What Would Jesus Do?: Liberal Christianity and the Gospel of Prosperity

            A few months ago I was telling someone a story about the origins of the What Would Jesus Do movement, and our minister Rev. Amy Kindred overheard, and said, you should do a sermon on that!  So, today I don’t really have anything to say about what Jesus would do, instead what I am going to do today is tell a story about what Christians have thought about what Jesus would do, but I think it has some implications for Unitarian-Universalists, and has some things to teach about fads, and social action, and spreading the message, and recognizing allies.

            My story today is about a religious fad, and so it makes sense to begin by thinking a little about fads.  Fads tend to catch-on rapidly spread throughout a population and then die out fairly rapidly.  But they also tend to come back occasionally, when the conditions are right.  Fads are products of mass-marketing techniques, but they transcend the marketing that spawned them, tapping into deeper currents within pop culture, moving into many genres and platforms.  So think, for example, about the Care Bears. Care Bears rose to prominence between 1983 and 1987, and they were designed by the marketing division of General Mills to fill the gap left by the end of the fad for the Strawberry Shortcake franchise.  They began on greeting cards, but moved to toys, TV, movies, t-shirts, and beyond.  There were knock-off imitations by other companies trying to cash-in on the fad, and parodies trying to make fun of the Care Bears.  But by 1989 the franchise was almost dead.  Two attempts to re-launch the Care Bear product line were made during the 90s and both flopped terribly.  But in 2002 there was another major Care Bear re-lease, and it did not flop.  Apparently there were enough parents who remembered the Care Bears fondly from their own childhood by 2002, that the hook worked, and indeed rose from 2002 to 2008, albeit with a major re-envisioning in 2007.  In each incarnation, the Care Bears were also a seriously multi-media phenomenon.  They were toys yes, but they began on greeting cards, and morphed to TV, movies, plush toys, and appeared in music, video games, board games, on pajamas and far more.  They were seriously cross-platform symbols, but symbols of almost nothing beyond innocence and emotionality.  There principle opponents typically sought to do evil by promoting apathy, and their principle weapons were hugs and the dreaded Care Bear Stare.

            At first glance religion doesn’t look much like a marketing gimmick.  It involves some of our deepest and most significant commitments, and touches directly on issues of personal identity, for example.  But, religion in the US has been compared to a marketplace of ideas for centuries, and many religions think about sharing their ideas in terms central to marketing, how to get the message out, how to make it attractive, what is the target demographic, what is working and not working in our approach?  And from the 1700s to today, many commentors have worried that the American approach to religion favors slick marketing over fundamentals.  But the reply has been again and again, surely fundamentals and slick marketing together are even more effective than the fundamentals alone, without the cunning marketing.  Even good ole’ St. Augustine argued that rhetoric, his age’s word for slick marketing, was one of the central things for Christian leaders to learn and embrace.  Further, American Christianity, especially of the more evangelical varieties has long been known for working to explore means of getting the message out, other than just traditional sermons and services, embracing over the decades: tent revivals, music, handing out tracts and Bibles, mass print media, radio, TV, and now the internet.  So the key elements of a fad: marketing strategy, many distinct platforms, and tapping into the deeper currents of culture and growing beyond the original marketing vision, are all actually there for American religion.

            The “What Would Jesus Do” movement is a great example of a seriously multi-pronged marketing fad, albeit over a little longer of a time frame, than the Care Bears.  The words “What Would Jesus Do” appear on t-shirts, on bracelets, in magazine articles, sermons, books, CDs, and more.  The modern incarnation of the WWJD movement began in 1989, although the phrase was not trademarked until 1998.  The trademark owner, Tinklenberg, claimed she never wanted money, just some control, just they ability to reign in the excesses of the market.  She claims the straw that broke her back and convinced her to trademark, was when she saw a WWJD board game.  By 1999 Gore was endorsing the phrase WWJD.  By 2002 it was being used in political commercials.  By 2005 it was clear that the fad was past its peak and declining, although it is clearly not entirely played out even today.   

            What is often not appreciated, and my real topic for today, is that the What Would Jesus Do spiritual fad did not begin in the 1990s, but rather in the 1890s, and that in both its 1890s version, and its 1990s version an important part of its power and appeal was a particular Liberal Christian critique of the theology of prosperity.  The letters W-W-J-D, were and are a symbol for millions of evangelical Christians of an attitude towards money and poverty and social action that many Unitarian Universalists would heartily agree with.

