The Prosperity Gospel as the exploitation of our inner reserves. How Homo Economicus conquered the last non-economic field — and why the promise it sells there is bound to fail notoriously without making the system vulnerable in the slightest.
Religions have always made a business of the longing for the transcendent. They built temples, maintained priests, enriched monasteries, sold indulgences, amassed church property. None of this is new. But what has emerged over the past forty years in the American mega-churches and their offshoots around the world is a different operation. It is not the exploitation of the longing for transcendence. It is the abolition of transcendence itself — by turning it into a this-worldly promise that cannot be redeemed in this world and must, for that very reason, be sold endlessly.
This essay complements two earlier texts in this series. It deepens the diagnosis of Homo Economicus by asking how the logic of optimisation penetrates the last remaining non-economic spheres. And it follows on from the End-Times Capitalism essay, in which we showed how Peter Thiel uses a theological language of Katechon and Antichrist to disguise economic operations. What Thiel delivers as an elite theology for tech investors, the Prosperity Gospel delivers as a popular theology for the economically displaced. Both work with the same mechanism: religious language as a veil over economic extraction.
In 1944, in The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi described how the market created three fictitious commodities — labour, land and money. They were not produced for sale, yet they are treated as if they were. The fiction is destructive: treating human labour as a commodity destroys the human being, treating nature as a commodity destroys nature, treating money as a commodity destroys the capacity for exchange itself. Polanyi described these three waves as the Great Transformation of modernity.
Since Polanyi, further waves have followed. In the seventies, feelings, relationships and attention became markets — the therapy economy, the dating industry, the advertising business. In the eighties and nineties, education, health and care became fields of exploitation — the marketisation of the universities, the privatisation of hospitals, the industrialisation of care for the elderly. In the 2000s and 2010s, digital attention itself, personal data and the psychological windows of attention became markets — the platform economy from Facebook to TikTok.
What remained after all these waves was a residue that had long been considered impossible to exploit. Religious experience. Prayer. Hope. The despair of the terminally ill. The grief of the bereaved. The last inner reserves of the human being, which seemed to resist the market because they were too intimate, too vulnerable, too existential to be captured in categories of exchange.
It is precisely this domain that the mega-churches have opened up. They have made the last inner reserves exploitable. This is the fourth wave of the transformation, of which Polanyi knew nothing yet — the exploitation of hope itself.
The objection is obvious: But religions have always done this. Tetzel sold indulgences; the line As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs was not written by Joel Osteen but originated in the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was one of the largest landowners in Europe. Temples, monasteries and priests have been maintained since antiquity. What is supposed to be qualitatively new about the mega-churches?
Four differences which, taken together, mark the break.
First — the object of exchange. Traditional religion sold transcendent goods: salvation of the soul, forgiveness of sins, redemption in the hereafter, consolation, meaning, a place in a history of salvation, encounter with the holy. These goods cannot be tested in this world. Whoever bought an indulgence could not check whether his father had really been released from purgatory. The exchange was asymmetric in its time horizon, but it was honestly asymmetric — it never claimed to deliver in this world what it offered.
The Prosperity Gospel sells something else. It promises this-worldly wealth, this-worldly health, this-worldly careers, this-worldly healing of marriages. These promises can be tested — and they systematically fail the test. The cancer patients die, the marriages break up, the money does not come back. This makes the Prosperity Gospel the first religion in history to make a systematically falsifiable promise while carrying on as a flourishing business model.
Second — the theological treatment of failure. In traditional religion, the failure of a prayer was integrated into a more comprehensive theology. If healing did not come, that was God's unfathomable will, a trial, a call home. The fault did not lie with the believer. On the contrary — Job is the paradigmatic figure: the righteous man from whom everything is taken and who nevertheless does not forsake God. The Book of Job teaches explicitly that the equation faith equals prosperity is false. Job's friends, who try to persuade him that he must have sinned because misfortune has befallen him, are in the end rebuked by God himself. They are the Prosperity Gospel theologians of antiquity, and they are wrong.
The Prosperity Gospel turns this around. If healing fails to come, you did not believe enough, did not give enough, planted the seed in the wrong place. The fault lies with the victim. What Job's friends still formulated as an accusation, and had rejected by God, has here become a system operation.
Third — the logic of optimisation. Traditional religion was not geared towards optimisation. It had fixed rituals, fixed times, fixed texts. Whoever said a prayer said the prescribed prayer. There was no personalisation, no A/B testing of a sermon's effect, no data analysis of donation triggers.
