The Prosperity Gospel Extracts More Black Wealth Than Payday Lending

Consider the arithmetic of extraction. A payday lender charges an annualized interest rate of approximately 400% on a two-week loan, and for this, it is rightly identified as predatory, subjected to regulatory scrutiny, and condemned by consumer advocates as an institution that profits from poverty. Now consider a different institution — one that asks a family earning $40,000 per year to contribute 10% of their gross income as a tithe, plus additional “seed offerings” of $100, $500, or $1,000 at special services, plus a monthly building fund contribution, plus a pastoral anniversary gift, plus a first-fruits offering at the beginning of each year. This institution pays no taxes, files no public financial disclosures, is subject to no regulatory oversight of its finances, and promises its contributors not a 400% return but an infinite one — the blessings of God, measured in health, wealth, and divine favor, payable upon the contributor’s sufficient faith. And this institution is called a church.

The prosperity gospel — the theological framework that teaches that God rewards financial giving with financial blessing, that poverty is a consequence of insufficient faith, and that the measure of a Christian’s spiritual maturity is the size of their bank account — is not merely a doctrinal error. It is, when practiced in communities where the median household income falls below the national average and the median net worth approaches zero, one of the most efficient wealth-extraction mechanisms operating in Black America today. It extracts more consistently than the lottery, more predictably than the payday lender, and more thoroughly than the check-cashing outlet, because it wraps the extraction in the language of the sacred and seals it with the threat of divine displeasure.

The Theology of Taking

The prosperity gospel did not emerge from the Black church tradition. Its intellectual origins trace to the New Thought movement of the nineteenth century, a metaphysical philosophy that taught the power of positive thinking and the ability of the mind to attract material outcomes. It was imported into Pentecostalism in the mid-twentieth century by figures like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin, who developed the doctrine of “seed faith” — the teaching that financial gifts to a ministry function as “seeds” that God is obligated to multiply and return to the giver.

Kate Bowler, a historian at Duke Divinity School whose research represents the most comprehensive academic study of the prosperity gospel movement, traces how this theology migrated into Black Pentecostal and charismatic churches in the 1970s and 1980s, where it found particularly fertile soil. The reasons are not difficult to understand. A theology that promises material deliverance has obvious appeal to communities experiencing material deprivation. The message that God wants you to be wealthy, that your poverty is not a structural condition but a spiritual deficiency that can be corrected through the right combination of faith and giving, offers something that structural analysis does not: agency. It tells the listener that they are not trapped. That the system arrayed against them can be bypassed through supernatural means. That the check is in the mail — God’s mail, which runs on a different schedule than the United States Postal Service but arrives with certainty for those who believe.

The appeal is understandable. The consequences are devastating.

The Pastors and Their Planes

In 2015, Creflo Dollar — the senior pastor of World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia, a predominantly Black megachurch with approximately 30,000 members — asked his congregation to help him purchase a Gulfstream G650 private jet. The cost: $65 million. The request was made through a campaign that asked 200,000 people to give $300 each. The median household income in College Park, Georgia is approximately $36,000. The pastor was asking families earning less than the national median to collectively fund a private aircraft that costs more than the entire annual budget of many small cities.

Dollar is not an anomaly. He is a specimen. The prosperity gospel ecosystem in Black America includes a network of pastors whose personal wealth, derived from the contributions of their congregations, would be considered excessive in any industry and is obscene in the context of the communities they serve. The compensation packages, the multiple residences, the luxury vehicles, the designer wardrobes, the first-class travel — all of it funded by the voluntary contributions of people who have been taught that giving to the pastor is giving to God, and that questioning the pastor’s lifestyle is questioning God’s anointing.

“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
— James Baldwin

The Financial Damage

The individual toll of prosperity gospel giving is difficult to quantify precisely because churches, unlike publicly traded companies, charities rated by watchdog organizations, or even political campaigns, are not required to disclose their finances. The IRS exempts churches from the requirement to file Form 990, the annual financial return required of other tax-exempt organizations. This means that a megachurch with annual revenue of $50 million or $100 million has no legal obligation to tell its congregation — the people providing the money — how that money is spent. The pastor’s salary is not publicly disclosed. The church’s investments are not publicly disclosed. The proportion allocated to community services versus personal compensation versus building expansion is not publicly disclosed.

In 2007, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa launched an investigation into six televangelists and prosperity gospel preachers, including Creflo Dollar and Eddie Long, requesting financial documentation that any publicly traded company would be required to provide as a matter of course. Several of the ministries refused to comply, and the investigation ultimately produced no legislative action. The IRS church exemption remained intact. The financial opacity that enables extraction without accountability continues to this day.

What we do know, from survey data and ethnographic research, is suggestive of enormous financial harm. Bowler’s research documents prosperity gospel adherents who gave away their savings, took on credit card debt to make “seed offerings,” deferred necessary medical care, and fell behind on rent and mortgage payments in order to maintain their giving levels. The theology creates a vicious cycle: when the promised blessing does not materialize, the failure is attributed to insufficient faith, which can only be remedied by more giving. The system is, from a financial mechanics standpoint, structurally identical to a gambling addiction, with the additional cruelty that the gambler believes God is running the casino.

