That interview was such a stunner because it’s exactly what Republicans aren’t supposed to say about their health-care bill. Most Republicans paint their support for the AHCA in terms of the deficiencies of Obamacare, the problems low-income people face obtaining affordable health-care, or a perceived inability of the country to pay for the broad benefits of the program.

When pressed, despite the evidence otherwise, party leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan break out PowerPoint to argue that their plan will actually help low-income people and people with pre-existing conditions. Even provisions that are obviously more rooted in a moral background, like support for work requirements in Medicaid, are painted as pieces that will make the whole law better and benefit the lives of everyone involved.

But while Brooks’s comments stray from Republican talking points, they may help explain both the internal logic of the American Health Care Act and one of the main elements to the political appeal of Trumpism.

The AHCA, even by conservative think-tank calculations, will leave many low-income and sick people without insurance they can afford, and does so even as it makes health-care work better for healthy people. Brooks’s explanation, and his close association of morality and health, with the idea that “good lives” produce good health, is just a recasting of the prosperity gospel.

What’s a religious philosophy mostly pioneered by wealthy televangelists and megachurches got to do with pre-existing conditions and Medicaid reform?

The beliefs of some evangelicals connecting wealth to God’s favor became intertwined with faith healing, and both rose to new heights in the television era on the backs of men like Oral Roberts. While it became part of the cults of personality around the generation of Pat Robertsons and Peter Popoffs that followed Roberts’s lead, faith healing was also undeniably a policy statement. It at least partially rejected the role of science in public health and encouraged a view that faith, virtue, and good works could be enough to secure healing. And although the furthest extremes of the prosperity gospel often bring to mind church scandals, thousand-dollar suits, and parish helicopters, the basic idea that a healthy life was also a sign of favor fit right in with the gospel’s defense of riches. Health is wealth.

The prosperity gospel sold by televangelists fit—and fits—so well in many American homes because it mirrors the established national secular ethos. Some proto-form of prosperity gospel animated the life and works of men like Andrew Carnegie, who neatly tied individualism, capitalism, and wealth accumulation together in his own Gospel of Wealth. That book, a foundational defense of capitalism and income inequality based on the perceived intellectual differences and contributions of laborers and capital-owners, was also rooted in a certain form of muscular Christianity that placed health and wealth as the near-inevitable consequences of a life well-lived, and sickness as a curse for the damned.