            Christianity has gone back and forth on its understanding of economics and wealth many times over the centuries.  The Dominicans and the Franciscans fought in the middle ages about what the appropriate Christian attitude towards material wealth ought to be.  Luther and Calvin and the early Protestants accused the Catholic Church of being overly worldly and obsessed with money, and saw that as one of the reasons for their split with the Church.  On the other hand, many thinkers, including, Max Weber, have thought that Protestant doctrines of predestination, and worldly success as being evidence of a saved state, led to a “Protestant Work ethic” in which one was expected to work diligently and become prosperous to make it evident to others that one is in fact saved.  And thus the Protestants also came to seem overly concerned with wealth and careerism to many critics over the centuries. 

The episode of this perennial fight about Christian attitudes towards wealth that concerns us today begins in 1889 with Andrew Carnegie’s famous essay “The Gospel of Wealth.”  Now Carnegie was one of the richest men in America (and indeed the world) when he wrote this essay, but was also a famous philanthropist.  The basic thrust of the essay is that rich and poor will always be with us, so what a person should do is become as rich as they can, and then any excess wealth they have after paying for a “modest” standard of living for themselves and their dependents, should be donated to charitable causes.  And the ideal charitable causes to donate to are ones that allow hard-working poor people to transcend their origins, like the libraries that Carnegie famously set up.  For Carnegie, work is dignified and a source of good, and rich people are rich because they work hard, whereas poor people are poor because they are lazy.  Indeed, the divisions between the rich classes and the poor classes serve the useful role of separating the virtuous from the unvirtuous, although it does so imperfectly, and Carnegie admits that occasionally you will meet a lazy rich person, or an industrious person who is not rich yet.  He actually cites Herbert Spencer’s ideas about Social Darwinism favorably in the essay.  But Carnegie’s basic attitude towards wealth and worldly prosperity is clear, the Christian should strive hard to be prosperous in this life, should not feel guilty for their wealth, and should donate whatever excess they earn above their families’ needs to carefully chosen charities.  By the 1890s it was clear that Carnegie had articulated what many American Christians already believed about wealth, and this position was typically called “the Gospel of Wealth” in pulpit and print, after the title of Carnegie’s essay, and is probably part of what Max Weber meant by the Protestant work ethic.

But it is equally clear that many American and British Christians in the 1890s, and 1900s, rejected Carnegie’s understanding of the role of wealth and class in the Christian life.  The theology which opposed Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” came to be known as “the Social Gospel” in the US, and as “Christian Socialism” in Britain, and theologians like Richard Ely, Washington Gladden, and Walter Rauschenbusch (who we cited earlier) were important leaders of the movement.  They argued that Christianity required comforting the poor, and trying to improve the conditions of humanity and that this was best accomplished by not oppressing the poor in the first place, rather than oppressing them for profit, and then pretending to give them a bit of charity in recompense.  They thought that direct action to help the unfortunate was more in line with Christian teachings that working hard and then donating money to just causes.  The Social Gospel theologians were an important part of the political Progressive movement.  They supported mandatory education, banning child labor, regulating the hours that mothers worked, ending the 12-hour work day, labor unionism, public health legislation, cleaning up slums, and donating services directly to the poor.  Missionary work abroad was important to the Social Gospel promoters, and they often advocated medical uplift missions both abroad and in domestic impoverished areas.  The YMCA became one of the great advocates and organizing locations of the Social Gospel.  The Social Gospel became a central part of the understanding of Christian social action, for many American denominations including the Presbyterians, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the United Methodist Church, the United Churches of Christ, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  It was pretty common for Episcopalians too, and other denominations often had slightly different but fairly analogous ideas, like the Salvation Armies understanding of social action, or the Catholic labor movement and Catholic liberation theology.

One of the most influential authors of the Social Gospel was Charles Sheldon, who made the basic case for it in his 1896 novel “In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?”

In the key passage of the novel, the fictional Rev. Henry Maxwell is confronted by a homeless man who is puzzled about why so many Christians ignore the poor.  The homeless man says:

"I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night,

'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,

All my being's ransomed powers,

All my thoughts, and all my doings,

All my days, and all my hours.'

"and I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps? It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and sin."

The chararcters in the novel then go on to ask themselves in their daily lives “what would Jesus do?”  What would count as following “in his steps?”  And while they answer the question in different ways, none of them decide to make as much money as they can and then give the excess to the poor, each tries to minister to the poor directly in some way or another.

