There are traces of the old Christianity at Lakewood Church—or perhaps I should say traces of religion in general—lingering like the echoes of archaic chthonic cults that could still be found in classical Greek mythology and ritual. “God” makes many appearances, often as “God in Christ Jesus,” and Victoria refers often to anointings with oil—something she says she had wanted to do to “that whole courtroom.” Joel makes much of the fact that a turning point in the trial occurred on “8/8/08,” which he claims has some biblical numerological significance. At a small group meeting (very small, about twelve people in a room with 108 seats) I attended on Saturday evening, the speaker endorsed the Jewish dietary laws, or at least the avoidance of pork and shellfish, although most Christians believe that these laws were lifted two thousand years ago by Peter and Paul. But where is Christianity in all this? Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, “If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also”?
Even God plays only a supporting role, and by no means an indispensable one, in the Osteens’ universe. Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction—that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes—you have granted humans omnipotence.
All of these departures from the Christian tradition have already been noted with shocked disapproval—by Christians. My Baptist friends in Houston can only shake their heads in dismay at Osteen’s self-serving theology. On scores of Christian Web sites, you can find Osteen and other positive pastors denounced as “heretics,” “false Christians,” even as associates of the devil, sometimes on highly technical grounds (Joyce Meyer has put forth the idiosyncratic view that Jesus served time in hell to spare us from that experience), but more often for the obvious reasons: they put Mammon over God; they ignore the reality of sin; they reduce God to a servant of man; they trivialize a spiritually demanding religious tradition. On a 2007 60 Minutes segment on Osteen, a theology professor, Reverend Michael Horton, dismissed Osteen’s worldview as “a cotton candy gospel” that omits Christianity’s ancient and powerful themes of sin, suffering, and redemption. As for the central notion of positive theology—that God stands ready to give you anything you want—Horton describes this as “heresy,” explaining that “it makes religion about us instead of about God.”
Secular Roots
Whatever decorative touches positive preaching retains from the Christian tradition, its genealogy can be traced more or less directly to nineteenth-century New Thought. New Thought has its own extant denominations, like Christian Science and the smaller Unity Church, which arose in 1891 and, like Christian Science, was based on Phineas Parkhurst Quimby’s teachings. Kansas pastor Will Bowen, author of A Complaint Free World and inventor of the purple complaint-free wristband, is a Unity minister, as is Edwene Gaines, who illustrates in her book, The Four Pillars of Prosperity, a breathtakingly bossy attitude toward God. When the two hundred dollars she needed for a plane ticket failed to materialize, she writes, “I sat down and gave God a severe talking-to. I said, ‘Now look here, God! . . . As far as I know, I’ve done every single thing that I know to do in order to manifest this trip to Mexico City. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. So now I’m going to go right down to that travel agent and when I get there, that money had better be there!’ ” 12
Other streams feeding into modern positive theology can also be traced, ultimately, to the teachings of that nineteenth-century Maine clockmaker Phineas Quimby. Norman Vincent Peale, as we have seen, drew on New Thought sources, and his most prominent successor today is Robert Schuller, who in 1958 enlisted Peale himself to help build up the congregation of Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. Like Peale, Schuller teaches a form of mental reprogramming based on visualization, affirmation, and repetition, only he marks it as his own by calling it “possibility thinking” instead of “positive thinking.” But by the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of pastors were finding their way to New Thought without any help from Peale. Kenneth Hagin, considered the father of the Word of Faith movement, sometimes called “Word Faith” or the “prosperity gospel,” derived his ideas from the work of the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century evangelist E. W. Kenyon, whose ideas in turn have been painstakingly traced back to secular New Thought by D. R. McConnell. 13 Among Hagin’s acolytes were Joel Osteen’s father, John Osteen, as well as the first African American televangelist, Fred Price. Introduced to Hagin’s work by a friend, Price later wrote, “I went home that night and read every single book [by Hagin] and I was changed forever. It was like the scales came off my eyes.” 14 The Word of Faith message resonated powerfully with African Americans, who were eager to see the gains of the civil rights movement transformed into upward mobility. Another prominent prosperity preacher was the Harlem-based Frederick Eikerenkoetter, or “Reverend Ike,” who had been a traditional fundamentalist until the midsixties, when he discovered what he called “Mind Science,” derived from his reading of New Thought literature. 15 Sporting an enormous pompadour, he taught that poverty resulted from a wrong attitude and proved the correctness of his own thinking by acquiring a fleet of Cadillacs appointed in mink.
Contemporary Word of Faith preachers encourage a sense of brash entitlement, as in this commercial for the Atlanta-based Creflo Dollar’s videotape series Laying Hold of Your Inheritance: Getting What’s Rightfully Yours, described by religious scholar Milmon Harrison:
“Yo quiero lo mio!” a young Hispanic woman unflinchingly demands. She seems to be looking right at me across the distance between her as a televised image and me as a bleary-eyed, early-Sunday-morning-before-church channel surfer. “I want my stuff —RIGHT NOW!” a professionally dressed African American man demands, bouncing boxer-style on his toes for extra emphasis. An African American woman signs the phrase with an intensity that mirrors that of the spoken words. So forcefully do they convey a sense of authority and urgency as they lay their claim to their “stuff ” that I find myself caught up in the collective effervescence of the moment. It is all I can do to keep myself from adding mine to their chorus of voices. “YEAH, I WANT MY STUFF RIGHT NOW, TOO!” 16
Mary Baker Eddy would not have put it so baldly, but she had articulated this vision of an all-giving God, or universe, just waiting for our orders, more than a century earlier.
