As the grandson of a Pentecostal preacher, I can quote each of the thirty-five verses of Exodus 32, in which the recently liberated Hebrew peoples, fed up waiting for Moses to descend from Mount Sinai with divine orders, ask his brother, Aaron, to make them new gods. After beckoning them all to give up their gold earrings, the text explains, he melted down the gold and “fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf.” As a child I often imagined just what the calf looked like: how big it was; how gold it was; how long it took to sculpt the gold and wait for it to cool.

“Let me say this plainly,” the evangelical pastor Mark Burns said upon the unveiling of a twenty-two-foot gold statue of Donald Trump on the president’s private Miami golf resort this past May: “This is not a golden calf.” Burns, the televangelist and cofounder of the NOW Television Network, joined a few dozen other evangelical leaders and fans in prayer at the dedication of the statue, Don Colossus, which Alan Cottrill—a pizza franchise owner-turned-sculptor known for his depictions of famous Americans like Thomas Edison—had made on a $300,000 commission from a group of some sixteen cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Cottrill reportedly didn’t learn that the statue’s backers aimed to use it to market a Trump-themed memecoin called $PATRIOT until a few weeks into the project; in exchange he demanded approximately $75,000, in addition to the original commission, for the intellectual property rights.

“I’m very close to the President, but I don’t know anybody in my circle who worships or honors Donald Trump as a god or any kind of deity,” Burns told The New Yorker after the statue inspired a backlash, including from other Florida-based pastors. To Burns the statue symbolized “the hand of God over President Trump’s life,” a tribute of gratitude to God for protecting Trump from assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania. It should come as no surprise that this “symbol” was coated in gold leaf, or that it had the dual purpose of promoting a memecoin. The discourse surrounding Don Colossus was a reminder of the close proximity between the MAGA movement and the school of American theological thought that, starting in the 1870s and rising to greater prominence in the middle of the twentieth century, came to be called the prosperity gospel.

At the start of her book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, the historian Kate Bowler remarks on the difficulty of defining this tendency. “The prosperity gospel,” she writes,

is not bounded solely by region, as its celebrities hail from Seattle to New York, Houston to Chicago, and even around the globe. Denominational markers do not offer many clues, since most of its largest churches claim nondenominational status. Few leaders advertise themselves as a “prosperity preacher,” even if they sermonize weekly about divine finances…. They appear to be solo evangelists—fireflies that flicker on and off, here and there, each burning brightly and then fading without consistency or connection.¹

What links them, as Bowler wrote for Vox in 2018, is the “bold central claim that God will give you your heart’s desires: money in the bank, a healthy body, a thriving family, and boundless happiness.” Trump understands the appeal of that claim because he grew up in it. His childhood pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, was perhaps this tendency’s most influential twentieth-century voice. As Bowler shows, Peale didn’t market himself explicitly as a “prosperity preacher,” and neither do his spiritual descendants. The prosperity gospel, as the scholar Matthew D. Taylor notes in his book The Violent Take it By Force, is not a self-description but “a polemical label, leveled as an accusation.”² And yet it remains the best way to describe a quasi-theological view of material success that has, in recent decades, spread far and wide. Amplified by ever-growing mass-media networks, it now inflects not just evangelical discourse but our politics as a whole.

The prosperity gospel has its roots in the work of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century metaphysical teachers associated with what would become known as the New Thought movement. These figures held a wide range of views, but to varying degrees they all appealed to the country’s growing middle class by promoting the idea that belief—often Christian belief—could result in practical benefits in the material world. Phineas P. Quimby, one of the first proponents of New Thought, was a mesmerist who preached that sickness and poverty could be overcome by disciplined right-thinking. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement, instructed her followers—even infirm ones—to reject medicine in favor of belief. Myrtle Fillmore, who grew up as a sickly child, joined her husband, Charles, in blending Protestant themes with the country’s growing penchant for self-improvement, offering unoriginal tips like “A period of quiet and rest each day is your opportunity to establish yourself at the center of your being.”

