Blaming Prosperity Gospel for the Economic Collapse

You can take this however you like:

Let the confusion end: The Atlantic has hit the news stands with a breaking revelation: It's the Christians! To wit: Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

... recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how "God blessed me with my first house despite my credit" were common ... Sermons declaring "It's your season of overflow" supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about "what God can do," little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. "I would hear consistent testimonies about how 'once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,' or 'I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,'" he says. "This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster."

Whew! That was easy! Who knew? But is it really that simple? What are the facts on which this startling conclusion is based?

...Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona--all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis.

Makes sense: these were rapidly growing areas of the country; with rapid growth and cheap credit, lots of homes were getting sold. And lots of new churches and churchgoers would be expected. So, these Sun Belt areas grew quickly, had a lot of new churches (some of which were the "prosperity" variety) and ended up with a lot of foreclosures. But surely there has to be more evidence than that...

Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. "Hyper-segregated" urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites.

So, a lot of foreclosures occurred in the Hispanic and black communities -- and the prosperity gospel was increasingly popular among these groups as well. Pretty damning, I'd have to say. Pretty much nails it down, don't ya think?

Or not.

Without questions a lot of Christians have gotten sucked into prosperity gospel messages, but usually in the form of sending money to the people preaching this stuff. I'm not sure that believing that good financial things can happen to you is all that dangerous.