Faith's Real Riches
By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, August 6, 2008; A17
In
a recent investigative profile, the Associated Press tells the
depressingly familiar story of televangelist Kenneth Copeland. His
ministry's private jet and lakeside mansion. The complex web of
ranching, oil and media interests that benefits his extended family. In
this case, there is no taint of hypocrisy. Copeland practices what he
preaches -- a doctrine that God wants his followers to prosper in very
material ways.This prosperity gospel combines two of the most
powerful forces on Earth: the profit motive and the power of positive
thinking. At its best, it inspires hard work, generosity and the
avoidance of life-destroying vices. At its worst, it is religiously
infantile."I believe God wants to give us nice things," says evangelist Joyce Meyer."I think God wants us to be prosperous," pastor Joel Osteen assures us. "I think He wants us to be happy."Whatever
ethical problems such leaders may or may not have, they face a large
theological challenge. A religious system that promises happiness and
"nice things" is difficult to reconcile with the faith whose founder
had "no place to lay his head," urged his followers not to store up
"treasures on earth," and called on them to deny themselves and take up
a cross of suffering.This has never made the best marketing
message: What company would adopt the electric chair or the hangman's
noose as its logo? Christianity has always dealt in hard truths -- that
God is not a means to our own ends, and that suffering is unavoidable
in lives bounded by mortality and often wrecked by failure.Suffering
for the sake of suffering is useless; it is merely masochism. But when
suffering cannot be escaped as the health-and-wealth preachers promise
-- or even nobly endured as the Stoics promise -- it may perhaps be
transformed. "If you and I can share our pain," said the late
theologian Henri Nouwen, "suddenly we find grace and joy coming in. In
your tears and anguish and struggle, you suddenly discover community,
you suddenly discover friendship, you suddenly discover affection, you
suddenly discover forgiveness, you suddenly discover healing. All these
things come through vulnerability."And in this odd faith where
the poor in spirit are blessed, the highest ideal is suffering for
others -- though most of us do precious little of it. This model of
spiritual leadership has nothing to do with conventional measures of
success and influence. It is found in the medical missionary who buries
his or her life in the forgotten relief of forgotten suffering. In the
dying pope who speaks for the vulnerable by exposing his own shocking
vulnerability.One of the most vivid literary pictures of this
leadership comes from a strange source -- a self-loathing,
self-described "Catholic agnostic," prone to prostitutes, opium and
suicide attempts. In Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory," set in
the 1930s, Mexico's authorities destroy churches and hunt down priests
for execution. An unnamed whiskey priest -- disguised and constantly
moving -- doggedly performs his sacramental duties while knowing he is
a spiritual failure. He has a mistress, a child and a problem with
alcohol. But stripped of dignity, respect and possessions, he discovers
an identification with the poor around him. "When you visualized a man
or woman carefully," he observes, "you could always begin to feel pity
-- that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the
lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair
grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of
imagination."Having reached safety in a neighboring state, the
whiskey priest returns, knowing he will be captured and killed, to
deliver the last rites to a murderer. The priest is driven by suffering
and sin down to the level of his fellow men, until he is worthy to die
for them. During this hard descent into sainthood, he finds that God's
love is often different from what we expect. "It would be enough to
scare us -- God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it,
and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man
like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."With
the health-and-wealth gospel advancing from America to Brazil to
Nigeria, it is worth considering the vast spiritual distance between
Copeland and the whiskey priest, and the possibility that success is
not the only or best measure of influence.michaelgerson@cfr.org