The Prosperity Gospel

I find Christian fundamentalism (of the American flavour) fascinating, and from time to time have lost myself in the woods of the Internet, following a breadcrumb trail about things like the Quiverfull movement, Proverbs 33 Women, male religious groups like the Promise Keepers, the Dugger family, and so on. Mentions of the "prosperity gospel" picked up a couple of years ago, but my plate was already pretty full with learning about how Proverbs 33 women escaped from the cruel shackles of "feministic thinking," so I passed.

The New York Times occasionally throws up these pieces of How the Religious Among Us Live, and today they had another article about more prosperity preachers. This couple, the Copelands, have a ministry worth 100 million dollars a year. They get this prosperity through the grace of God, of course, who moves lower-middle-class people to send them $2000 to get a new Gulfstream. So that they can fly around the world ministering to people, of course: because a merciful God would never want you to fly coach (actually, I think that this is true, and that airline travel will convince anyone of the absence of God).

I should get worked up about this, but it just makes me sad. And it also makes me think, not for the first and not for the last time, that the real racket is religion. I should start one of my own. The Eternal Church of Mockingness and Cynicism.