Showing posts with label hucksters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hucksters. Show all posts

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Your best life now


From Slate:

Joel Osteen wants you to stand up straight. "Even many good, godly people have gotten into a bad habit of slumping and looking down," Osteen writes in his best-selling self-improvement tract Become a Better You. "[Y]ou need to put your shoulders back, hold your head up high, and communicate strength, determination, and confidence." After all, "We know we're representing Almighty God. Let's learn to walk tall."

Osteen is the pastor of Houston's Lakewood Church, a Pentecostal congregation recently named the largest in the country by Outlook magazine, hosting some 47,000 souls in the former Compaq Center, where the Houston Rockets used to play. Every Sunday, he broadcasts a running string of similar homespun nuggets of wisdom—usually rife with metaphors of automotive and financial trials that resonate with his exurban flock's daily routines—while beaming incandescently before an audience of millions on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and various other cable services. And each of those sermons kicks off with Osteen's patented chant, with those 47,000 voices declaring, "This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I do what it says I can do," and building to an oddly colorful climax: "I am about to receive the incorruptible, indestructible, ever-living seed of God, and I will never be the same. Never, never, never. I will never be the same. In Jesus' name. Amen."

The chant is about as close as Osteen's relentlessly upbeat preaching ever comes to a theological doctrine, and it captures many of the key themes behind his runaway appeal. There's the stark individualist ethos that lies behind the definition of scripture as first and foremost an agent of identity change. There's the curiously infantile quality of both the act of the chant and its diction. (No matter how emphatically an arena full of believers may shout "Never, never, never," they always sound like pouting toddlers.) Most of all, though, there's the vividly sexualized power ascribed to the Word of God, which serves as a sort of skeleton key to the Osteen phenomenon. While Joel Osteen has never formally trained as a minister, he is heir to a theological teaching—the movement known as Word-Faith. Word-Faith holds that believers possess, in divinely sanctioned snatches of scripture, the stuff of miraculous self-healing and prosperity—an odd turn for the Pentecostal movement, which first took root in some of the poorest (and blackest) stretches of the West and Southwest. Then again, the Word-Faith tradition is also part of a much broader movement toward therapeutic healing in American Protestantism—including the Mind Cure and New Thought teachings of the late 19th century that produced Christian Science, the positive thinking homilizing of Norman Vincent Peale, and all manner of New Age folderol, up through The Secret and The Prayer of Jabez.