With Christian Science and the Unity Church, positive thinking had carved out a home within American Protestantism more than a hundred years ago. So why did it suddenly became such a prominent force at the end of the twentieth century? One possible explanation is simple contagion: churches are influenced by secular trends, and certainly by the 1990s there was no dodging the positive thinking available in the business literature, the self-help books, and even weight-loss plans. Joel Osteen, for example, might have picked up the tenets of positive thinking from his father or in conversations with Houston businessmen or from any number of books available in the business sections of airport bookstores. Most observers agree, though, that there has been a trend within Protestantism that increasingly disposes it toward the old New Thought, and that trend is the “church growth movement.” Starting in the eighties and accelerating in the last two decades, churches have increasingly sacrificed doctrinal tradition to embrace growth for its own sake, and positive thinking turns out to be a crucial catalyst for growth. Of the four largest megachurches in the United States, three offer the “prosperity gospel.” 17 The other, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, although hostile to the crass prosperity gospel, is definitely within the positive theology camp—long on “purpose” and opportunity, short on sin and redemption.
Corporate Churches
Size has always been a criterion for the success of a faith, although not t
he only one. Especially in the mainstream denominations, ministers seemed content for years to preach the same gospel, in the same church building, accompanied by the same music, even if this meant an increasing concentration on burying a dying congregation. The decline of mainstream church membership in the latter part of the twentieth century prodded a new generation of self-styled “pastorpreneurs” to try a fresh approach based on “strategic thinking” and “the aggressive goals of business.” 18 Looking out on the American suburbs, they felt like missionaries facing a heathen population. Here were millions of people who professed to be believers yet remained “unchurched.” In the “church growth movement” that had begun to emerge in the midfifties, energetic pastors drew on the experience of real missionaries in places like India, asking themselves, in effect, “How can we make our religion more congenial to the natives?” or, in the American setting, “What does it take to fill our parking lots?” To critics of growth for its own sake, and there are many—see, for example, the series “Is Church Growth the Highway to Hell?” on the Web site Church Marketing Sucks—an Atlanta Baptist church responded in a pamphlet: “A church gets big because its spirit is big. . . . Nobody ever started a business without hoping that someday, if he or she worked hard enough, it would be a big success. That is the American dream, isn’t it?” 19
In the new business-oriented approach to Christianity, you didn’t start by opening a church and hoping that people would be drawn in by newspaper announcements of the services. You started by finding out what people wanted from a church. Pastors Robert Schuller, Rick Warren, and Bill Hybels did the groundwork for their megachurches by conducting surveys of potential parishioners, and what they found was that people did not want “church,” or at least anything like the church they had experienced in childhood. If this were corporate market research, the company might have thrown up its hands and decided to abandon the product line, but enterprising pastors concluded that they simply had to reconfigure the old product. Hard pews were replaced with comfortable theater seats, sermons were interspersed with music, organs were replaced with guitars. And in a remarkable concession to the tastes of the unchurched—or, as they are also called, “seekers”—the megachurches by and large scuttled all the icons and symbols of conventional churches—crosses, steeples, and images of Jesus. Crosses, in particular, according to religious historian Randall Balmer, might affect the unchurched as they do vampires: they could “intimidate or frighten visitors.” 20
To further assuage the theophobia of the public, megachurches are typically designed to fit seamlessly into the modernist corporate-style environment that they inhabit. Gothic cathedrals were designed to counter the mundane world with a vision of transcendence, and to engage the imagination with the rich details of their ornamentation. The Protestant Reformation threw out the gargoyles and images of tortured saints but retained, in church design, a clean-lined rebuke to the secular world. Not so the megachurches, which seem bent on camouflaging themselves as suburban banks or school buildings. Surveying megachurches in 2005, the architect and writer Wytold Rybczynski found them, like Lakewood, “resolutely secular” in design. He wrote of Willow Creek Community Church, outside Chicago, for example, that “it doesn’t look like a place of worship, but what does it look like? A performing-arts center, a community college, a corporate headquarters? . . . Inspiring it’s not. It’s the architectural equivalent of the three-piece business suit that most nondenominational pastors favor.” 21
And that is apparently the desired result—to “lower the threshold between the church and the secular world,” as journalist Frances Fitzgerald writes, and reassure the “seeker” that he or she has not stumbled into some spiritual dimension different from that occupied by the standard bank or office building. To the Christian artist Bruce Bezaire, that is precisely what’s wrong with corporate-style churches: “While we might legitimately contemplate the degradation of a culture’s sense of Beauty when it has turned away from God, I’m concerned about the church’s understanding of God when it has turned away from Beauty. What does stepping into a gray drywall box contribute to our experience of reverence, joy, exaltation, worship?” 22 But for others, the corporate camouflage seems to work. A member of the Lakewood congregation, a semiretired schoolteacher, told me that because she had been forced to go to Catholic school as a child and “hated everything about it,” she was completely comfortable in the visually desolate environment of Lakewood, adding, “Church is not a building, it’s in your heart.”