In the early years of the twentieth century, evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson repackaged these ideas in more explicitly Christian language. McPherson’s popular radio broadcasts secured her reputation as the “Prima Donna of Revivalism,” as a Harper’s journalist put it in a 1927 profile. In shows at her Los Angeles megachurch “the Almighty occupies a secondary position,” the author noted. “He plays an important part in the drama, to be sure; but center stage is taken and held by Mrs. McPherson.”³

None of these figures loom over our current culture and politics as much as Peale, who had a more secular-seeming style than most of his peers. For fifty-two years, as pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, he preached that the right mindset could bring material and personal success, a gospel that he spelled out in his book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which spent over three years on the New York Times best-seller list. Among its devotees was Fred Trump, a Queens real estate developer eager to break into elite Manhattan circles, who started bringing his son to services at Marble Collegiate in the 1960s; Peale would officiate Donald Trump’s marriage to Ivana Zelníčková in the same church the next decade. “I still remember his sermons,” Trump said of Peale during an Iowa campaign stop in 2015. “You could listen to him all day long. And when you left the church, you were disappointed it was over.”

Peale’s approach had its detractors. “The basic sin of this cult is its egocentricity,” Reinhold Niebuhr, then a professor at Union Theological Seminary, told a journalist in 1955.

It puts “self” instead of the cross at the center of the picture. Christianity insists that you cannot have faith without repentance, and since the very ideas of sin and repentance are negative, the positive thinkers simply leave them out, or at best, gloss over them…. Anything which corrupts the gospel hurts Christianity. And it hurts people too. It helps them to feel good while they are evading the real issues of life.

But Peale’s audience extended far beyond traditional Christians, or indeed Christians of any kind. It was a theology for a booming postwar America. Between 1947 and 1952 median family income in the United States surged by approximately 30 percent, expanding the middle class to more than half the population. Homeownership skyrocketed from 44 percent in 1940 to 62 percent by 1960, buoyed by industrial advancements, a roaring economy, and government programs like the GI Bill. These conditions made it relatively easy for Peale to offer such advice as “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.” They also, as the historian of religion Leah Payne told me, furnished Peale and his inheritors with “an interpretation of the American century.” If the twentieth century was distinctly America’s by dint of divinely bequeathed prosperity, then it was not much of a leap to suggest that the Soviet bloc suffered from poverty because of its godlessness.  

Another consumer trend during these years did much to widen the reach of this message: between 1945 and 1960 the number of households with television sets jumped from less than 1 percent to nearly 90 percent. Among the great beneficiaries of this shift was the evangelist Oral Roberts. Born into poverty in rural Oklahoma in 1918, Roberts claimed to have been healed from tuberculosis through a miracle. He built an empire of tent revivals, “healing crusades,” and, most crucially, television ministry; he also, in 1963, founded his own evangelical university in Tulsa. Faith, for Roberts, was an investment: he preached that a combination of belief and action—especially donations to his rapidly growing ministry—could reorient one’s fate, and offered his own upward trajectory as proof.

Oral Roberts and You, his syndicated weekly show, featured sermons and scenes of his healing crusades accompanied by panoramic views of his university’s gold-plated buildings. His slogans—Your faith is power! and Expect a miracle! and Plant your seed of faith, and God will return it to you a hundredfold!—found their way into millions of homes; by the 1970s Time estimated that his television program was the leading religious telecast in the country. Roberts belonged to a cohort of proto-prosperity preachers—among them Pat Robertson, Kenneth Hagin, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Jack Coe—who understood that religious authority could be intertwined with celebrity, and that belief could be packaged for mass consumption.⁴

Among their listeners were two generations of my extended family. In the 1940s and 1950s my paternal grandparents, living in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, tuned in devotedly to the radio station where Roberts’s voice cut through static with the promise of miracles. When they had their first son, my uncle, they named him Oral Roberts Gayle, as if to signify the prosperity they hoped to achieve when, soon after, they immigrated to the United States. Like many Jamaicans of the 1960s and 1970s, they settled in Brooklyn, where they raised their children as churchgoing Pentecostals. One of my aunts—whose faith would be most generously described as lapsed—still remembers the exact P.O. Box address of Roberts’s ministry, a holdover from hearing him on TV soliciting “seed faith” donations, which he sometimes called “love gifts.”

