Blessed A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

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I do also, while we were mentioning books, want to highlight Blessed, a history of the American prosperity gospel. Thanks Kate Bowler. Yeah, it's a monograph and it's probably the best work of its kind out currently if you'd like to read more.

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I do also, while we were mentioning books, want to highlight Blessed, a history of the American prosperity gospel. Thanks Kate Bowler. Yeah, it's a monograph and it's probably the best work of its kind out currently if you'd like to read more.

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Kate Bowler is an associate professor at Duke University Divinity School. She made an early name in her field of American religious history with her 2013 book, Blessed, a History of the American Prosperity Gospel.

So and this actually also just before we leave the Mennonites behind, I started with you getting really fascinated by hearing about a new Mennonite mega church. I couldn't believe it. I it broke a part of my brain that puts information together, because I was on the one Winnipeg Manitoba, the glories of the prairies please visit has only one fast road.

And they put a traffic light up on it. And I was sitting there at the light full of Christian rage. And, and I thought that I was watching a factory empty. And it turns out that this pop up building was in fact, a mega church in middle of the large Canada's largest mega church, and that it was mostly attended by Mennonites.

And that people I knew had recently contributed to pastors appreciation day, in which their pastor had been given a motorcycle, and then he rode it around on stage. And I was like, absolutely not. This is for Americans.

And so you went down this rabbit hole of what is known as the prosperity gospel, which is a Pentecostal movement.

And and that's such a big wide story also that we don't have time to go into here. But I want to say in this room, it's so easy to make fun of something like the prosperity gospel and some of the ways that it gets reported and caricatured.

You know, when we are secular and erudite, what I really appreciate about the book you wrote, and I mean, you have your critique, which one would have of anything one was studying closely enough. But I appreciate how you so looked for what was what is human and understandable. And what this particular religious movement also says about the rest of us.

And I thought, well, if it can happen in Mennonite world, it can happen in anywhere.

But I also saw the desire to escape. Believers wanted an escape from poverty, failing health, and the feeling that their lives were leaky blankets.