants say their church teaches God will bless them if they give more money to their church and charities. That figure is up from 38 percent of churchgoers in 2017. It’s an almighty leap, according to Lifeway’s executive director, Scott McConnell, who attributes the shift to the pandemic. The Covid-19 years, he says, had a real effect on the way many believers see the relationship between their faith and their personal finances. “Both positively and negatively,” he told The New Republic; “there was a lot of frustration just on the financial side.” Whether people “were out of money, or they couldn’t really spend the money they had on what they wanted,” largely in the form of stimulus checks, “they didn’t feel very prosperous.”
They fit right in with the new Republican party!
My sister-in-law nagged my wife and I to go to her church to just check it out. I went and the service was just as described. I found the message to be nothing more than a scam. Funny thing! My sister-in-law and her family were not showered with dollars from heaven; in fact they were poorer because their limited funds were spent on this scam. Somewhere along the way the preachers did not read the Bible or perhaps their bible contains some sort of corporate balance sheet.
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