Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies in the department of religion at Princeton University and the chairman of the Center for African-American Studies.

I once wrote that the black church was dead. It was a deliberate provocation. I wanted to spark a conversation about the role of black churches in light of contemporary challenges, particularly the crisis of American capitalism.

Black pastors preaching the need for prosperity lock us in gilded cages forged by competition and selfishness, sealing our fates.

Inequality is deepening in our country. People are working harder for less, and unemployment is high. Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” confirmed what we already felt, that we have entered a second Gilded Age in which the divide between the wealthiest and the rest of us makes the Grand Canyon look like a Georgia creekbed.

These developments have taken shape within a broader economic philosophy that has displaced the idea of the public good with the notion that we should all be engaged in the pursuit of self-interest. The result has been the privatization of social misery and a cultural mean-spiritedness that sanctions selfishness and greed.

One would think that this state of affairs contradicts a Christian vision of who we should be as children of God. But today we see throughout American Christendom, including in the black Christian community, a growing embrace of what has been called “prosperity gospel.” This view holds that God wills that those who are “born again” be materially wealthy and free of disease. Known also as the “Health and Wealth Gospel” or “Faith Message,” the theology connects a wide range of non-denominational and charismatic ministries based in what is known as the “Word of Faith Movement.”

We see its influence spreading, nationally and internationally, as televangelists and celebrity ministers with their megachurches preach its basic tenets. In black America, this theology overtakes calls for economic empowerment. Freedom dreams are supplanted by the aspiration to wealth, a theology that suits a vision of capitalism that is devastating our communities and country.

This gospel of wealth blunts criticism of durable inequality, precisely because wealth and the aspiration for upward mobility are tied to individual spiritual considerations. Wealth and poverty constitute evidence of God’s blessings or punishment. Conspicuous consumption becomes a critical part of the work of faith. Here Christians are “blessed entrepreneurs and consumers.”

Such an understanding of Christianity works seamlessly with American capitalism. There is no contradiction. It helps forge “the gilded cage” that locks us into an understanding of ourselves rooted in competition, selfishness, and greed. And God sanctions all of it.

If black Christendom succumbs to the allure of this view, its fate is sealed and what I initially wrote as a provocation – that the black church is dead – should become a reality.



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