Prosperity gospel and the American dream

Summary

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Throughline: "Prosperity Gospel and the American Dream"

Host: Rund Abdelfattah (NPR)
Date: June 23, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Throughline explores the roots and evolution of the prosperity gospel in America—how a blend of self-help, religion, and capitalist values created a powerful promise: if you believe hard enough, both happiness and wealth are within reach. Host Rund Abdelfattah and a panel of historians and commentators trace the prosperity gospel from its early 20th-century origins to its boom via televangelists in the 1970s-80s and its entanglement with American capitalism, neoliberalism, and the American Dream.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: The Power of Positive Thinking

• Norman Vincent Peale’s Influence
  • Peale, an early 20th-century minister, is credited as a “key apostle” of the prosperity gospel.
  • “What is positive thinking?” — Norman Vincent Peale [01:24]
  • His book, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), popularized the notion that positive thoughts can directly lead to success and happiness.
  • His teachings drew from scripture but focused on the self and personal well-being.
  • “If you think positively, you’re going to get all of these things.” — Expert [01:27]
  • The concept: “You can, if you think you can.” — Peale [01:51]

2. Prosperity Gospel as American Self-Help

• Connection to Self-Help Movements
  • The prosperity gospel equates belief and willpower with self-improvement and success.
  • “Self Help is a series of spiritual beliefs that we can somehow become better because of the power of mind.” — Kate Bowler [02:40]
  • Even outside religious contexts, this mindset permeates American culture—spreading through figures like Oprah and self-help literature.

3. Televangelism and Spread in the Late 20th Century

• Rise of Religious Media

  • In the 1970s and 80s, televangelists like Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker and Paul & Jan Crouch brought prosperity gospel into millions of American homes.
  • “These shows...were important conduits for, you know, the A, B, C and D list of all of these prosperity gospel preachers.” — Expert [05:57]
  • The “seed faith” concept: give (often large sums) to ministries, expect divine returns.
  • “If you’ll start now and get your seed of faith into the ground, it’ll begin to grow and God begin to move.” — Peale [06:23]

• Marketing Tactics

  • Mailing lists became a key mechanism for cultivating donors: “It’s like Hotel California... You keep the money coming in, you keep people hooked.” — Expert [06:43]

• Cultural Impact

  • By the mid-80s, 25 million Americans watched religious television.
  • The message was embedded everywhere: TV, magazines, billboards, and self-help books.

4. Ties to Neoliberal Capitalism

• Ideological Symbiosis

  • Prosperity gospel paralleled the rise of neoliberal economics: market solutions framed as theological truth.
  • “The focus, like with Prosperity Gospel, is on personal advancement. More is more.” — Anthea Butler [07:50]
  • The market, like God, becomes an unquestionable force.
  • “The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes... As Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is no alternative.” — Expert [08:43]

• Personal Responsibility

  • The burden of success or failure falls wholly on the individual.
  • “If capitalism is unstable, it simply means that you need to adopt more flexible work hours, be willing to hustle at 2am...” — Kate Bowler [08:23]
  • This mindset reinforces the dream that anyone can “bootstrap” their way to prosperity.

5. Prosperity Gospel and the Illusion of Equality

• The “Blessed” Aesthetic
  • Preachers flaunted wealth to display divine favor—inviting followers to imitate their faith (and donations) to achieve similar outcomes.
  • “You need to show yourself in a certain kind of way so that people know that you’re blessed... It gives the illusion that everybody can get this and that...there is equality when there really isn’t.” — Expert [09:19]
  • The myth dovetails with narratives of American exceptionalism and immigrant hope.

6. Faith, Sincerity, and Consequences

• Motivation of Preachers

  • Some prosperity preachers are sincere; others exploit followers.
  • “I’ve met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in Florida. And I have met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this could very materially transform people’s lives.” — Kate Bowler [10:25]

• Parishioner Perspectives

  • For many, preacher sincerity is less important than their belief that God is good and the rules work.
  • “What matters to them is whether God is good and God has set up the rules by which they too can have those good things.” — Kate Bowler [11:40]

• Promise and Peril

  • The redemptive uplift effect: prosperity gospel can, for some, encourage positive habits and networks.
  • For others, it exploits the vulnerable, exacerbating inequality.

