The Prosperity Gospel and the new GOP American Health Care Act

How Prosperity Values are Redefining America and Christianity

CNN’s Jake Tapper, in a recent interview about the GOP health care plan with Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, elicited these words from Brooks: “The plan] will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool, and that will help offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”

Vann R. Newkirk II, in an article in The Atlantic published May 5, 2017, picked up on Brooks’ theme as amplified it and its origins, in the American strain of theology known as the prosperity gospel.

Newkirk says, “The AHCA, even by conservative think-tank calculations, will leave many low-income and sick people without insurance they can afford, and will do so even as it makes health-care work better for healthy people. Brooks’s explanation, and his close association of morality and health, with the idea that “good lives” produce good health, is just a recasting of the prosperity gospel.”

Newkirk roots this religious philosophy among wealthy evangelical televangelists and megachurches. And he asserts that it is directly connected to the GOP’s willingness to remove pre-existing conditions from basic insurance, and their desire to annul the Obama Medicaid reforms.

“The beliefs of some evangelicals connecting wealth to God’s favor became intertwined with faith healing,” Newkirk writes, “and both rose to new heights in the television era on the backs of men like Oral Roberts.”

These beliefs were popularized by the TV cults created by Pat Robertson and the Bakers, and today’s Joel Osteen, among others. Their number also includes Paula White, Donald and Melania Trump’s pastor and protégé of James Dobson.

“Faith healing,” says Newkirk, “is also undeniably a policy statement. It at least partially rejects the role of science in public health and encourages a view that faith, virtue, and good works can be enough to secure healing. The basic idea that a healthy life is also a sign of favor fits right in with the prosperity gospel’s defense of riches. Health is wealth.”

“The prosperity gospel fits well in many American homes because it mirrors the established national secular ethos. Some proto-form of prosperity gospel animated the life and works of men like Andrew Carnegie, who neatly tied individualism, capitalism, and wealth accumulation together in his own Gospel of Wealth. That book, a foundational defense of capitalism and income inequality based on the perceived intellectual differences and contributions of laborers and capital-owners, was also rooted in a form of muscular Christianity that placed health and wealth as the near-inevitable consequences of a life well-lived, and sickness as a curse for the damned.”

Many of us, and perhaps most mainline clergy, want to believe that the view of sickness as a curse has been supplanted by epidemiology. Yet it is clear that the prosperity gospel has stuck around as one of the major pillars of American health policy.

Remember the AIDS/HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s?

It sparked a huge debate about morality and widespread condemnation of gay communities as cursed. This deep bias was echoed across the nation, and, though public thinking about LGBT people has shifted greatly, the strong links between health and morality persist in health policy today.

Newkirk reaches back into American history, citing a book called Sick From Freedom by Jim Downs, which chronicles the original exclusion of free black people from the American health-care system. For decades black people were not allowed to enter white hospitals.

Henry Lewis Gates, Harvard professor and author, has written of his own inability to obtain treatment as a child for an infection in his leg that left him lame for life, and could, in a white hospital, have been successfully treated. This restriction by race was founded on a belief that the immense burden of sickness among freedmen was a curse for their immorality.

When did American Protestants decide that salvation by grace alone, one of the pillars of Martin Luther’s reformation theology, no longer was part of their belief system? When did it become alright to say that our life is merited by our faith, our life style, our choices?  When did it become mainstream to say that we do not respect human suffering?

Donald Trump said this about Senator John McCain, whose long years in a tiger case prison in Vietnam had made him a hero in the eyes of the public for decades. Yet Trump, speaking from a prosperity gospel point of view, said publicly that he did not respect as heroic any man who was captured, rather than being the winner of the battle.

How quickly the basic values of Jesus are set aside. Where has the Good Samaritan gone in our sight? I’ve asked, in churches, liberal UCC churches where no one has preached the prosperity gospel, and yet the people in the pews are honest enough to say No, they would not pick up a beaten person lying in a public road.

American culture has indeed changed, and it seems, while we weren’t looking. Donald Trump’s campaign remarks about his worthiness being obvious in his worth, his wealth, have become acceptable to a great many Americans.

And the voices of preachers calling out the values of Jesus, that the society should bend its efforts to caring for the poor, the sick, the homeless, who are the very body of God in our midst, seem to fall unheard, or at least unheeded. Even Pope Francis, beloved, admired, and an ardent proclaimer of Jesus love for the poor, the refugee, the suffering, seems to hold little sway at the moment.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel just got himself caught in a firestorm of public comment, for saying on TV that sick children should have access to health care without regard to their parents’ incomes, insurance plans, etc. And when his guest, a Republical congressman, questioned how that would be paid for, Kimmel replied, by not cutting taxes on millionaires. Kimmel has had to apologize for this. Why?

Why does freedom of speech meet a border wall when national insurance is involved? Why is it a transgression to argue against tax cuts for the wealthy?

Kimmel has been called an elitist for his remarks. My mind boggles. Since when are the rich a social minority, needing our protective care?

Newkirk ends his article with a few facts that are indisputable:

1.Aside from race, the most direct societal predictor of health is still wealth, and as America has lionized its rich men, so it has often accepted health not as a basic right, but as an aspiration. But aspiration can be inspirational, even to the sick and the poor—perhaps especially so. After all, the prosperity gospel at least offers people some hope of living well enough to always have a shot of making it.

2. The reality is more crushing, and might even lend itself to nihilism: Generational poverty tends with few exceptions to breed poverty, and one of the key indicators ofa person’s lifetime health quality is that of their parents.

The only way out of this, is the Way Jesus recommended every day of his life: share, care, bend yourself to changing dire circumstances around you. Lift people up. And perhaps, for their children, life will change. That’s not the prosperity gospel. It’s The Gospel.
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Image: Falling Money – Prosperity Gospel.  from End Times Prophecy Report.