The Regressive Evangelism of America Part 4: God’s Plan #Blessed

How the Christian Right created a society and politics of greed and selfishness that’s susceptible to conmen

If you have ever held a magnifying glass up to the teachings of today’s far Christian Right, you may have noticed a stark departure from the traditional teachings of Christianity. Where charity and service were once emphasized, they have increasingly been replaced by a “winner-take-all” prosperity gospel under the guise of the American Dream—tragically and ironically fitting for a hyper-capitalistic society like the United States. Their mantra is simple: “God helps those who help themselves.”

It is a faith rooted in the belief that no matter how wealth is acquired, it is inherently God’s plan for you to have it—even if it comes at the expense of your fellow human beings—and that no one has the right to take it away. Charity and good works are at best optional. It is your divine right to hoard as much wealth as possible because, as one of their for-profit prophets, Norman Vincent Peale, once stated, “Empty pockets never held anyone back—only empty heads and empty hearts.”

It is no coincidence that this theology is embraced most enthusiastically by wealthy billionaires, right-wing politicians, and the conmen who orbit them in and around Washington. It has been carefully manufactured to justify widening wealth inequality and the political and legislative decisions that reinforce it. After all, if God has ordained the outcome, how can anyone argue with it?

From trickle-down economics to tariffs, Republican economic strategies over the past half-century have frequently been coated in the holy veneer of evangelical Christianity—framed as helping others while overwhelmingly enriching those at the top. The prosperity gospel also fueled decades of “hustle and grind” grifts through multi-level marketing schemes, with companies like Amway and Mary Kay opening conventions with prayer so attendees might continue to be “blessed” with wealth from above.

The logical conclusion of this theological movement is—of course—its newest religious text: Project 2025, which is now informing the policy direction of the current administration as it moves to strip food assistance, health care access, and retirement security from millions of Americans. The underlying logic is simple: I should only have to help myself, not others, because my faith tells me that wealth is next to holiness.

So how the hell did we get here—and how is this shaping our politics? If you’ll join me, let’s take our fourth deep dive into the fantastical world of far-right evangelical Christianity.

Roots of Prosperity Gospel

Prosperity theology—commonly known as the Prosperity Gospel—is a belief among some Christians that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God, and that faith, positive scriptural confession, and giving to charitable causes will increase one’s material wealth. Success is interpreted as proof of divine grace, favor, and blessing, while failure is viewed as judgment from on high. Adherents treat the Bible as a covenant between God and humanity: if they have faith in God, God will, in turn, deliver security and prosperity.

Almost all other Christian denominations consider this theology heretical and deeply exploitative of the poor, particularly because much of the wealth it generates is accrued at the expense of lower-income and vulnerable communities. But the uniquely American combination of capitalism and American exceptionalism—discussed in Part 2—created the perfect environment for this belief system to take root and flourish.

While its philosophical roots can be traced back to the 19th-century New Thought movement, prosperity theology did not gain significant traction until the mid-20th century. In the aftermath of World War II, charismatic Christian leaders found fertile ground among Americans eager for stability, success, and upward mobility in a rapidly expanding consumer economy.

One of the earliest and most explicit political expressions of this theology was Spiritual Mobilization, founded in 1935 by Rev. James W. Fifield Jr. The organization functioned as a religious-political movement funded by corporate leaders who sought to oppose Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by merging Christianity with free-market capitalism. Fifield argued that the expansive government programs of the New Deal represented a form of “pagan statism” that threatened spiritual freedom, individual liberty, and private enterprise.

Fifield sought to mobilize clergy across the country to defend what he framed as God-given rights against what the movement described as a “godless, collectivist state.” The organization’s credo reflected the everyday politics of the millionaires in Fifield’s congregation, asserting that men were creatures of God endowed with “inalienable rights and responsibilities,” explicitly enumerated as “the liberty and dignity of the individual, in which freedom of choice, of enterprise, and of property is inherent.”

Spiritual Mobilization promoted what it called a “Gospel of Free Enterprise,” positioning capitalism as not only compatible with Christianity, but as its natural economic expression. This was framed in direct opposition to the Social Gospel movement, which emphasized collective responsibility, labor protections, and care for the poor.