7. Prosperity Gospel and Economic Crashes

• Faith Amid Financial Crisis

  • During events like the 2008 crash, prosperity logic collided with harsh realities.
  • Predatory lending intertwined with church networks led many Black Americans into disastrous home loans, facilitated by faith leaders’ endorsements.
  • “You were encouraged by your televangelist pastor, you could just buy a home because here we’ve got this loan officer here today...And then all these people went Belly up in 2008 and lost their homes.” — Expert [12:55]

• Faith in “Formulas”

  • The search for prosperity continues, with people turning to self-help gurus, entrepreneurial icons, or politician-preachers.

8. From Religion to Culture and Politics

• Gospel of Responsibility
  • The allure of a belief system where “the responsibility always falls back on them because it’s always the one thing we can control is ourselves.” — Kate Bowler [14:58]
  • This paves the way for Christian nationalism, where material success is seen as divine approval for the nation and its chosen people.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You can, if you think you can.” — Norman Vincent Peale [01:51]
• “God says it, I can have it. I believe it. That settles it.” — Expert [02:00]
• “To me, it’s like God’s plan for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” — Expert [09:19]
• “The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes... As Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is no alternative.” — Expert [08:43]
• “I have met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in Florida. And I have met people who...believed that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job...” — Kate Bowler [10:25]
• “For people who are constantly on the cusp of losing everything...we’re looking for the person with a formula.” — Kate Bowler [13:50]
• “If you preach an empowered individualism, you’ve got a gospel you can believe in, which is always us.” — Kate Bowler [14:58]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:46–02:32]: Norman Vincent Peale and the birth of positive thinking
• [05:31–07:06]: Televangelists and prosperity gospel boom in 1970s-80s
• [07:31–09:55]: Prosperity gospel’s links to neoliberal capitalism
• [10:12–11:40]: The divide between sincerity and exploitation among preachers
• [12:55–13:50]: Prosperity gospel’s role in the 2008 housing crisis
• [14:37–14:58]: Christian nationalism and the persistence of prosperity thinking

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Conclusion

This Throughline episode demonstrates how the prosperity gospel both shapes and is shaped by American notions of individualism, capitalism, and hope. The story is not only about faith, but also about the promises and perils of a culture that equates belief, effort, and wealth—and the consequences for those who buy in.

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For further exploration, listen to the full episode for deeper dives into the history, personal stories, and cultural impact of the prosperity gospel in America.

Transcript

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Each week we bring you stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

This is Norman Vincent Peale. What I have in mind to do is to give a little discussion on this subject, how to make positive thinking work for you.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

Norman Vincent Peale is a bit of a theological outlier. Like a lot of these modern spiritual entrepreneurs, he kind of floundered around a bit.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Born at the end of the 19th century and comes into the 20th, he's beating all of these big automakers, oil people. So he's right there in the middle of this sort of capitalist kind of thing.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

What is positive thinking?

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

When he writes this book, the Power of Positive Thinking, which you can still find probably in every used bookstore in the country, he's like, if you think positively, you're going to get all of these things.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

Life can be wonderful. You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around and pull it down.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

The book is really just a series of success mantras.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

You can, if you think you can,

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

drawn from Scripture, God bless you and best wishes.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

God says it, I can have it. I believe it. That settles it.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

Get up every morning, look in the mirror and repeat over and over again, you know, some variation of you can,

[Norman Vincent Peale]

whatever you can dream of, think you can trust. You can is the first signature of success.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

Norman Vincent Peale is very much a key apostle of prosperity gospel belief, a

[Rund Abdelfattah]

gospel he began to preach in the

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

1930s, a kind of spiritual psychology of success. At this point, it is all about the self and all about feeling good.

[Kate Bowler]

Self Help is a series of spiritual beliefs that we can somehow become better because of the power of mind.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Basically, the message of the Secret is the message that I've been trying to share with the world world on my show for the past 21 years. The message is that you're really responsible for your life.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

If you're thinking the prosperity gospel, self help, what does that have to do with me? Consider this. Even if you've never stepped foot in a church or watched a single episode

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

of Oprah, what Hold up, hold up.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So much of our lives is shaped by the idea, the belief that all you have to do to succeed is believe harder. And if you fall on hard times, well, better try harder. It's all on you, after all. And listen, I'm not saying the founders were preaching the prosperity gospel, but I do think that from the very beginning the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness set up this goal of individual happiness. And that's where the Prosperity Gospel came in and filled the void by creating a roadmap to that happiness based around self improvement, religion and capitalism. Today on the show, we're going back to the heyday of the movement, to the 1970s and 80s when the gospel was streaming into homes every day to hear how millions of Americans got sold on the idea that God wants you to be happy and rich. That's coming up after a short break.

