Fakery and Wealth in African Charismatic Christianity: Moving beyond the Prosperity Gospel as Script
Year: 2019
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The prosperity gospel has gained visibility and prominence over the past decades as an empirical and theological trend, as well as in scholarship on African charismatic Christianity. This chapter provides a critical discussion of how the prosperity gospel has been approached in the literature. It discusses in particular how giving and receiving, and the relationships this entail, has been analyzed from an instrumental perspective by seeing it as a disrupted relationship of exchange if the giver does not receive a material blessing. I argue that most analytical approaches have seen the prosperity gospel as a script in the sense that it is approached as a coherent system of thought. Instead of taking the prosperity gospel as the analytical focus, I suggest that studying different modalities of exchange provides a broader understanding of what is considered legitimate and what is considered dubious or fake in the charismatic Christian context and beyond. The argument of the chapter is that by combining the study of the prosperity gospel with an analysis of everyday theology we gain a more nuanced understanding of the role of wealth and money in charismatic Christianity in Africa that moves beyond what is encapsulated in the idea of the prosperity gospel.
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Karen Lauterbach
Institution: University of Copenhagen
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: No poverty
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3132431174