Former President Herbert Hoover—vilified by Roosevelt and his allies—became a prominent opponent of the New Deal and a key ally of Fifield. Hoover advised and encouraged the minister through personal meetings and regular correspondence. In a 1938 letter, Hoover warned that if the Church were to conduct a moral investigation of the federal government, it would find “everywhere the old negation of Christianity—that the end justifies the means.”

These ideas did not remain confined to elite congregations or policy salons. They would soon be popularized, simplified, and sold to mass audiences through revival tents, television screens, and eventually the political mainstream.

Televangelism and the Sales Pitch of Faith

In 1947, Oral Roberts began preaching the Prosperity Gospel just as Dwight D. Eisenhower was rising through the ranks of the U.S. military and federal government. As discussed in earlier installments, Eisenhower would later cloak America’s fight against communism abroad in religious language during the 1950s. At the same time, Roberts and other charismatic Christian leaders were waging a parallel war at home—using prosperity theology to combat anti-capitalist sentiment and portray free-market ideology as divinely ordained.

Roberts framed faith as a contractual “blessing pact,” promising followers that God would return their donations sevenfold. Donors were assured that money would come back to them from mysterious, unseen sources if they demonstrated sufficient faith by giving generously. What followed was a wave of financial support from middle-class Americans eager to secure prosperity in the post-war economy—money that overwhelmingly enriched those preaching the gospel while delivering little material benefit to those funding it. This transactional model of faith laid the foundation for the next evolutionary stage of evangelical Christianity: televangelism.

With the rapid expansion of television in the mid-20th century, charismatic preachers found a powerful new tool for scaling their message—and their fundraising. By the 1960s, prosperity gospel teachers had fully embraced televangelism and came to dominate religious programming across the United States. Oral Roberts was among the first to develop a nationally syndicated weekly television program, which soon became the most-watched religious show in the country. By 1968, television had supplanted the tent revival as the central vehicle of his ministry.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, televangelists became some of the most influential figures in American religious life, amplifying prosperity theology to millions of households each week. Among the most prominent were Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, who helped bring networks like Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) to national prominence through programs such as The 700 Club, and later co-founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) through their own show, Praise the Lord (PTL).

By the late 1980s, the Bakkers’ programming reached an estimated 13 million viewers worldwide. Their ministry expanded far beyond television into sprawling business ventures, most notably Heritage USA—a Christian theme park that, at its peak in the mid-1980s, was the third-largest theme park in the United States, behind only Disney’s properties. The line between ministry, entertainment, and enterprise had all but vanished.

Though the Bakkers would eventually become synonymous with scandal, their broader impact on American evangelicalism and mass-media religion remains undeniable. They demonstrated that faith could be packaged, branded, and sold at scale—and that religious devotion could be leveraged into immense political and financial power.

Other prosperity gospel figures quickly followed their lead. Televangelists such as Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer refined the model for a new generation, while Paula White—perhaps the clearest inheritor of this tradition—would go on to become Donald Trump’s personal pastor and spiritual adviser.

Yet televangelism alone did not explain how a prosperity-gospel preacher could move from a television studio to the inner circle of a sitting president. For that leap to occur, prosperity theology needed to fully merge with American self-help culture, salesmanship, and political ambition.

Preachers and Prose

As prosperity theology was taking the country by storm religiously, the ideas it spurred inspired countless books, think pieces, and schemes in the worlds of business and politics. Around the same time, Rev. James W. Fifield began mobilizing clergy, and Oral Roberts was drawing crowds to his healing tent revivals. The self-help genre was gaining popularity among Americans looking for a roadmap to personal success in a rapidly changing economy.

The most famous of these early works was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Carnegie began as a night-class instructor at a YMCA in New York City, teaching aspiring salesmen how to secure more business and be more effective in their roles. He focused on improving conversational skills, relating to people’s personal lives, and appearing empathetic to make selling easier. When one of his students, Leon Shimkin of Simon & Schuster, persuaded Carnegie to transcribe his fourteen-week course into a book, the result became one of the most influential nonfiction titles in American history.

