Hanna Rosin has a fascinating article about the increasingly popular Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that virtue is rewarded with wealth in this world, may have been at the core of the housing bubble and associated crash:

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

It’s something that I’ve never thought about, but I do tend to see the correlation between someone assuming that their own personal virtue will somehow trump the house price to income ratio, and engaging in reckless behavior, and as Rosin further notes:

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Certainly, they fit hand in glove with the housing boom and bust, as does the explicitly atheist philosophies of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which would tend to imply at least a supporting role.

Of course, this attitude has its genesis at the beginning of European colonization of this country.

The Pilgrims, as good Calvinists, believed that predestination implied financial success, and this idea has carried forward 4 centuries since.

As a Jew, I see the focus on rewards in heaven in most mainstream Christian denominations to be a bit unseemly, Judaism downplays the afterlife, focusing on the mission of Tikkun Olam (Mending the world), but prosperity gospel has always seemed to me to be, a perversion of faith as well as being insincere: After all, what is there to religion if you get something for nothing.

I would note that Rev. Rick Warren, with whom I agree on very little is of largely the same opinion, saying that, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?”

All in all, it’s an interesting read, and gives a view of a theology that I find profoundly disturbing.