Social Gospel Christians of the 1890s and 1900s found themselves asking What Would Jesus Do, and answering, roughly, some version of “support progressive politics, while engaging social problems directly via social action.”  By the 1910s the progressive movement had some big successes but was splintering.  The Social Gospel movement petered on a bit, and eventually clearly becomes one of the important influences on the Civic Rights movements of the 50s and 60s.

But the idea that God wants us to be prosperous in this world, does not die with Carnegie either.  A number of Christian evangelical thinkers develop a theology called the “Word of Faith” theology that eventually influences a broader movement that is now called the “Prosperity Theology.”  There are several obscure early writers in this vein like E. W. Kenyon, and Kenneth Hagin.  More mainstream Evangelicals like Sister Aimee McPherson seemed somewhat influenced by it, and even Billy Graham, wrote a 1955 book called the “Secret of Happiness” which has a lot of affinities with the Prosperity Theology movement.  Several scholars have argued that Prosperity theology, has roots in the “New Thought” movement of the 1890s, or even that it is just an Evangelical repackaging of New Thought, a charge that Prosperity Theologians deny.  But, Prosperity Theology really comes into its own during the 1980s, when nearly every one of the important televangelists, embraced it and argued for it on air, including Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton, Jim Bakker, and John Osteen.  During the 80s, Prosperity Theology moves from relative obscurity, to being one of the main ideas of nearly every televangelist.  Jim Bakker is a particularly interesting case, because after he was convicted of fraud and sent to prison, he wrote a book entitled I Was Wrong: The Untold Story of the Shocking Journey from PTL Power to Prison and Beyond, in which he sees embracing the Prosperity Theology as the key mistake he made, and the main teaching from his televangelism days that he wishes to retract.

“The more I studied the Bible, however, I had to admit that the prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of Scripture. My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I was appalled that I could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet! - Jim Bakker 1996

The heart of the prosperity theology is the idea that God is a loving father, and like any loving father wants his children to prosper.  It certainly sees material prosperity as part of this, but sees health and loving relationships to be equally central to worldly prosperity.  It cites a number of passages in the Bible where God talks about his desire that humans have “more abundant life” or where Jesus asks, What father would give a stone when their child asked for Bread?  Critics often nickname the theology, “Name-it-and-claim-it” for the doctrine that when a Christian who is right with the Lord prays for something that they genuinely want, if they can put the prayer into words they will receive what they have asked for.  So the televangelists preached again and again, if you get right with the Lord, if you obey and tithe, and then sincerely pray for prosperity in this life you will get it, because God loves you and God is fair and God wants you to be happy.  You only need to let him into your heart, accept the gospel, act rightly, and, of course, tithe.  For the Prosperity Theologians faith in God is the key not just to happiness in the next life, but also to wealth, health, love, and success in this life.  And this message proved to be enormously popular, and brought the Prosperity Theologians a large audience, and with it both a fair bit of money, and of political power.

During the 1980s and 90s non-Christians and Christians with theologies quite different from the Televangists attempted to counter the Televangelists influence largely by making merciless fun of them, and eventually via criminal prosecutions.  The Televangelists were so pompous, and eventually exposed as so hypocritical that they were obvious targets of comedy.  But for evangelical Christians, that wasn’t really an appropriate tactic, in stood in danger of obscuring what the televangelists got right while making fun of them for their errors.  Instead what was needed was a counter-movement that would criticize the Televangelist’s errors without calling into question the parts of the message that the regular evangelical Christians agreed with.  And eventually, in 1989, Janie Tinklenberg, the Youth Minister of Calvary Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan, hit on an answer, by creating What Would Jesus Do t-shirts and friendship bracelets, and telling the story of Sheldon’s 1896 novel and the movement it began.  And things spiraled from there.

And in a sense that is the heart of the What Would Jesus Do movement.  It is an attempt to critique the Televangelist’s theology of Prosperity, from within a Christian Evangelical perspective.  It is an attempt to recreate a vibrant Evangelical left, one that can oppose the Evangelical Christian Right on its own terms.  It is an intentional echo of Evangelical Leftist movements of the past, like the Social Gospel movement.  It is Christian Socialism, without the Socialism word that gets so many Americans riled up.  It is the belief that Christian faith calls for direct social action to benefit the unfortunate, rather than focusing one’s life on hard work to prosper materially, along with charitable donations. 

