–Commentary–by DaveM

All my life I have heard of Christians saying never to use God’s name
in vain.  Going into the subject of what God’s name actually is will
be another discussion in itself, so I will not go into that in this
article.  What I want to focus on is the main way I see Religious
entities and followers using god’s name to bring profit to themselves
and to give the people more hell on earth then any devil ever could.
And the blind followers continue to do so… I give you proof:

Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess
By David Van Biema -Time Magazine, business & tech

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of
the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current
financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of
Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black
televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the
University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s
central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy
the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous
expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this
encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused
the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first
house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty
much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in
Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: “The
pastor’s not gonna say, ‘Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,’ but I
have heard, ‘Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still
bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big
donation to the church], you’ll get that house or that car or that
apartment.’ ” Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: “It
definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this
offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house,
people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was
really bad banking policy.” If so, the situation offers a look at how
a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism
entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.

Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a
distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will
reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily
to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and
concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn
throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-
enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its
faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see
themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are
“worthy of having more and doing more and being more.” In some cases
the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good
financial habits and entrepreneurship.

But Walton suggests that a decade’s worth of ever easier credit acted
like a drug in Prosperity’s bloodstream. “The economic boom ’90s and
financial over extensions of the new millennium contributed to the
success of the Prosperity message,” he wrote recently on his personal
blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not
positively. “Narratives of how ‘God blessed me with my first house
despite my credit’ were common. Sermons declaring ‘It’s your season to
overflow’ supplanted messages of economic sobriety,” and “little
attention was paid to … the dangers of using one’s home equity as an
ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations.”

With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity
congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as
to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier
ministries will shrink along with their congregants’ fortunes. Says
Walton: “You would think that the current economic conditions would
undercut their theology.” But he predicts they will persevere, since
God’s earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the
economic eight ball.

A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville
Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition.
Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies
more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of
God. But the believer’s note to his minister illustrates how magical
thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. “Last
Sunday,” it read, “You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So
I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a
picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer
as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On
Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage
company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of
only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy &
Grace.”

And pray that the credit market doesn’t tighten any further.