As one of his most prominent critics, Sinclair Lewis described Carnegie’s method as teaching people to “smile and nod and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” That was, of course, the premise of Carnegie’s course in the first place: a lengthy program designed to keep people paying for lessons that could have been summarized in a half-hour conversation. It was a business model that twenty-first-century coaching schemes and multi-level marketing operations would later refine and monetize.

In 1937, Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich, outlining a so-called “Philosophy of Achievement” based on thirteen principles for success, drawn from the lives of wealthy figures like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Hill’s central message was that the only thing keeping someone from becoming rich was the wrong mindset. Change how you think, and wealth will follow. The result was a worldview that elevated individualism, rejected collaboration, and framed economic failure as a personal moral shortcoming rather than a structural reality.

Thinly veiled as self-help, Hill’s work amounted to anti-labor propaganda, repackaging the ideology of fiercely anti-union industrialists as universal wisdom. This mindset helped fuel hostility toward organized labor throughout the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which curtailed union power nationwide by allowing states to enact so-called Right-to-Work laws (more on why we should repeal these laws here).

Norman Vincent Peale completed the fusion in 1952 with The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living. Peale taught readers that happiness, success, and fulfillment could be achieved by reshaping one’s mindset through faith, affirmation, and visualization. His ten-step method encouraged followers to repeat scriptural affirmations daily, suppress doubt, and believe without reservation that God would deliver success.

For years, Peale preached these principles from the pulpit at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, where Fred Trump regularly brought his wife and children to hear him speak. Donald Trump later referred to Peale as “his pastor” and credited him with shaping his business philosophy, even claiming that Peale’s teachings helped him survive nearly a billion dollars in debt.

This mindset—absolute belief untethered from material reality—would come to define Trump’s public life. If he believed strongly enough, success was inevitable. If it failed, it simply was not meant to be. Facts became flexible, failure became unspeakable, and confidence itself became the product. In that worldview, faith, salesmanship, and political power are not just aligned—they are interchangeable.

From Multi-Level Marketing Meritocracy to a Salesman for President

The prosperity gospel crashing headlong into the “Greed Is Good” ethos of the 1980s created an almost perfect breeding ground for something uniquely American. You will often hear the Right prattle on relentlessly about how America is a “meritocracy,” where everyday citizens are told to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” to achieve success. Nothing should be handed to anyone—an irony that becomes hard to ignore when so much of their leadership, including the head of their party, Donald Trump, comes from inherited wealth.

This fixation on meritocracy also explains why so many Americans became uniquely susceptible to pyramid and multi-level marketing schemes beginning in the mid-20th century. People across every tax bracket were drawn in by the siren song of “being your own boss” and “making your own hours.” The promise that anyone could will themselves into success was so intoxicating that millions put themselves into financial ruin chasing it, all while funneling wealth upward to a small group of people who became extraordinarily rich and politically powerful.

Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel founded Amway in 1959 after finding early success as distributors for the first major MLM, Nutrilite. After building an organization of more than 5,000 distributors and realizing they would never profit as much as those at the top, they applied the same multi-level marketing strategy to their own company. The result was Amway—one of the largest direct-sales corporations in the world and, for many, the clearest embodiment of the so-called American Dream: proof that any ordinary citizen could strike it rich if they simply worked hard enough.

Amway’s direct-sales model—exported to more than one hundred countries—became a ubiquitous feature of the modern economy. Even Donald Trump experimented with the approach; his short-lived Trump Network in 2009 used an Amway-style pitch to recruit sellers for nutritional supplements, snack foods, and skincare products.

Amway’s success was deeply intertwined with evangelical Christianity. Both DeVos and Van Andel were devout Christians who relied heavily on church communities as recruitment hubs. Major conventions and meetings routinely opened with prayer, and company rhetoric leaned heavily on themes of family, faith, and personal salvation. Terms like “conversion,” “belief,” and “commitment” were used interchangeably with business success, encouraging near-total loyalty to the brand. Leaving the organization often came with significant financial and social consequences, creating a high exit cost for those who wanted out once the math stopped working.

