I well remember the 1980s, when I was growing up. My generation saw scandal after scandal with “name it and claim it” preachers whose own lavish lifestyles held out the promise that God could and would make followers rich. Preachers like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were proponents of prosperity theology, an offshoot of Pentecostalism that envisions faith as a spiritual power to unleash wealth and health.
Some scandals are still going on—late last month, for instance, David Yonggi Cho, the pastor of the world’s largest prosperity church, was convicted of tax evasion and fraud, and Joyce Meyer and others are still under investigation in the U.S. But overall, we’ve transitioned from the “hard prosperity gospel” of the 1980s to what Duke historian Kate Bowler identifies as a therapeutic softer sell offered by Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, and others.
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