Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

Credited with pioneering “God-men” theology, Lake’s bold claims teetered on self-apotheosis. “God intends us to be gods (John 10:34),” he argued. “There is a God-power and a soul-force in the nature of man that God is endeavoring to bring forth.… The man within is the real man. The inner man is the real governor, the true man that Jesus said was a

Father George Hurley, for example, eschewed programmatic solutions for the urban black poor, urging his followers to counter racism with prayer and positive thinking.

Kenyon wholeheartedly agreed that Christians must live out their faith in contradiction to their senses. As Kenyon argued, humans, bombarded by “sense knowledge,” must be trained to see the spiritual truths (“revelation knowledge”) buried beneath.

Pentecostal businessmen would learn to invest spiritual meaning in the marketplace and cultivate religious pride in entrepreneurship. The logo showed a firm handshake under a white cross.52

Right thinking would open the floodgates to the abundant life: “See yourself in a prosperous condition. Affirm that you will before long be in a prosperous condition.… You thus make yourself a magnet to attract the things that you desire.”

Positive thinking was simply a repackaging of earlier metaphysical mind-power, remembered for its psychological cast and emphasis on a cheerful and well-ordered mind.

God spoke the world into existence, creating light with the words, “Let there be light.” In this, Kenyon shared a common New Thought premise that God established the “original Creative Word” in Genesis, making the spoken word the template for activating power.31 Kenyon, however, stipulated that the divine power poured into the container of words co

Positive thinking was synthetic, mixing the categories of religion, psychology, medicine, and self-help; its prophets were not typically systematizers or intellectuals, but popularizers and doers.

Great men—and they were men—were once regular people, separated from the masses by steely character. Conwell preached the American virtues of innovation, pragmatism, and self-reliance dipped in bronze. Modern business simply tested every Christian’s nature. Conwell’s Wall Street gospel agreed with the unfettered accumulation by the nation’s first m