In the early 1980s my grandfather planted his own church in the South Bronx, pulling his congregation from across the five boroughs, although some had decamped to southernmost Westchester County and parts of New Jersey. I remember dressing for Sunday services in a suit and tie; the women wore skirts and used makeup sparingly, if ever. Holiness, as I was taught to understand it, was to be separate—to “be in the world but not of the world,” as the popular rephrasing of John 17:14-16 goes. The weekdays included other separating actions: abstaining not just from the usual sins—sex before marriage, lying—but from listening to secular music, visiting movie theaters, going to bowling alleys, or playing card games. It was with this nearly puritanical resolve that we Jamaican Pentecostals could become fully American.

It might seem paradoxical that devout, often legalistically committed Pentecostal believers could find ourselves so enmeshed within the world of the prosperity gospel. But our religious education extended beyond those agonizingly long Sundays. On television we’d switch between The Bobby Jones Gospel Hour on BET, James and Betty Robison recounting their humanitarian travels and mission trips from their studio in Fort Worth, and Robert Schuller exulting the power of positive thinking on the Hour of Power, beaming in from California’s Crystal Cathedral, a 10,000-mirror-paned star-shaped megachurch designed by Philip Johnson.

In 1997, a month before I turned eight, my parents decided to move to Tulsa, the epicenter of the prosperity gospel. My first sight of the city, piercing the clouds as our plane began to descend, was Oral Roberts University, with its signature work of public sculpture: two enormous bronze hands clasped in supplication, a short walking distance from a flying-saucer-like structure wedged between two cones called “the Prayer Tower.”

For the leading spokespeople of the prosperity gospel, relying on television to mass-distribute God’s word never meant abandoning the physical space of the convening. The first church my family attended once we arrived in Tulsa was Higher Dimensions, founded in 1981 by Carlton Pearson, who recalled to me that Roberts called him his “Black son.” Pearson’s classmate and fellow Tulsa-based megachurch pastor, Billy Joe Daugherty, led Victory Christian Center across from ORU, whose building was used every weekday for Victory Christian School. Friends invited me to pickup basketball games at Kenneth Hagin’s Rhema Bible Church—the home of the “Word of Faith” movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

Those years—the late 1990s—were a high point for the Tulsa-based Azusa Conference, founded by Pearson in 1988. The annual multiday event—a revival-like, nearly ecumenical gathering of believers—took its name from the series of Los Angeles revival meetings that ran from 1906 to 1915. In some important ways the Azusa of the early twentieth century resembled the Azusa I’d later attend: Pearson, like the revival’s founder, William Seymour, was a Black man who would routinely draw a multidenominational, multicultural crowd that he encouraged to claim salvation, to speak in tongues, to prophesy, and to heal.

But where Seymour had preached from a former stable in an impoverished part of town, Pearson’s Azusa was not meager. Held in the Mabee Center, the basketball arena built by Pearson’s white “father,” Azusa featured then-unknown emerging evangelical talent like T.D. Jakes and Joyce Meyer. The choir accompanying them would perform old-school gospel standards, led sometimes by Pearson’s nasally vocals and in other cases, mercifully, by more popular stars. An appearance there could make a preacher’s miniscule hometown congregation overflow in a matter of days: “T.D. Jakes’s ascent,” the sociologist Shayne Lee wrote in 2003, “is almost unimaginable without his fortuitous encounters with Carlton Pearson and AZUSA.”⁵

When I met with Pearson in 2022, about a year before his death, he told me that there came a point when Jakes and Meyer “could sell $25,000 worth” of tapes of their preaching. Until Azusa, he said, “neither Jakes or Joyce had ever sold that kind of product. And neither one of them were on television. And I encouraged both of them to go on television.” Pearson himself, in a striking reversal, had by the time of our conversation lost nearly all of his influence for adopting what were, in this milieu, considered radical doctrinal views: by 2002 he preached what he called the “gospel of inclusion” and professed to no longer believe in the existence of hell.⁶

