Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

As the church modeled big business, lay people turned to a gospel that explained how wealth, capitalism, and devotion coincided.

The 1950s saw the first financial miracles creep into testimonies and sermons as a patchwork message of competing and complementary explanations about how faith made belief work.

It is a bizarre twist of history that this flowering of the prosperity gospel arrived in a season of withering anti-institutionalism. Its preachers valued clean living and future thinking among a generation in the grips of rebellion, when the first wave of baby boomers became teenagers, arriving in those years of anxiety and hormones in such number

Yet true to Peale’s unique style, the book was not a systematic treatise of thought-power. Rather, it traded precision for anecdotal evidence and warm reassurances.

Soon a flurry of “Prove God” campaigns encouraged believers to test their financial faith and earn their own proof. Gene Ewing, known as a financial troubleshooter for fellow evangelists, published Prove God testimonies like that of M. M. Baker, photographed beside his late model Lincoln:

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.”

Sweeping generalities buried the specifics, allowing New Thought to move beyond its sectarian heritage and into a blurry—but powerful—collection of religious beliefs inextricable from American culture itself.

Positive thinking followed a simple formula: “picturize, prayerize, and actualize.”

Russell H. Conwell (1843–1925), Baptist minister and lawyer, became a prophet of the gospel of wealth with his famous sermon, “Acres of Diamonds.” The sermon, preached some 6,000 times, promised listeners that wealth lay within any American’s grasp, if they would only accept their Christian duty to work hard and see God’s hand through the workings