Profiteering for Jesus

http://www.politicususa.com/profiteering-for-jesus/

By: Hrafnkell HaraldssonMarch 25, 2012

And Jesus so loved the rich he gave his life for them. Or so you’d think. Jesus’ evolution into a plutocratic champion of the ultra-wealthy beggars belief. That is certainly the outlook of prosperity gospel, the idea that Jesus will make you rich. It does make some people rich – the people sending the message, that is. And it’s the fools who believe this gospel who make them rich.

Witness Pat and Jan Crouch, who run the Trinity Broadcasting Network, “the world’s largest religious network and America’s most watched faith channel.” Faith in the almighty dollar that is. Fundamentalists accuse liberals of worshiping material things, of putting those material things above god and therefore engaging in idolatry.

That would be a sin, it would seem, endorsed by the Crouches, who raked in $92 million in donations in 2010, according to the Telegraph. All that money seems to have gone into fueling an outlandishly wealthy 1 percent-style existence, which included “private jets, mansions and a $100,000 motor home for their pet dogs.”

While Americans struggle. While Americans and people all around the world starve and die from disease. While Americans are homeless. A luxury motor home for dogs.

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The Crouches are hardly the first to live like millionaires. As CBS News reported in 2009, the Copeland’s of the Kenneth Copeland Ministries enjoyed “a lavish lakefront home, all 18,000 square feet of it, and a fleet of private planes – all paid for by the ministry.” Most folks don’t own $20 million dollar jets, let alone the four owned by the Copelands.

It is with good reason that Cathleen Falsani wrote in the Washington Post that the prosperity gospel as one of the “worst ideas of the decade” and labeled it an “insipid heresy.”

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If this obsession with wealth is not idolatry it is difficult to imagine what is.

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Whatever happened to the gospel Jesus actually preached? Here is a poor illiterate – at best semi-literate Galilean who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but the message being sent is a worldly and egocentric one, the very powers Jesus preached against 2000 years ago. Jesus said you cannot serve both God and money, but apparently Christians have found a way to do just that. [But they are not serving God, they are serving themselves.]

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