Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.”

Father Divine diagnosed the cause (negative thinking) and the cure (positive thinking) for the Great Depression.

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.