When pastors surveyed their catchment areas, they found that what people did want was entertainment—rock or rocklike music, for example—and they wanted an array of services like child care and support for people dealing with divorce, addiction, or difficult teenagers. Missionary churches in the Third World had long ago learned to attract people with bits of local music and culture, as well as with church-affiliated schools and health services. In line with consumer demand, today’s megachurches are multiservice centers offering pre-and after-school programs, sports, teen activities, recovery programs, employment help, health fairs, support groups for battered women and people going through divorce, even aerobics classes and weight-lifting rooms. American churches—mega and not so mega—have filled in with the kinds of services that might, in more generous nations, be provided by the secular welfare state.
But megachurch pastors took a further step that no missionary would have contemplated. A missionary might have accommodated to the local population with stylistic changes and the addition of social services, but only as a means to preach the “word,” the core beliefs of Christianity regarding sin and salvation. Even in the interest of attracting more parishioners, he would not have gone so far as to adopt reincarnation or the notion of plural deities. Not so the pastorpreneurs, who have been willing to abandon traditional Christian teachings insofar as they might be overly challenging or disturbing. One thing that church market research revealed was that people definitely did not want to be harangued about sin and made to feel in any way bad about themselves. If you have only one day a week not given over to work or errands and laundry, you probably do not want to spend even an hour of it being warned of imminent punishment in hell. Megachurches and those aspiring to that status needed a substitute for the more demanding core of Christian teachings, and that has been, for the most part, positive thinking—not because it is biblically “true” or supported by scripture but because it produces satisfied “customers”—as some megachurch pastors refer to them—like the megachurch member who told the Christian Science Monitor, “We love it. We don’t miss a Sunday. The message is always very positive and the music is great.” 23 Most positive preachers see no tension between their message and traditional Christian doctrine. God is good, so he wants the best for us, or, as Joyce Meyer puts it, “I believe God wants to give us nice things.” 24
A positive message not only sold better to the public than the “old-time religion” but also had a growing personal relevance to pastors, who increasingly came to see themselves not as critics of the secular, materialistic world but as players within it—businessmen or, more precisely, CEOs. This is not an idle conceit. While old-style churches—“minichurches,” perhaps we should call them— handled budgets in the low six-figure range, megachurches take in and spend millions of dollars a year and employ hundreds of people, making their pastors the equivalent of many CEOs in the sheer scale of the enterprises they head up. Size alone dictates a businesslike approach to church management, and most megachurch pastors took their organizational model directly from the corporate playbook. For example, the Economist reports that at Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek Community Church:
The corporate theme is not just a matter of appearances. Willow Creek has a mission statement (“to turn irreligious people into fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ”) and a management team, a seven-step strategy and a set of ten core values. The church employs two MBAs—one from Harvard and one from Stanford—and boasts a consulting arm. It has
even been given the ultimate business accolade: it is the subject of a Harvard Business School case-study. 25
Megachurch pastors may even consort with real CEOs and be flattered to think of themselves as companions to these hard-headed men of the world. Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church has been mingling with the “masters of the universe” at Davos for years, and in a New Yorker article Malcolm Gladwell quoted him as saying:
“I had dinner with Jack Welch last Sunday night. . . . He came to church, and we had dinner. I’ve been kind of mentoring him on his spiritual journey. And he said to me, ‘Rick, you are the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. I’m Rupert’s pastor! Rupert published my book!’ ” Then he tilted back his head and gave one of those big Rick Warren laughs. 26
The top pastors no doubt look to Jesus for guidance, at least they freely invoke his name, but they also look to secular management consultants and gurus. In his book PastorPreneur, Reverend John Jackson cites the positive-thinking guru Stephen Covey. Bill Hybels is an admirer of Peter Drucker and, at least as of 1995, had a poster hanging just outside his office quoting the questions that management expert urged businesspeople to ask themselves: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” There are plenty of Christian-oriented “church growth” consultancies for pastors to turn to also; in fact, a small industry has arisen to advise aspiring pastors on everything from parking lots to events management, and some of the more successful megachurches, like Saddleback and Willow Creek, have spawned ancillary businesses as church growth consultancies themselves, offering training seminars, Web sites, and conferences for the pastors of lesser churches. But no one denies the role of secular inspiration in megachurches—if the distinction between sacred and secular even makes sense here. Robert Schuller likes to include celebrity guests in his services, and they have included well-known motivational speakers and the CEO of Amway. As one ambitious pastor told the New York Times: “Corporations are teaching us to look to the future and dream dreams.” 27