[Listener/Caller or Minor Participant]

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[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Jim and Tammy Faye Baker or Paul and Jan Crouch, come on and look a certain sort of way. And they were the ones that began to bring, you know, different kinds of preachers and things and introduce them to others.

[Anthea Butler]

Anthea Butler is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Politics of Morality in America.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

These shows in the 70s and 80s were important conduits for, you know, the A, B, C and D list of all of these prosperity gospel preachers.

[Listener/Caller or Minor Participant]

Yay.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

Yay.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

That would get a foothold in America. And that's the way that most people saw them. You might be up late at night.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

I want to talk to you for a few moments about the law of the seed. Seed means beginning.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

And I see, you know, somebody preaching

[Norman Vincent Peale]

this message and if you'll call during this telecast for you that support Our ministry in any way. You need to make a vow of faith of $1,000. Oh, Bob, couldn't you say 25? No. If you'll start now and get your seed of faith into the ground, it'll begin to grow and God begin to move.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

And you'd send them something, and they'd send you something back and then you'd get on the mailing list. It's actually much more dangerous than televangelism was. The mailing list. If you can get that person to write to your ministry, you can harass them forever. You know, it's like Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. You keep the money coming in, you keep people hooked.

[Anthea Butler]

By the mid-1980s, the number of Americans watching religious television had skyrocketed to nearly 25 million. Prosperity gospel was everywhere. On TV, of course, but also in magazines, on billboards, and in self help books.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

We can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.

[Kate Bowler]

In so many ways. The story of the Prosperity Gospel follows the rise of a certain kind of

[Rund Abdelfattah]

capitalism, a kind of capitalism known as neoliberalism.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

[Anthea Butler]

The short version is that it's the idea that free markets are the solution to all of our problems. The focus, like with Prosperity Gospel, is on personal advancement. More is more.

[Kate Bowler]

It asks each individual citizen buyer to absorb all the responsibilities for making its promises true.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Kate Bowler. She's a historian at Duke University and author of a history of the American Prosperity Gospel.

[Kate Bowler]

Harder you work, the more that's meant to prove its own reward. If capitalism is unstable, it simply means that you need to adopt more flexible work hours, be willing to hustle at 2am have you taken on a side project? Have you really managed to?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Chris Lehman is the author of Money Cult and he describes this as, quote, sanctifying the market.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

The market itself becomes this object of worship and the arbiter of life outcomes. That is not to be questioned. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, there is no alternative.

[Kate Bowler]

It's similar to the prosperity gospel in which when the system is meant to prove itself, it shifts the burden of responsibility away from, in this version, away from God and onto the person who has failed to demonstrate the abundant life.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The abundant life, Fancy cars, expensive clothes, big houses, things all Prosperity Gospel preachers make sure to flaunt.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

You need to show yourself in a certain kind of way so that people know that you're blessed and that in turn they can be blessed if they follow you. Because obviously you've got God's word that will tell them how they need to get this prosperity in their lives too. To me, it's like God's plan for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, right? It gives the illusion that everybody can get this and that, you know, that there is equality when there really isn't. It's very compelling to people who come from, you know, the immigrants to America because it folds right into this American exceptionalism and the American dream.

[Kate Bowler]

I mean, one of the questions I get a lot is how much, how much were the preachers snake oil salesmen, and how much were they deeply sincere? And not just sincere perhaps, but like, how much did they truly believe that what they were doing could transform other people's lives?

[Anthea Butler]

Kate Bowler, a practicing Christian herself and a historian, spent a decade going to services, getting to know parishioners and their prosperity gospel preachers, investigating the relationship between the two.