And eventually, the math stopped working for most of them. Beneath the surface, Amway operated exactly like the pyramid schemes it so carefully avoided being labeled as. The vast majority of distributors discovered that no amount of effort could overcome the structural reality: they couldn’t sell enough product or recruit enough people to turn a profit. Required fees, inventory purchases, and qualification thresholds ensured that losses piled up at the bottom, while those at the top rolled in millions. Many distributors went into debt simply trying to keep up.

With that accumulated wealth, DeVos and Van Andel translated economic power directly into political influence. Both became major donors to the Republican Party at the state and national levels. They forged close relationships with Ronald Reagan, who addressed thousands of Amway distributors at the company’s 1984 “Spirit of America” rally. Their financial support for Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns proved invaluable—particularly as Amway faced investigations and fines abroad for pyramid-scheme-like practices.

Despite being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission in 1969 and even after the FTC’s 1979 ruling that Amway was not technically a pyramid scheme, the company flourished domestically during the Reagan years. Jay Van Andel went on to serve as chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and maintained close ties with President Gerald Ford, though he largely confined his political involvement to Michigan until he died in 2004.

Richard DeVos and his family, however, kept their hands firmly on the levers of political power. DeVos served as national finance chairman for the Republican National Committee and became a major donor to Focus on the Family, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. Through their wealth and influence, the DeVos family helped engineer an environment in Michigan that allowed unregulated charter schools to proliferate and transformed the birthplace of the American labor movement into a right-to-work state.

They exported this model nationwide—to Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia, Louisiana, and beyond—fueling hundreds of PACs and independent expenditure campaigns under the banner of “school choice” and “religious freedom.” In practice, these efforts worked to dismantle public education, weaken labor protections, and embed evangelical Christian values into public institutions.

The DeVos family’s influence now spans three generations, from ownership of the Orlando Magic to leadership roles across Amway’s corporate structure. And finally, there is Dick DeVos and his wife, Betsy DeVos—whose family, the Princes, share the belief that Christianity, capitalism, and patriotism are inseparable.

Together, the DeVos and Prince families used their combined wealth to wage a decades-long campaign against public education. Schools became the primary battleground for reshaping American society into a more rigidly Christian, prosperity-driven order. Their efforts culminated in Betsy DeVos’s appointment as Secretary of Education under Donald Trump, placing her in charge of dismantling the very system her family had spent years trying to undermine.

Without the prosperity gospel, Richard DeVos never would have amassed the wealth he did. Without that wealth, his family could not have exerted the political influence they wield today. And without a culture steeped in meritocratic mythology—where everyone is a “boss,” and failure is always personal—America would not have been nearly as primed for a slick salesman, reality-TV star, and serial grifter to ascend to the presidency.

Project 2025

All of these strands ultimately converge in Project 2025, the governing framework written by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation—an institution deeply entwined with the very prosperity theology and political machinery that produced it. Roberts’ appointment in 2021 was announced by Heritage board chair Barb Van Andel-Gaby, the daughter of Jay Van Andel, one of Amway’s co-founders. The lineage is not incidental. It is the point.

The ideological foundations of Project 2025 are unmistakably reinforced by the prosperity gospel that has animated modern conservative movements for decades. The document lays out an explicit plan to radically shrink the federal government, strip away social protections, and consolidate power in the executive branch. Its policy prescriptions include ending access to the abortion pill Mifepristone, easing child labor laws, dismantling the administrative state, weakening environmental and labor regulations, and completing Betsy DeVos’s long-standing project to eliminate the Department of Education.

Much like the theology and business models that preceded it, Project 2025 systematically downplays the importance of labor, collective bargaining, and fair compensation. The document includes an entire section devoted to “independent contractors,” recommending a return to Trump-era rules that made it easier for employers to classify workers as temporary or contract labor rather than full-time employees with benefits and protections. The language is revealing:

“Roughly 60 million Americans across all income groups, ages, education levels, races, and household types participate in independent work, including full-time, part-time, or as a ‘side hustle.’ People choose independent work for a variety of reasons, including flexibility, earnings potential, and the desire to be one’s own boss.”

This rhetoric is lifted directly from the prosperity gospel and the multi-level marketing playbook: flexibility over stability, aspiration over security, and personal belief over material reality. It treats precarity as freedom and casts exploitation as choice.