The Theological Betrayal

What makes the prosperity gospel particularly offensive is not merely its financial impact but its theological violence against the tradition from which the Black church draws its deepest power. The Black church tradition — the tradition of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., of James Cone and Prathia Hall — is a tradition of liberation theology. It reads the Exodus narrative as a story about God’s preference for the oppressed. It reads the Prophets as a sustained critique of economic injustice. It reads the Gospels as a record of Jesus’s ministry among the poor, his confrontation with the wealthy and powerful, and his explicit warning that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The prosperity gospel inverts every element of this tradition. Where liberation theology sees poverty as a condition to be challenged through collective action, the prosperity gospel sees it as a spiritual deficiency to be corrected through individual giving. Where the prophetic tradition demands justice for the poor, the prosperity gospel demands offerings from them. Where Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple, the prosperity gospel pastor has installed credit card readers in the lobby.

Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic whose work profoundly influenced King, wrote in Jesus and the Disinherited that the genius of Christianity was its message to people with their backs against the wall — that their dignity was not contingent upon their circumstances, that their worth was not determined by their material condition, and that the God who loved them did not measure that love in dollars. The prosperity gospel teaches the opposite: that God’s love is measured in dollars, that material wealth is the evidence of divine favor, and that the poor are poor because they have not given enough, believed enough, or confessed enough positive words over their finances.

This is not theology. It is exploitation dressed in vestments.

The 15-25% Extraction Rate

For families who are deeply embedded in prosperity gospel congregations, the total financial extraction can be staggering. The standard tithe of 10% is merely the baseline. On top of the tithe, prosperity gospel churches typically solicit:

• Seed offerings — special gifts tied to specific faith declarations, often accompanied by the instruction that the size of the seed determines the size of the harvest
• Building fund contributions — monthly or annual gifts toward construction or renovation projects
• First-fruits offerings — the teaching that the first paycheck of each year (or each month) should be given entirely to the church
• Pastoral anniversary and appreciation gifts — annual campaigns to fund gifts for the pastor, which in megachurches can include luxury items, vacations, and cash
• Conference and event fees — registration costs for the church’s conferences, revivals, and special events, which can range from $50 to $500 per event

A family that participates fully in a prosperity gospel church’s giving program can easily contribute 15% to 25% of their gross income to the church annually. For a family earning $40,000, that represents $6,000 to $10,000 per year — money that is not being saved, not being invested, not being used to build an emergency fund, not being applied to education, not being deployed toward homeownership or any other wealth-building activity. It is being given, in the sincere belief that it will be returned multiplied, to an institution that uses it to fund operations, expand facilities, and in many cases, finance the personal lifestyle of its leader.

What a Genuinely Prosperity-Creating Church Looks Like

The condemnation of the prosperity gospel is only useful if it is accompanied by a vision of what the alternative looks like — what a church that genuinely creates prosperity for its congregation would do with the resources it receives. And the model, as discussed in greater detail in our companion article on church-based economic development, is not theoretical. It exists. It works. And it looks nothing like what prosperity gospel megachurches are doing.

A genuinely prosperity-creating church teaches financial literacy. It does not tell its congregation that God will multiply their seed. It teaches them how compound interest works, how to build a budget, how to eliminate consumer debt, how to save for emergencies, and how to invest for retirement. It puts Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University or the FDIC’s Money Smart curriculum in its fellowship hall and runs it with the same regularity and seriousness that it runs its Bible study programs.

A genuinely prosperity-creating church operates a community development corporation. It uses its institutional credibility, its real estate, and a portion of its revenue to develop affordable housing, incubate small businesses, and provide the gap financing that commercial banks will not offer in its community. West Angeles COGIC in Los Angeles does this. Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta does this. Concord Baptist in Brooklyn does this. The model exists. The majority of churches have simply chosen not to follow it.

A genuinely prosperity-creating church invests in its neighborhood. It does not build a sanctuary that costs $50 million while the block around it crumbles. It uses its resources to improve the community in which it is located — through homebuyer education, workforce development, after-school programs, and partnerships with community organizations that are doing the work that the church’s own mission statement claims to prioritize.

And a genuinely prosperity-creating church practices financial transparency. It publishes its budget. It discloses its pastor’s compensation. It submits to an annual independent audit. It treats the money it receives from its congregation with the same accountability that any organization receiving public trust should demonstrate. The fact that the law does not require this transparency is not an excuse. It is an indictment — of the law and of the churches that hide behind it.

“The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.”
— James Baldwin

The prosperity gospel will not be defeated by theological argument alone, because its appeal is not primarily theological. Its appeal is economic — it promises relief from economic suffering to people who are experiencing it acutely. The only effective response is to provide actual economic relief: the financial education, the wealth-building tools, the community investment, and the transparent stewardship that the prosperity gospel promises in the language of faith but never delivers in the currency of fact. The church that teaches its congregation to build a budget is more spiritually powerful than the church that teaches them to sow a seed. The church that operates a credit union is more prophetic than the church that operates a bookstore selling the pastor’s latest prosperity manual. The church that builds affordable housing in its community is doing more to fulfill the Gospel than the church that builds a $50 million sanctuary and calls it a monument to God’s faithfulness.

Faith without works is dead. But works without honesty is exploitation. And a theology that takes from the poor in the name of making them rich — while making only the preacher rich — is not faith at all. It is a transaction in which one party has all the information and the other has all the hope, and hope, as every con artist knows, is the most profitable commodity in the world. The Black church deserves better than this. The communities it serves deserve better. And the Gospel it claims to preach — the Gospel of a carpenter from Nazareth who owned nothing and gave everything — demands better. The question is not whether we know this. We do. The question is whether we love the people in those pews enough to say it out loud.