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Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel . By Kate Bowler . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 337 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Book Reviews and Notes
Much maligned by its critics as a simple example of materialism and greed, the prosperity gospel gets a fair and even sympathetic hearing from Kate Bowler in Blessed, the first book-length monograph on the subject. Her thesis, that the prosperity gospel both reflects and influences the theology and culture around it, allows for an unbiased study of the movement. Far from being a tangential and irrelevant phenomenon, the prosperity gospel becomes, in Bowler's account, a rather logical outgrowth of its religious surroundings and of Protestant soteriology. She convincingly argues that the prosperity gospel holds that faith is a causal agent: faith causes blessings to happen. Some blessings--wealth and health, for example--can occur in this world, while salvation will follow in the next.
Bowler begins with a brief history of the individuals and movements that shaped the prosperity gospel. She demonstrates that the tangled confluence of New Thought, Pentecostalism, and, as she calls it, the "American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility" provided a hospitable soil for prosperity gospel seeds to grow roots (11). While at times the parade of personages--from Mary Baker Eddy to E. W. Kenyon...