Today many prosperity gospel preachers lead highly personalized ministries, often sidelining traditional checks like boards, elders, and denominational oversight. Jakes was the son of a janitor and a lay, non-seminary-trained minister in West Virginia, who both pastored a small storefront church and did physical labor at a local chemical plant before his 1992 breakthrough at Azusa. Now he oversees a media empire with his own denomination, his own seminary, best-selling books, and a series of straight-to-television Lifetime movies. Joel Osteen, the “smiling preacher,” dropped out of Oral Roberts University but converted his experience manning the A/V team of his father’s church into a remunerative enterprise speaking at conferences, selling books, and promoting a self-help-infused faith. Joyce Meyer, once a rural Missouri radio host, has since become a global televangelist. Creflo Dollar, a counselor by training, built a vast prosperity gospel empire. Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts’s former pilot, presides over a ministry worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The prosperity-preaching world’s lack of transparency has drawn criticism even from Republican legislators like Chuck Grassley, who in 2007 opened a Senate investigation into the financial apparatuses of six televangelist ministries, including those of Copeland, Meyer, and Dollar. (The probe concluded three years later without specific findings of wrongdoing, and Meyer’s was one of two ministries to say it was undertaking internal reforms in response to the investigation; the others declined to fully cooperate, often citing privacy concerns.) When the Senate probe got underway, Warren Smith, the president of the Christian accountability organization Ministry Watch, rhetorically asked CBS: “If there is nothing to hide, why are you hiding it?”

If the views of this constellation of preachers seem hard to define, it is because language associated with the prosperity gospel crops up across churches of many denominations and evangelists with considerable theological disagreements. For some—like Hagin, the Word of Faith preacher who founded Rhema Bible Church and Rhema Bible Training College—belief seems to yield exclusively personal forms of victory and success. “Healing belongs to you,” he writes in his book Don’t Blame God!. “It belongs to you because sickness is of the enemy.”

Copeland’s theology has a particularly unhinged quality. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic he blew on his camera during a televised sermon and claimed that a supernatural heatwave would kill the virus: “Covid-19! I blow the wind of God on you! You are destroyed forever!” It was from Roberts, Copeland has said, that he derived his claims that prosperity is a sign of godly obedience and unrelenting faith: “We became close friends until he died,” he told a reporter in 2019. “He took the same heat for believing God would prosper you that I’ve taken over the years.” He proceeded to quote the last verse of Galatians 3: “If you belong to Christ, then are you Abraham’s seed and heirs, according to his promise.” Then he added: “And his promise was great wealth.”

But the prosperity gospel’s moral logic extends beyond the personal. If God blesses individuals with success, surely He could do the same for countries and their leaders. My initial understanding of global politics, such as it was, came from John Hagee, the San Antonio megachurch pastor and founder of Christians United for Israel. My grandmother loved watching him, a former college football player who would bellow a refrain—“Give Him praise and glory!”—near the end of every major point. Hagee offered the same lessons as Roberts and his faith-healing mentee Benny Hinn: “Poverty is a curse,” for instance, or “Your income is controlled by your giving.” But for Hagee God’s blessing had a global, eschatological reach. In his New York Times best-seller Four Blood Moons, he attempted to treat planetary, solar, and astral trajectories as prophetic messages: “GOD’S HIGH DEFINITION BILLBOARD.” Routinely he offers an axiom for geopolitical prosperity: “The day America turns its back on Israel is the day God will turn His back on America.”

The present head of the White House’s Faith Office, the televangelist Paula White-Cain, owes her early success to the advocacy of leading figures in the broader world of televangelism, like Jakes, and her pugilistic Christian nationalism has long echoed the rhetoric of pastors like Hagee. I grew up watching White-Cain, often puzzled by her hackneyed mimicry of Black sermonizing style. She bet early on Trump’s presidential ambitions, founding and chairing his influential evangelical advisory committee during his first campaign, and became a recognizable presence at White House prayer meetings during both administrations. As Matthew Taylor has written, her status as Trump’s “evangelical translator and chaperone” has made White-Cain a “bridge builder” between prosperity preachers and adherents of still more radical movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, an informal far-right network of prophetic spokespeople (from which White-Cain has distanced herself) dedicated to the belief that, in Taylor’s words, “Christians need to conquer the high places of influence in society and govern from the top down.”