The Prosperity Gospel works differently. The sermon is optimised for its effect on donations. The stage show is calibrated for emotional peaks. The appeals for donations are calibrated to psychological thresholds. Online streaming, webshop merchandising, book sales funnels — all of it is an optimised marketing apparatus working with techniques taken from the entertainment industry and digital marketing. Kenneth Copeland does not run a church with a webshop; he runs a media and merchandise machine organised as a church.
Fourth — structural self-criticism. Traditional religion had immanent counterweights. Mendicant orders that lived in poverty. Reformers who denounced worldliness. Councils that corrected excesses. Saints living in extreme humility. Francis of Assisi was part of the same Church that sold indulgences — and his mere existence was a critique of the indulgence system.
In the Prosperity Gospel there is no such counterweight. There is no saint who preaches poverty. There is no mendicant order. There is no reformer criticising from within. The pastors live openly in luxury, and the luxury is proof of the doctrine, not its refutation. This is a religion with no immanent capacity for correction, a closed construction built as a business model and immunised against self-criticism.
Whoever makes a this-worldly promise of salvation cannot prevent it from failing. Statistically there is no correlation between faith and prosperity, between donation and healing, between a pious attitude and a life that goes well. The promise must fail empirically, and at a rate close to one hundred per cent. The mega-church system knows this — and has installed machinery that makes the failure invisible or reinterprets it. Six individual operations and one social operation interlock.
If healing does not come, you did not believe enough. This is the most fundamental mechanism. The material from research into the mega-churches contains the scene with blind Nick, who steps forward at a Benny Hinn event. Hinn asks: Now you can see? — No, sir. Instead of questioning the miracle, Hinn questions the seeker. Nick withdraws, ashamed. The message to the audience: His faith was not strong enough.
This operation cuts off the victim's path to blaming the system, because the victim blames himself. Over the past decades it has struck thousands of parents whose terminally ill children died and who afterwards blamed themselves for not having saved their children through faith. The parents of eleven-year-old Ashtyn Cole are a documented case: they donated to Benny Hinn, hoped for the healing of two brain tumours, kept on giving when the miracle failed to come, and after the child's death they blamed themselves for not having believed enough.
The seed that has been planted will bear fruit, but nobody says when. A week, a month, a year, or never. This indefinite delay makes any empirical refutation impossible. Whoever wants to check whether the promise has been kept is told: You must keep believing, keep being patient, keep waiting.
Karl Popper named this operation precisely in the philosophy of science: a system becomes irrefutable by naming no point in time at which it would be refuted. The Prosperity Gospel turns this logical operation into a theological virtue — the virtue of patience. Patience here is not a Christian virtue but a business model. It keeps the believer in the system as long as he hopes.
At Benny Hinn's events and similar ones, so-called screeners are at work. They talk to those seeking help before they are allowed onto the stage, ask questions, enquire about their illness and circumstances. Whoever is obviously incurable — severe physical disabilities, end-stage cancer, lifelong genetic conditions — does not get onto the stage. Those who get onto the stage are the ones whose symptoms can ease for a short time through adrenaline, suggestion and the placebo effect: back pain, passing feelings of weakness, psychosomatic complaints.
Justin Peters, born with cerebral palsy, who hoped for healing, was never let onto the stage at several Hinn events. Today he is one of the sharpest critics of this movement from within Christianity. What he bears witness to is not accidental harshness. The stage is casting, not healing. What the audience sees is a result curated in advance.
What happens on stage can be explained neurophysiologically. The combination of expectation, music, crowd, suggestive atmosphere, touch and a hormonal surge produces real, short-term physical effects. Pain eases, muscle tension releases, movement patterns change. The person affected really does feel better, for hours, sometimes for days. They return home firmly believing they have been healed.
When the symptoms return after days or weeks, they are long gone from the stage. The mega-church system has translated the short-term placebo response into a long-term belief in healing and separated the experience on stage from the later relapse in place and time. The failure happens in another city, in another week, without witnesses. What the audience sees in the next live stream are once again the fresh healings — the ones still working in the short term, which have not yet relapsed.
When the preacher flies in a private jet, appears wearing a diamond ring, lives in a luxury mansion, this is not embarrassing but proof. If he gets rich, so will you. The visible prosperity of the pastors is presented as empirical confirmation of the system. The obvious fact that this prosperity comes from the believers' donations — that it is proof of redistribution from the bottom to the top, not of a divine mechanism — is covered over by theological language.
This is a particularly shameless operation. The symptoms of exploitation become marketing material for the exploitation. The jet that the believers helped finance for Kenneth Copeland is proof that giving works. The believers see the jet and think: One day I will get that far too. They do not see that they paid for the jet.
