The Black Church: How Corporate Media & the Prosperity Gospel Make Legions of Ready Dupes | Black Agenda Report

The Black Church: How Corporate Media & the Prosperity Gospel Make Legions of Ready Dupes

09 May 2012

🖨️ Print Article

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

News reports are surfacing of more fraudulent financial advisors operating from the pulpits of black and white prosperity gospel megachurches. Federal lawmen are investigating, corporate news reporters and commentators bloviating. But are they asking the real questions, or missing the real story?

The Black Church: How Corporate Media & the Prosperity Gospel Make Legions of Ready Dupes

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“Why are prosperity gospel churches such a fertile ground for retail financial fraud?”

Corporate media like ABC's Nightline this week briefly focused on an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a shady character that prosperity gospel churches foisted upon their credulous members as a “financial advisor” on a ministry that was called the “Building Wealth Tour.” In an all too common story, the so-called “wealth-building ministry” was a Ponzi scheme, a Bernie Madoff swindle in miniature..

The Nightline news report consisted of interviews with a couple of families who entrusted the financial advisor with their life savings, and saw them disappear. It included footage of the charlatan's employee, who recounted how he locked his office doors and hid from the church people whose money he took, and finally a statement from the crook's lawyer, interspersed with clips of complicit black and white prosperity gospel mega-preachers Joel Osteen and Bishop Eddie Long. The case is much mentioned too, in what pass for black sites on the internet, but the focus on Creflo Dollar style flashy pimp preachers and the rotating cast of crooks they allow to access their pulpits fails to ask what ought to be the real questions of the hour.

Why are prosperity gospel churches such a fertile ground for retail financial fraud? Why doesn't this kind of thing happen more often in non-prosperity gospel churches, or in other self-governing organizations like community groups, sororities or labor unions?

“As long as our media, our leaders and our preachers educate us to be sheep, we will be preyed on by wolves...”

The obvious answer is that the peculiar kind of magical thinking embraced by these kinds of churches, and in lots of other places, like in the universe of Oprah, constantly maintains and manufacture a vast and ready supply of credulous marks and hopeful dupes, wooly headed little sheep eager to be sheared. Millions of us have been instructed, and now teach each other to “visualize” wealth, happiness and material comfort and that the power of this visualization will make them real, will bring them into being. Preachers of the prosperity gospel contrive various ways to award divine sanction to this nonsense, while advocates of the Oprah-style “secret” take their superstition straight with no chaser.

And that's the real story. Bernie Madoff was able to steal tens of billions over 20 years because investors and the general public all believed that financial magicians made profits out of hot air. Bernie Madoff is gone now, but there are still millions who still have faith in the magic, faith reinforced by the teachings of corporate media hucksters like Oprah, and shored up every Sunday by prosperity gospel preachers, black and white, across the country.

The African American church, which likes to imagine and promote itself as the leading institution in black America, is deeply infested with the disease of the prosperity gospel. As long as our media, our leaders and our preachers educate us to be sheep, we will be preyed on by wolves. It's really that simple.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He lives and works in Marietta GA, and is a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him via this web site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

listen

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20120509_bd_prosperity_gospel_manufactures_dupes.mp3

More Stories

Abayomi Azikiwe
Lawsuit Exposes White House Secret Agreement to Deport Migrants to Ghana
24 Sep 2025
A fifth African state, the Republic of Ghana, has been subjected to widespread criticism and legal actions for its participation in illegal deportations from the United States.
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Radio September 19, 2025
20 Sep 2025
In this week’s segment, we discuss a new book that analyzes the latest iteration of fascism currently emerging in the United States. But first, we are joined by a journalist and activist who has…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
The Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition
19 Sep 2025
Our guest is Rosa Clemente, who is an activist, independent journalist, and currently a Doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Fascism American Style
19 Sep 2025
A new anthology, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, was recently published by OR Books. We're joined by co-editor Michael Steven Smith, a retired attorney, former board member of the…
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
White Power
17 Sep 2025
The power structure in the U.S. can be boiled down to a system of might, and white, making right. Donald Trump has exposed its rotten foundations and the two-faced collaborators who keep it running.