The New Prosperity Gospel

Health and wealth is out. Meaning and purpose is in.

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Kids in church youth group are always being prepped for a variety of highly unlikely scenarios. A school shooter who will let you go if you deny Jesus. A science professor who will fail you if you don’t spit on the Bible. Jezebels begging you to lose the purity ring. And just sort of the general idea that being a Christian will mean spending your life as a public high school pariah. Youth groups tended to flourish in the shadow of the lions at the Colosseum. The fact that pretty much everyone I knew either went to my youth group or a similar one didn’t factor into this equation.

But one big scenario that seeps out of the youth groups and into grownup church culture is this rooted in the idea of meaning. Christians, the theory goes, have found purpose and meaning. Non-Christians haven’t. If you’re doing a really good job of being a Christian, non-Christians will notice how much purpose you have and will start asking you about it, because they want to live with purpose too. 

Now, I’m a Christian, and it’s the source of my hope. But I’ve got a real problem with the idea that this somehow makes me special, and I’m emphatically not a fan of this framework. The whole thing hinges on the assumption that all people are either in the midst of a profound existential crisis, or else have resolved it by coming to faith in Jesus. 

As a teen, this gave me kind of a complex because not only was nobody asking me about why I had so much purpose and meaning; I didn’t really feel more purposeful or meaningful than anyone else I knew. Was I doing Christianity wrong? 

I think what’s happened in these circles is a sort of Millennial spin on the prosperity gospel. Reality just can’t prop up the idea of health and wealth gospel, which is why you don’t hear about it so much these days. But we still need some sort of carrot to dangle in front of the people who aren’t Christians, so we swapped out “health” and “wealth” for “purpose” and “meaning.” Maybe faith won’t make you outwardly rich, but it can still give you an enviable interior life. Maybe prayer won’t ward off every physical disease, but it can keep existential terror at bay. 

There are a few problems with this.