By 1999 Gore, was using the phrase WWJD in public.  In 2002, television commercials appeared in four states beseeching people to abandon the gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles that are so popular in the US.  The ads asked: "What Would Jesus Drive?" The Rev. Jim Ball of the Washington DC-based Evangelical Environmental Network, which paid for the commercials, said: "We take seriously the question of 'What Would Jesus Do?' 'What Would Jesus Drive' is just a more specific version. What would he want me to do as a Christian? Would he want me to use public transportation?"

So what does this story mean for UUs?  Well, I draw three main lessons from it, one about allies, one about fads, and one about social action.  First, it is important to realize that American Christian Evangelicals have a long history of being extreme religious liberals.  Religious liberalism is the position that each person must struggle to interpret and understand the teachings of religion themselves, that growth of understanding along a personal path is an essential part of spiritual growth, as opposed to the religiously conservative position that religion teaches timeless truths which are easy to understand but sometimes harder to obey.  It’s just that in some time periods American Evangelists have been socially and politically conservative enough that their religious liberalism was hard to see.  That was certainly true as I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, as the Evangelicals were so tied to conservative politics, and conservative economic pictures.  But what the WWJD movement IS, is a critique of this, and attempt to re-create a socially liberal evangelism, one that believes that one’s faith should spill out into what one eats, what one drives, how one treats the people around them, that social action must move beyond earn and donate, to transforming the relations of social life.  And those are things I believe too.  Religious liberals trying to become social liberals by struggling against the power of mass media and transforming their lifestyles.  Hmm.  Those are our allies!  Or they are at least trying to become our allies.  Our Principles, Purposes and Sources, lists the 6 main sources of our religious tradition as UUs, and the 4^th is “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.”  Yes the Social Gospel, and its modern incarnation the WWJD movement are our natural allies in many ways.

The second lesson that I draw from this story, is about getting the message out.  There is a classic tension between marketing and the fundamentals of a religious message.  Something of the power and meaning of struggling to imitate your spiritual hero is lost, when it is reduced to earning 4 plastic letters on a “Christian” board game.  And we can certainly chuckle at the faddy excesses of the WWJD phenomena.  But when we look at ourselves, well, how do I put this.  UUs are far better at uhm, “resting on our fundamentals” than at getting our message out to the people who might be receptive to it, whether by slick marketing gimmicks or more classic techniques like simple word of mouth.

But the third lesson is the hardest.  I want to be prosperous, to have wealth and health and love and success.  And I see spirituality as part of this.  Maybe I cast spells and pray to the Greek gods, to help prosper, rather than tithing to televangelists, but I am not so far from the Prosperity theology as I might like to pretend.  And then I look at my upper-middle class parents, how do they do social action?  Are they working in the soup kitchens, or do they work hard at their careers, prosper and then donate?  They may scoff at televangelists, but they are certainly on the work-prosper-donate end of the spectrum too.  Actually working in a soup kitchen rather than just donating to it, seems kinda, well lower-class.  I’m certainly not of the class of my parents, and the middle class is in the process of disappearing as we speak, but I certainly haven’t shaken its habits and prejudices entirely yet.  Donating to a worthy cause helps me to assuage my guilt, and actually working in the trenches and seeing how bad it is, well that just makes my guilt feel worse.  It makes me more aware of my undeserved privileges.  And when I look at the two classic poles of Christian social action, the work-prosper-donate model, and the direct social action model, which best exemplifies the UU approach to social action?  Well, I certainly know UUs engaged in direct personal social action, but the work-prosper-donate model, sure seems pretty dominate in Unitarian-Universalism, to me, and for reasons deeply tied to class.  America has troubles talking honestly about class issues, and the Unitarian-Universalist religion has troubles talking about its class issues too.  But the spiritual issues here go beyond class too.  I cannot deny that it seems spiritually appropriate to me to yearn to prosper in this life in terms of health and wealth and love and success.  I also cannot deny that our love for our neighbors must spill into all social interactions, rather than just being expressed in nice safe anonymous donations.  But how do we balance these two truths, how to we chart a path between a spirituality of prosperity and a spirituality of direct social action?  The Christians have struggled with this for centuries, and when we are honest, the UUs: Humanists, Pagans, Agnostics or closet Christians are in much the same boat, struggling with much the same tensions.  If we cannot say “What Would Jesus Do?” as our glib, and more than just glib answer to this hard, hard question, is there any other glib and more than just glib answer that we can give?  I haven’t found one yet.  So maybe we need an insightful fad too, something with deep fundamentals under its slick marketing.  Thank you.