In his foreword, Roberts invokes the year 1979—the same year the FTC ruled that Amway was not technically a pyramid scheme—arguing that both 1979 and 2023 represented moments when the country and the conservative movement were “in dire straits” before being rescued by Ronald Reagan. In Roberts’ telling, Reagan’s triumph came from championing “the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.” The language could have been lifted directly from the speeches, columns, and donor memos circulated by the DeVos and Van Andel families in the 1980s.

Though Donald Trump initially attempted to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, the document ultimately appealed to him because it articulated the society he has always envisioned. In this world, power is autocratic and centralized, ordered around insular family dynasties overwhelmingly led by white men. Oversight is minimal or nonexistent. Work is constant, temporary, and unpredictable. Social obligation disappears. People do not owe one another anything.

These tenets are not merely political preferences—they are the direct inheritance of prosperity theology. They flow from a belief system that treats wealth as moral proof, poverty as personal failure, and hierarchy as divinely ordained. What we are witnessing now is the exertion of political power steeped in that religious dogma, made flesh through policy and governance.

And Americans are suffering for it.

The more clearly we understand the ideological architecture we are up against—not just a party or a candidate, but a decades-long fusion of theology, media, money, and power—the more obvious it becomes that incremental responses will not suffice. Countering this movement requires boldness, clarity, and a willingness to confront the religious fanaticism that continues to justify greed, cruelty, and authoritarianism in the name of God.

Conclusion: The Gospel They Preach

The prosperity gospel did not merely distort Christianity—it hollowed it out and refilled it with the moral logic of the marketplace. In doing so, it transformed faith from a call to mutual responsibility into a license for accumulation, hierarchy, and indifference. Wealth became virtue. Poverty became failure. And power, once sanctified, became untouchable.

Over decades, this theology was professionalized, broadcast, and monetized. It moved from pulpits to television studios, from revival tents to boardrooms, from self-help paperbacks to political platforms. Along the way, it taught generations of Americans that suffering is deserved, that help is weakness, and that anyone promising salvation—financial or spiritual—should be trusted if they sound confident enough. This is how a nation becomes susceptible to conmen: not because people are foolish, but because they are trained to confuse belief with truth and success with righteousness. It’s why so many people in the MAGA orbit can be seen hawking diet supplements, skin care products, and merchandise where everything has a monetary value, just like their predecessors in Nutrilite, Amway, and Mary Kay.

Project 2025 is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of this belief system made policy—an attempt to codify a society where obligation disappears, labor is disposable, and the powerful are shielded by both money and God. It reflects a worldview in which democracy is an inconvenience, empathy is a liability, and governance is merely another sales pitch.

What makes this moment dangerous is not simply the extremism of the policy proposals, but the moral framework that sustains them. When greed is baptized, and cruelty is reframed as discipline, there is no internal limit—only escalation. That is why technocratic fixes or half-measures cannot counter this movement. It must be confronted at the level of values, story, and moral clarity.

This is not a fight between religion and secularism. It is a fight over what kind of society we believe we owe one another. One vision says your worth is measured by what you accumulate, and your failures are yours alone. The other insists that dignity is not earned, that community is not charity, and that no economy—no matter how profitable—can justify abandoning its people.

Understanding how we got here is not an academic exercise. It is a warning. And whether we heed it will determine whether the next chapter of American politics is written by solidarity and accountability—or by the next salesman who knows how to tell us exactly what we want to hear.

Thank you all for reading and listening to By the Ballot. Looking back on 2025, we have had a wonderful year since we started this journey. As we head into 2026, we are focused on what Democrats can do in the Virginia General Assembly Session and in the 2026 midterms. By The Ballot will be taking a brief hiatus to spend time with family before we gavel in in Richmond. We will be back in the new year to continue our regularly scheduled programming.

By the Ballot is an opinion series published on Substack. All views expressed are solely those of the author and should not be interpreted as reporting or objective journalism or attributed to any other individual or organization. I am not a journalist or reporter, nor do I claim to be one. This publication represents personal commentary, analysis, and opinion only.