Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

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.

In it, he folded Christian and psychological categories into a New Thought theme: God’s power could be harnessed by “a spirit and method by which we can control and even determine” life’s circumstances.

New Thought taught that the world should be reimagined as thought rather than substance. The spiritual world formed absolute reality, while the material world was the mind’s projection.

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

Second, Peale’s theological synthesis of upward mobility with religious buoyancy matched the postwar mood, turning a man into a movement. His blend of Methodist evangelism, Dutch Reformed Calvinism, and New Thought focus on mind-power appeared in earlier works, The Art of Living (1937) and You Can Win (1938), yet as Peale’s writing progressed, New

He urged believers to use spoken words, called positive confessions, to tap into this spiritual power. “Faith never rises above its confession,” he often repeated.33 Though Kenyon lambasted New Thought adherents for their proclamations of “I am well, I am well, I am happy, I am happy,” he chided their content, not their method. Kenyon advised them

This was an American gospel, based on hard work, pragmatism, innovation, self-reliance and openness to risk.83 The steadfast virtues of thrift, prudence, and persistence—so celebrated as the foundation of the American character—were appended to the imagined traits of frontiersmen, wildcatters, and fortune seekers.

Self-mastery became an art and occupation, as people sought to consolidate the era’s advances with improvements to their own lives.

Good Americans were good consumers and (so it seemed) good Christians. This nascent culture of acquisitiveness fixed in people’s minds the connection between America’s fortunes and their own spending power.