The sky is flawless, blue like an IT'S A BOY ribbon. Like, if there were a God, who had a passing inclination to conceive of something inexplicably perfect and present it for the heathens as proof of His might, it would look like this, probably. Of course, the woman two seats over from me—bubbles of fat on her elbows and ankles, sweat shining from every concave surface on her body—is eating her remaining nacho cheese directly from the container, with two curled fingers, and He would have to claim responsibility for that, too, so we'll just say that it was nice out.

Joel Osteen is equal parts Tony Robbins, palm reader, and late-night radio DJ. Osteen is Senior Pastor at the Lakewood megachurch in Houston, the largest Protestant church in the United States. He lives in a spectacularly generic $10.5 million mansion in one of Texas's wealthiest suburbs. He is an advocate of prosperity theology, a nontraditional, frequently criticized interpretation of the Bible in which God wishes for us to prosper financially and donating to the church will help fulfill that wish.

If you are sleepless or lonely, you can find him on cable, almost whenever, beaming into your brain at maximum voltage, rescuing you from yourself.

His sermons include almost no religious parables. They are instead fueled by vaguely empowering solutions to human strife, inflated with the heft of God: Greatest Hits. He recites passages like, "We are masterpieces, fearfully and wonderfully made," and says, "You are fully loaded and totally equipped to fulfill your dreams." He wants you standing in front of the mirror beating your chest, calling her back, never giving up. He is selling limitless positivity with no strings attached, mirages for the hopeless in the form of fortune-cookie bromides. He is a man with perfect posture, perfect abs, big white teeth, a family that seems impenetrably happy. On stage his children bounce all over like cartoon animals. His son's Twitter feed is an ongoing G-rated celebration of moms, feeling awesome, and One Direction. His wife talks like she is permanently on an infomercial for LOVE. Not loving anything in particular, just LOVE as a concept, love as unbridled happiness. Osteen is saying this without actually saying this: "We have won, we are proof, we are the manifestation of the wisdom I have shared with you. God has steered us and now here we are, standing in Yankee Stadium, wearing khaki pants and gaudy watches. One day, if you work hard enough, maybe you can wear khaki pants too."

Humans mumble; humans piece together sentences as they're going. Osteen doesn't. There is no apprehension or doubt.

Osteen is a maestro of American consumerism. His ministry—from the pastors on stage at the Compaq Center to women in call centers in Ohio—has achieved near-total homogeneity, from ideology to tone of voice. They speak in a way that is both calm and uplifting at the same time. Every word of conversation seems scripted, practiced. They are selling you this worldview in a way that is so patient and unflappable it is as if it's a recording. They are nice to us. They listen. They are telling us we're big and brave. We are masterpieces.