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    <title>The Cheap Prosperity Gospel of Trump and Osteen - The New York Times</title>
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                        			<h1 itemprop="headline" id="headline" class="headline">The Cheap Prosperity Gospel of Trump and Osteen</h1>
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<p class="byline-dateline"><span class="byline" itemprop="author creator" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" >By <span class="byline-author" data-byline-name="ANTHEA BUTLER" itemprop="name">ANTHEA BUTLER</span></span><time class="dateline" datetime="2017-10-29T23:11:43-04:00" itemprop="dateModified" content="2017-10-29T23:11:43-04:00">AUG. 30, 2017</time>
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        <p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="445" data-total-count="445">Before it began to rain in Houston last week, the spectacularly wealthy pastor Joel Osteen could have opened up his megachurch to serve as a logistics center. He could have announced that evacuees were welcome to take shelter there when Hurricane Harvey landed. Instead he wrote tweets like “God’s got this” and “don’t drift into doubt and fear … stay anchored to hope.” Only a couple of his posts on Twitter offered “prayers.”</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="354" data-total-count="799">On Sunday, Mr. Osteen’s church announced that it was inaccessible because of “flooding.” But intrepid journalists <a href="https://twitter.com/SeanUnfiltered/status/902314878303703041">proved</a> otherwise. After Mr. Osteen was humiliated on social media, he finally opened the 16,800-seat church to the public on Tuesday. When asked about the delay, Mr. Osteen <a href="https://twitter.com/TODAYshow/status/902862187764514816">said</a> that “the city didn’t ask us to become a shelter.”</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="399" data-total-count="1198">President Trump, too, revealed his morally bankrupt soul during the storm when he said that he timed his pardon of the racist former sheriff Joe Arpaio to coincide with the hurricane’s landfall because he assumed that it would garner “far higher” TV ratings than usual. Mr. Trump did visit Texas, but <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/902620363485478912">there was apparently no mention of dead or displaced Texans</a>, and no expressions of sympathy.</p><figure id="media-100000005400816" class="media photo embedded layout-large-horizontal media-100000005400816 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/08/30/opinion/30butlerWeb/30butlerWeb-master675.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" aria-label="media" role="group">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="176" data-total-count="1374">Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen are mirrors of each other. Both enjoy enormous support among evangelicals, yet they <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/19/americas-most-popular-pastor-doesnt-know-the-bible/#ixzz42tRme486">lack</a> a command of biblical scripture. Both are among the 1 percent.</p><div id="story-ad-1" class="story-ad ad ad-placeholder nocontent robots-nocontent ">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="456" data-total-count="1830" id="story-continues-1">Natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey are the worst kind of crises for people like Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen, who purvey their own versions of the prosperity gospel. This is a belief that says if you think positively and make affirmations, God will reward you with financial success and good health. If you don’t, you may face unemployment, poverty or sickness. (Mr. Trump in particular always speaks in laudatory terms about himself and his companies.)</p>        <a class="visually-hidden skip-to-text-link" href="#story-continues-2">Continue reading the main story</a>
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        <p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="213" data-total-count="2043" id="story-continues-3">But the problem is that it’s hard to promote “Your Best Life Now” or “The Art of the Deal” to people whose houses have flooded or been blown away, or to evacuees who have only the clothes on their backs.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="463" data-total-count="2506">Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Osteen’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/15/how-the-prosperity-gospel-explains-donald-trumps-popularity-with-christian-voters/?utm_term=.f13e531f0a56">brands</a> are rooted in success, not Scripture. Believers in prosperity like winners. Hurricanes and catastrophic floods do not provide the winning narratives crucial to keep adherents chained to prosperity gospel thinking. That is why it is easy for both men to issue platitudes devoid of empathy during natural disasters. They lack compassion for people who are not prosperous, because those people simply did not follow the rules.</p><div class="newsletter-signup variant-1-hidden " id="newsletter-promo" data-newsletter-productCode="TY" data-newsletter-productTitle="Opinion Today" aria-labeledby="newsletter-promo-heading">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="685" data-total-count="3191">This empathy-less prosperity gospel also permeates attitudes about the role of our government. Consider when Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said in March that poverty was a “state of mind.” Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama echoed this in a May <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/republican-sick-people-dont-deserve-affordable-care.html">interview</a> when he said that “people who lead good lives” don’t have to deal with pre-existing medical conditions. This kind of thinking by the Republicans, that individual effort and religious faith are paramount, has desensitized them to poverty, disaster and the vagaries of disease. They have already cut millions from federal disaster aid, and if an uptick in disasters occurs, many more people will die.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="579" data-total-count="3770">Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen aren’t the first to display such tone deafness. President George W. Bush, an evangelical known for his “compassionate conservatism,” was crucial in promoting an individual ethic of compassion. “Government cannot solve every problem,” Mr. Bush said in 2002, “but it can encourage people and communities to help themselves and to help one another.” What that really meant was churches, rather than the government, needed to administer social aid programs. The self-reliance of individuals and communities would substitute for federal support.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="447" data-total-count="4217">So while the storm churns through Texas and Louisiana, causing floods, death and misery, it is time to consider the damage the prosperity gospel has done to America. Mr. Trump and Mr. Osteen unwittingly revealed its ugly underbelly: the smugness, the self-aggrandizing posturing. It has co-opted many in the Republican Party, readily visible in their relentless desire to strip Americans of health care, disaster relief and infrastructure funding.</p><button class="button comments-button  theme-speech-bubble-large" data-skip-to-para-id="">
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<p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="309" data-total-count="4526">Now Ted Cruz and Texas Republicans seek federal disaster aid, although they voted against the same in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The Republicans in states affected by the disaster will find out soon enough what it feels like to come to Washington and relief organizations with their hat in their hands.</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="221" data-total-count="4747">The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.</p><footer class="story-footer story-content">
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                <div class="story-notes"><p><em> </em></p><p>Anthea Butler (<a href="https://twitter.com/AntheaButler">@AntheaButler</a>) is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “<a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807858080/women-in-the-church-of-god-in-christ/">Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World</a>.”<em> </em></p></div>
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        <p class="story-print-citation">A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 31, 2017, on Page A23 of the <span itemprop="printEdition">New York edition</span> with the headline: The Cheap  Prosperity Gospel. <span class="story-footer-links">  <span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html" target="_blank">Today's Paper</a><span class="pipe">|</span></span><span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp839RF.html?campaignId=48JQY" target="_blank">Subscribe</a></span>
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