But such creative cynicism was rare. By and large, America’s white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, “I’ve gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional.” Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the “cheese” was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview—a belief system, almost a religion—that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.
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* Marketdata Enterprises estimates that in 2005 the total U.S. market for “self-improvement products”—including tapes, books, and coaches on business, diet, and relationships—amounted to $9.6 billion, but with the caveat that “information about the market and its privately owned competitors is still very difficult to obtain. Most companies or organizations are very reluctant to give out any information regarding their revenues, enrollments at their programs, or how they are doing/how fast they are growing.” In 2004, Potentials magazine gave an estimate of $21 billion a year for the market in all “motivational products” (Steven Winn, “Overcome That Gnawing Fear of Success,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 2004). The International Coach Federation estimates that coaches worldwide garnered $1.5 billion in 2007 and that most of them were business coaches (Executive Summary, ICF Global Coaching Study, revised Feb. 2008).
FIVE
God Wants You
to Be Rich
The most eye-catching religious development of the late twentieth century was the revival of fire-and-brimstone Calvinism known as the Christian right. But while its foremost representatives, televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, hurled denunciations at “sinners” like gays and feminists and predicted the imminent end of the world, a friendlier approach was steadily gaining ground—positive thinking, disguised now as Christianity. Calvinism and positive thinking had last squared off in the nineteenth century, when positive thinking was still known as New Thought, and they did so again near the turn of the twenty-first century, not in public clashes but in a quiet fight for market share—television audiences, book sales, and ever-growing congregations. Promulgated from the pulpit, the message of positive thinking reached white-collar suburbanites who had so far encountered it only at work, as well as millions of low-wage and blue-collar people who had not yet encountered it at all.
By any quantitative measure, the most successful preachers today are the positive thinkers, who no longer mention sin and usually have little to say about those standard whipping boys of the Christian right, abortion and homosexuality. Gone is the threat of hell and the promise of salvation, along with the grim story of Jesus’s torment on the cross; in fact, the cross has been all but banished from the largest and most popular temples of the new evangelism, the megachurches. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of megachurches—defined as having a weekly attendance of two thousand or more—doubled to 1,210, giving them a combined congregation of nearly 4.4 million. 1
Instead of harsh judgments and harrowing tales of suffering and redemption, the new positive theology offered at megachurches (and many smaller churches) offers promises of wealth, success, and health in this life now, or at least very soon. You can have that new car or house or necklace, because God wants to “prosper you.” In a 2006 Time poll, 17 percent of all American Christians, of whatever denomination or church size, said they consider themselves to be part of a “prosperity gospel” movement and a full 61 percent agreed with the statement that “God wants people to be prosperous.” 2 How do you get prosperity to “manifest” in your life? Not through the ancient technique of prayer but through positive thinking. As one reporter observes of the megachurch message:
Often resembling motivational speeches, the sermons are generally about how to live a successful life—or, “Jesus meets the power of positive thinking.” They are encouraging, upbeat and usually follow on the heels of a music and video presentation. (After this, the last thing those in attendance want to hear is a sermon about “doom and gloom.”) One will often hear phrases such as “Keep a good attitude,” “Don’t get negative or bitter,” “Be determined” and “Shake it off and step up.” 3
Televangelist Joyce Meyer writes that “I believe that more than any other thing, our attitude is what determines the kind of life we are going to have”—not our piety or faith but our attitude. “It’s especially important to maintain a positive attitude,” she explains on her Web site, “because God is positive.”
Like many other proponents of the new theology, Meyer has good reason to be “positive.” Her ministries—which extend to weight loss and self-esteem—have made her the centimillionaire owner of a private jet and a $23,000 antique marble toilet. So egregious is the wealth of top positive-thinking evangelists—much of it, of course, tax-deductible—that in 2007 Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) launched an investigation, not only of Meyer but of televangelists Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. If these pastors have been incautious about displaying their wealth, it’s because, like secular motivational speakers, they hold themselves up as role models for success. Follow me, is the message—send money, tithe to my church, employ the methods outlined in my books—and you will become like me.
Joel Osteen of Houston’s Lakewood Church is hardly a high roller among the positive evangelists. He flies in commercial planes and owns only one home, but he has been dubbed the “rock star” of the new gospel and called “America’s most influential Christian” by the Church Report magazine. 4 Unlike many others who make their money by motivating people, Osteen has no history of painful obstacles overcome through sheer grit and determination. He inherited his church from his father, assuming the pulpit with no theological training after dropping out of Oral Roberts University. Once ensconced, he “grew” the church at a furious rate, till today it boasts a weekly attendance of forty thousand people and a weekly income of a million dollars. Osteen doesn’t collect a salary from his church—there are already three hundred people on its payroll—because he is apparently content to live off his royalties. His first book, Your Best Life Now, has sold about four million copies, leading to what was said to be an advance of $13 million for the sequel, Become a Better You.