Some right-of-center Christians have criticized Trump for aligning with figures like White-Cain. “Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian,” the former Southern Baptist Convention leader Russell Moore tweeted in 2016; six months later, just before White-Cain spoke at Trump’s first inauguration, the theology professor Michael Horton wrote a Washington Post op-ed summarizing the history of the prosperity gospel and warning against “helping to mainstream this heretical movement.” Among her more controversial appearances was a viral pre-2020 election prayer during which she denounced the “demonic confederacies” trying to prevent Trump’s success and summoned “angelic reinforcements” from Africa and South America to his aid:  

I hear a sound of abundance of rain! I hear a sound of victory! I hear a sound of shouting and singing! I hear a sound of victory! I hear a sound of an abundance of rain! I hear a sound of victory! I hear a sound of an abundance of rain! I hear a sound of victory! The Lord says it is done! The Lord says it is done! The Lord says it is done! For I hear victory, victory, victory, victory in the quarters of heaven! In the quarters of heaven! Victory, victory, victory, victory, victory, victory, victory!

The more traditional—and arguably more biblically correct—theological understanding of “victory” is that triumphing over one’s enemies in worldly contests is not necessarily a sign of having God’s favor. Among many Trump-aligned evangelicals, however, it seems to have become a mainstream position. And Trump—having survived assassination attempts, vanquished political enemies, and accumulated wealth—is the ultimate winner.

Many scholars, journalists, and pundits have tried for good reason to understand why—despite his alleged dalliances with sex workers, his multiple divorces, his boasting about groping women, and his routine violations of Paul’s edict in Ephesians to “not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs”—evangelical voters have remained so loyal to Donald Trump. The most common explanation has to do with political tradeoffs. In exchange for an advocate for their preferred policies on core issues like abortion and anti-trans politics, his followers happily overlook his personal behavior.

But to portray the religious right as simply hypocritical risks understating the strength of its affinity with Trump. The prosperity gospel around which I grew up prioritized charisma, spectacle, saber-rattling culture-war rhetoric, and visible success over any precise adherence to Christian teaching. A preacher could gloss over plenty of moral failings if they could perform miracles, speak in tongues, or prophecy financial breakthroughs. Trump’s understanding of scripture is shaky (his religious and secular critics alike still joke about the infamous time he cited not “Second Corinthians” but “Two Corinthians” before a snickering crowd at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University), but exegetical mastery was never necessarily the draw of the preachers who earned my gaze, either. As a teenager, to cite one example of many, I heard them insist that sex outside of marriage could lead to “soul ties,” binding you permanently with another person in a spiritual marriage covenant, though the Bible never espouses such a thing.  

Failed prophecies, too, wouldn’t disqualify them. Benny Hinn insisted at various points that Fidel Castro would die in the 1990s, that by 1995 all gay people in America would be destroyed by God, and that Jesus would appear in physical form at his events in the early 2000s. But his confidence and theatrics, including waving whole crowds down on their backs in unison, made him intoxicating to watch all the same. Often, indeed, Hinn and his peers defined themselves in active opposition to staid, passive religious doctrine. The churches and denominations from which they emerged often chafed at their promises of contemporary miracles, on the grounds that speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy were historically biblical acts alone. In this milieu institutional or establishment approval has often been a liability as much as an advantage.

Trump could hardly be more legible within this tradition. But prosperity theology also helps explain his appeal even to non-evangelicals. By redescribing faith as a transactional exchange of prayer for material return, it represents one of the clearest expressions of a moral logic that animates American society in general and American politics in particular. Today the engines of our political life are fueled by a kind of extraordinary self-belief, an obsession with power and celebrity, and an emphasis on victory no matter the cost.

The Christianity that kept me spoke a radically different moral language. The gospels tell of a messiah who revealed himself as a leader by riding a jackass, some three decades after being born in exile as a refugee, inside a shack meant to house farm animals. Again and again they return to the same unsettling priority: that whatever is done “to the least of these”—the poor, the sick, the imprisoned—is done to God. If our current political moment has shown us anything, perhaps it is that this Gospel was always too radical for an American civic faith that can see God only in the winners.