[Kate Bowler]

I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of them. And I think the answer, it really varies. I have met people who are likely at this moment defrauding a widow in Florida. And I have met people who were really concrete and practical about how they imagined that this could very materially transform people's lives. I'm thinking of a church I went to, an inner city church, and the megachurch pastor who had a Rolex and a mansion and all that, also simultaneously believed that all the things he was teaching his parishioners would be the reason why they get that job and they are that partner that creates a stable family home. So in one version you could say, well, it just robs people of their money, promises them things and can't possibly deliver. In other versions, we call it the redempt and lift effect, which is that when you stabilize people's lives, you encourage them to network, save, take care of their home life and are able to redeem and lift, is what they describe.

[Anthea Butler]

And why do the parishioners, seeing how well off the preachers are, keep giving them money?

[Kate Bowler]

Well, in the minds of parishioners, it doesn't matter if the preacher is sincere or not. What matters to them is whether God is good and God has set up the rules by which they too can have those good things. And so in that way, the preacher is its own show and tell, but doesn't inherently matter to the, to the faith lives of the people in the pews.

[Narrator/Commentator on Peale]

The sort of constant in American religion is this kind of anxiety about your destiny. And, you know, it reflects broader trends. In a market dominated society, we're forced

[Kate Bowler]

to Believe in invisible causality in this economy.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Stock market is now down 21%, 43%.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

All of the major technology sectors. Apple's under pressure. Yahoo down 8 and a half percent. It was the worst day on Wall street since.

[Kate Bowler]

And all this says though is don't be afraid. God is good. Don't be afraid. You'll do your best. And on the other side of this, there may be ups and downs, but I am going to bring you to a better future.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

Nearly 2 trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall street dug. And people wonder, where's the bottom? It turns out that this is the.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Let's just say this is the moment where we're going to talk about prosperity gospel and the banking industry, as you know, in collusion with each other in certain kinds of ways. So I want to tell a story and that story is about two the belly up of everything in the financial markets and especially the foreclosure market. And one of the places where this happens in a huge way was Atlanta. Black people were told that they should buy homes. Predatory lenders gave these kind of balloon loans to people who were in churches. So in other words, you were encouraged by your televangelist pastor, you could just buy a home because here we've got this loan officer here today is going to talk to you and you gonna bless you with the house. And then all these people went Belly up in 2008 and lost their homes.

[Kate Bowler]

For people who are constantly on the cusp of losing everything, which we were reminded again in the pandemic, we're looking for the person with a formula.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

For some that person might be a Tony Robbins or an Oprah.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

Who are the sharks?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Brothers like me? It's the business minds of Shark Tank.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

They're self made business exper worth billions.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And still others turn to preachers or politicians who seem to have it all figured out.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

You know, I said the other day, because so many people, they carry around the art of the deal because they're begging, they're begging their politicians. Please, please read the art of the deal when you negotiate with China and with Japan and with Mexico and with Vietnam.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

And I think this is crucial for right now. It flows into a kind of Christian nationalism. It means that God is especially favoring, you know, the nation as a special place. And so the people who live in it, who follow after this particular kind of thing are going to be more blessed than anybody else in the world.

[Kate Bowler]

I think people crave, even if they might hate it, they crave a gospel where the responsibility always falls back on them because it's always the one thing we can control is ourselves. So if you preach an empowered individualism, you've got a gospel you can believe in, which is always us.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's it for this week's show. If you want to hear the full story about the prosperity gospel, check out the full length episode, God wants you to be rich. And join us next week when we take a deeper look at the Constitution, the rights it includes and those it does not.

[Listener/Caller or Minor Participant]

So I guess, I guess when I think of that phrase like the Constitution doesn't tell you all the rights that you have because it doesn't know. It's both like, well, that's wonderful. The Constitution sort of acknowledges, it acknowledges that it doesn't know right there in the ninth Amendment right. It acknowledges that it's something that can grow and change. But it also, like, it also points to the fact that the Constitution not only left a lot of people out, but like, actively committed crimes against people.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moghadam and edited by Christina Kim and Julia Redpath with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Adablouei and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Cain, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.

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[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

This is Hourglass on this American Life. One thing we like is a good mystery sometimes about really big things. But most times the little mysteries are the best.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Our lost and found is currently filled with pants.

[Norman Vincent Peale]

I don't know.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I've never seen this happen.

[Kate Bowler]

This is true.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is true.

[Commentator/Expert on Prosperity Gospel]

Mysteries of every size. Each week, this American Life. Wherever you get your podcasts.