God Wants You to Be Rich?

"Milmon Harrison, author of Righteous Riches, calls this a 'prosperity narrative' and says it's as American as apple pie. Shaping these narratives, he says, is the entitlement mentality—from Winthrop's 'city upon a hill' sermon and John O'Sullivan's manifest destiny to the secular but similarly strong faith in Wall Street as 'too big to fail.' A laughable example was New Thought mystic Charles Fillmore's rendition of Psalm 23. It began: 'The Lord is my banker; my credit is good.' This talk of holy sinecure as a birthright is Osteen-ism at its most sophomoric. (He and his wife would not be held down by the foundation-cracked hovel of their more naive years! They got the full asking price for their townhouse!)"

Clint Rainey in Slate wonders how the recession will affect proponents of "the Prosperity Gospel."

And in the December issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin argues that these beliefs helped cause the recession itself.