The so-called "Prosperity Gospel," a strain of evangelical Christianity that argues material wealth is a direct sign of God's personal favor, has long been a controversial doctrine among more mainstream American conservatives.
Now The New Republic's Elle Hardy reports that there's a new strain of Prosperity Gospel that takes things a step further by not only seeing wealthy people as God's chosen, but singling out poor people as deserving of "hostility."
This "antisocial" new Prosperity Gospel, writes Hardy, gained more prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic when believers were forced to go searching online for Sunday worship services and they were algorithmically steered toward churches that preached more extreme doctrines.
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"Those who ended up getting their Christianity from Facebook rather than the pulpit found it all too easy to fall down into some extreme theological rabbit holes," Hardy explains. "And without anyone to bounce new ideas off, they had no mooring — there was no congregation to moderate radical ideas."
One particularly extreme version of this ideology was outlined in a tract called "A Biblical View of Work and Welfare,” which calls for evangelicals to have no sympathy for "indolent bums" who won't pull themselves up by their bootstraps on the grounds that many of them "have chosen the path of poverty."
"This is a worldview that seeks to wage not a war against poverty but a war against the poor instead—those who have... shown insufficient faith," comments Hardy.