Osteen’s books are easy to read, too easy—like wallowing in marshmallows. There is no argument, no narrative arc, just one anecdote following another, starring Osteen and his family members, various biblical figures, and a host of people identified by first name only. A criticism directed at Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s applies just as well to Osteen’s oeuvre: “The chapters of his books could easily be transposed from the beginning to the middle, or from the end to the beginning, or from one book to another. The paragraphs could be shuffled and rearranged in any order.” 5 One of the best of Osteen’s anecdotes involves a man who goes on a cruise ship carrying a suitcase full of crackers and cheese because he doesn’t realize that meals are included with the price of his ticket. In other words, there’s plenty for everyone—wealth, delightful buffet meals—if only we are prepared to demonstrate our faith by tithing generously to the church. His worst anecdotes, however, make the eyes glaze over, if not actually close, like the one that begins: “Growing up, my family had a dog named Scooter. He was a great big German shepherd, and he was the king of the neighborhood. Scooter was strong and fast, always chasing squirrels here and there, always on the go. Everybody knew not to mess with Scooter. One day my dad was out riding his bicycle. . . .” 6
How to achieve the success, health, and happiness God wants you to have? Osteen’s proffered technique is lifted directly from the secular positive thinkers—visualization. Other positive evangelists often emphasize the spoken word as well, and the
need to speak your dream into existence through “positive confessions of faith and victory over your life.” As Kenneth Hagin, one of the first positive preachers and a role model for Osteen, puts it: “Instead of speaking according to natural circumstances out of your head, learn to speak God’s Word from your spirit. Begin to confess God’s promises of life and health and victory into your situation. Then you can begin to enjoy God’s abundant life as you have what you say!” 7 For Osteen and Hagin, as for Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale before them, success comes mainly through “reprogramming” your mind into positive mental images, based on what amounts to the law of attraction: “You will produce what you’re continually seeing in your mind,” Osteen promises. “Almost like a magnet,” he writes, echoing Hill, “we draw in what we constantly think about.” As evidence, Osteen offers many small “victories” in his life, like getting out of a speeding ticket and finding a parking space—not just any space, but “the premier spot in that parking lot.” He suggests that the technique will also work “in a crowded restaurant”: “You can say, ‘Father, I thank you that I have favor with this hostess, and she’s going to seat me soon.’ ” 8
But Osteen’s universe is not entirely tension-free. Within his world of easy wish fulfillment an “enemy” lurks, and it is negative thinking: “The enemy says you’re not able to succeed; God says you can do all things through Christ. . . . The enemy says you’ll never amount to anything; God says He will raise you up and make your life significant. The enemy says your problems are too big, there’s no hope; God says He will solve those problems.” 9 Robert Schuller, another leading positive pastor, invokes the same “enemy,” advising his readers to “never verbalize a negative emotion” because to do so would mean “giving in and surrendering your will to an enemy.” 10 Neither of these preachers personifies the “enemy” as Satan or condemns negative thinking as a sin; in fact, they never refer to either Satan or sin. But the old Calvinist Manichaeism persists in their otherwise sunny outlook: on the one side is goodness, godliness, and light; on the other is darkness and . . . doubt.
The God of Victory
There is nothing to mark Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which I visited in the summer of 2008, as sanctified territory—no crosses, no stained glass windows, no images of Jesus. From my hotel room window, just across a six-lane highway from the church, it’s a squat, warehouse like structure completely at home among the high-rise office buildings surrounding it. In fact, it used to be the Compaq Center, home stadium of the Houston Rockets, until Osteen acquired it in 1999 and transformed the interior into a 16,000-seat megachurch. Entering through an underground parking lot, I arrive in a cheery child-care area decorated with cartoon figures and lacking only popcorn to complete the resemblance to a suburban multiplex theater. Even the sanctuary, the former basketball court, carries on in this godless way. Instead of an altar, there is a stage featuring a rotating globe and flanked by artificial rocks enlivened with streams or what appears, at least, to be flowing water. I can find nothing suggestive of Christianity until I ascend to the second-floor bookstore—a sort of denatured and heavily censored version of Barnes and Noble, prominently displaying Joel Osteen’s works, along with scores of products like scented candles and dinnerware embossed with scriptural quotes. Here, at last, are the crosses—large ones for wall hangings and discreet ones on vases, key chains, and mugs or stitched into ties and argyll socks.
The Osteens—Joel and his copastor and wife, Victoria—when they step forth on the stage for Sunday service to a standing ovation are an attractive couple in their forties, but Joel is not quite the “walking advertisement for the success creed” I had read him described as. 11 He is shorter than she is, although on his book cover he appears at least two inches taller; his suit seems too large; and, what is also not evident in the book jacket photos, his curly, heavily gelled black hair has been styled into a definite mullet. She wears a ruffled white blouse with a black vest and slacks that do not quite mesh together at the waist, leaving a distracting white gap. In one way, the two of them seem perfectly matched, or at least symmetrical: his mouth is locked into the inverted triangle of his trademark smile, while her heavy dark brows stamp her face with angry tension, even when the mouth is smiling.
The production values are more sophisticated than the pastors themselves. Live music, extremely loud Christian rock devoid of any remotely African-derived beat, alternates with short bursts of speech in a carefully choreographed pattern. Joel, Victoria, or a senior pastor speaks for three to five minutes—their faces hugely amplified on the three large video screens above and to the sides of the stage—perhaps ending with a verbal segue into the next song, then stepping back as the chorus and lead singers move to center stage. All the while lights on the ceiling change color, dim and brighten, and occasionally flash, strobelike, to the beat. It’s not stand-up-and-boogie music, but most of the congregation at least stands, sways, and raises an arm or two during the musical interludes, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of themselves on the video screens as the cameras pan the audience. “Disney,” mutters the friend who has accompanied me, the wife of a local Baptist minister. But this is just a taping, and the twelve thousand or so of us in the sanctuary (the seats do not fill at either Sunday morning service) are only a studio audience. The real show, an edited version of what we are watching, will reach about seven million television viewers.
Inadvertently, I have come on a Sunday of immense importance to the Osteens, one of the greatest turning points, they aver, in their lives. In the preceding week, a court had dismissed charges against Victoria for assaulting and injuring a flight attendant. The incident occurred in 2005, when they boarded the first-class cabin of a flight bound for Vail, the ski resort, only to leave—or be thrown off —the plane after Victoria raised a fuss over a small “stain” or “spill” on the armrest of her seat. She demanded that the flight attendant remove the stain immediately, and when the flight attendant refused because she was busy helping other passengers board, Victoria insisted, allegedly attempting to enter the cockpit and complain to the pilots. Victoria ended up paying a $3,000 fine imposed by the FAA, and the matter would have ended there if the recalcitrant flight attendant had not brought suit demanding 10 percent of Victoria Osteen’s net worth in compensation for alleged injuries, including hemorrhoids and a “loss of faith” due to her mistreatment by a leading evangelist.
My friend’s husband, the Baptist minister, had predicted when we had coffee on Saturday that the Osteens’ Sunday service would make no mention of the whole ugly business. Why would they want to revive the image of Victoria behaving, as another attendant on the plane had testified, like a “combative diva”? He was wrong. Both Sunday services are given over to Victoria’s “victory” in court. When Joel steps forth at the beginning of the service, he covers his face with his hands, peekaboo fashion, for several seconds, and when he removes them his eyes are red and his smile is in temporary remission. He then takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket and rubs his eyes vigorously, although no tears are visible on his magnified video image. “It’s not just a victory for us,” he announces. “It’s a victory for God’s kingdom,” hence the entire service will be a “celebration.” As the service proceeds, he tells us that he spent his time at the trial writing out scriptural quotes and shows us the yellow legal pad he used. He shares a long, muddled anecdote about how he had ended up wearing the suit he intended to testify in although he hadn’t known he was going to testify on that particular day, because he couldn’t “find another suit,” leaving us to think that he owns no more than two. More ominously, he tells us that God “is against those who are against us.”
When Victoria takes center stage, she’s as triumphant as David doing his victory dance through the streets of Jerusalem, even briefly jumping up and down in joy. The “situation,” as she calls it, was difficult and humiliating, but “I placed a banner of victory over my head”—figuratively, I assume, and not as an actual scarf. Oddly, the
re are no lessons learned, no humility acquired through adversity, not even any conventional expressions of gratitude to her husband for standing by her. This seems shabby even by the standards of that other positive preacher Robert Schuller of Orange County’s megachurch, the Crystal Cathedral. When he had a similar altercation with a first-class flight attendant in 1997—such are the hazards of commercial air travel when you are accustomed to having your own servants—he ended up apologizing in court. But for Victoria, the only takeaways are that “we can’t be bogged down by circumstances” and “don’t lick your wounds,” which echo Joel’s constant exhortations to be “a victor, not a victim.” In fact, sometime in the interval since the incident, God had revealed that he wanted her to write a book, and—good news!—it will be coming out in October, followed by a children’s book a few months later.
I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman, who happened in this case to be African American. The crowd, which is about two-thirds black and Latino and appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically, many raising their arms, palms up, to the deity who engineered her triumph. Maybe they hadn’t followed the case or maybe they are just trying to snatch a little of Victoria’s victory for themselves, because the message to this largely working-class congregation seems to be that they, too, will triumph, as Victoria has, because that is God’s promise to them. It just may take a little time, because theirs seems to be a forgetful God, who has to be “reminded” of his promises, Joel told us. “Remember your promises,” one of the songs goes, “remember your people, remember your children,” as if addressing a deadbeat dad. Focus on what you want, in other words, and eventually, after many importunings, God will give it to you.