What is visible are the success testimonies on stage, the healing anecdotes in the live streams, the positive reports of those who at the present moment are still hoping. Also visible are the donors, the staff, the loyal members of the congregation — that is, the people whose identity is bound up with the narrative and who have no reason to doubt it.
Invisible are those who left because the promise was not kept. Invisible are the dead — the cancer patients, the children, the suicides. Invisible are the impoverished, who gave away their savings and are ashamed. Invisible are those who no longer believe but outwardly still take part because they do not want to lose the community. This invisibility is not passive. It is actively produced.
Up to this point, the six mechanisms are individual operations. They cut off the individual seeker's path to interpreting his own experience as a refutation of the system. But they would not suffice if the seekers could speak openly with one another. If one of the healed confessed to the next that the healing had gone again after three weeks, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth — then the collective belief in its efficacy would fall apart.
That does not happen. And the reason is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of 1837. The Emperor's New Clothes. Two swindlers promise a cloth that only the clever can see. In truth every courtier sees nothing, but each fears exposing himself as stupid if he admits it. So each praises the cloth. The Emperor, who himself sees nothing, is especially afraid, because his status as emperor depends on his superior perception. He has himself dressed, naked, for the parade. Everyone sees the nakedness, everyone keeps silent, everyone praises the fabric.
The mega-church system operates according to exactly this logic — with two aggravations.
In Andersen, the courtier has to fear being thought stupid. In the Prosperity Gospel, the believer has to fear being thought an unbeliever. That is a graver charge. Whoever says openly in a mega-church congregation that the healing did not come, the money did not flow back, the marriage was not mended, is not merely confirming an empirical failure. He supplies along with it the diagnosis the system has prepared for him. He is not the victim of a deception but the deficient believer who did not deserve divine grace. He has not been taken in — he is an apostate.
The second aggravation: in Andersen, the courtier loses only status. In the Prosperity Gospel, the doubter loses his social home, often his circle of friends, sometimes his family, almost always the last support he still had. Most people join a mega-church because they are at a moment of despair — illness, divorce, debt, the death of a relative, addiction. The community caught them when nothing else was left. The price of being caught is belonging to the narrative. Whoever leaves does not fall into another community but into the void.
Andersen's fairy tale ends with a child calling out the truth and the spell breaking. In the mega-church world this does not work. If a child were to call out that the preacher is naked — that is, that the healing has not taken place, that the money is not coming back, that the promises are empty — it would not become a moment of truth. It would be reinterpreted as a child who does not understand the faith, as a test from the devil, as a trial for the community, which must now hold together all the more.
It would be wrong to describe the Prosperity Gospel as a phenomenon of particularly stupid people. Whoever joins a mega-church is not intellectually deficient but available. Availability is a social situation, not a cognitive condition.
Mega-churches recruit systematically among the isolated, the uprooted, the precarious. In the USA these are the people who lost their jobs, their union ties and their civic identities with deindustrialisation. The people who live without health insurance and would have to raise a fortune for an operation. The people who grew up in broken families. The people whose traditional churches have grown weak or vanished. The people who in the eighties and nineties watched the erosion of the American middle class.
These people are not naive. They are available. They no longer have any alternative narratives, any alternative communities, any corrective authorities that could put the mega-church promise into perspective. If someone is still anchored in a trade union, a political party, a middle-class circle of acquaintances, an academic tradition, a long-established parish, he has voices around him that would tell him: Don't plant a seed. Go to the doctor. Whoever has lost all these voices hears only one — that of the preacher on the stage.
This is the sociological basis of its success. The Prosperity Gospel works not despite the isolation of modern society but because of it. It is the religious answer to the atomisation that Homo Economicus himself has produced. A society that has dissolved all traditional bonds produces people who are receptive to such promises. The system exploits a despair whose further precondition — atomisation — it maintains itself. It is self-preservation through the secondary exploitation of its own consequences.
In the working paper Homo Economicus we described the logic of optimisation as an anthropological operation. The human being who optimises his own advantage destroys the foundations of his existence — ecologically, socially, anthropologically, existentially. We named the fourth destruction, the existential one, as the gravest: optimisation consumes its own preconditions until nothing is left that could be optimised.
The Prosperity Gospel is the empirical example of this fourth destruction in an unexpected sphere. It shows that the logic of optimisation does not stop once the economic markets are exhausted. It carries on and opens up spheres that were considered impossible to exploit. Religion was one such sphere. It was one of the last reserves of non-economic self-understanding. It is so no longer.
This shifts the diagnosis. In the Homo Economicus paper we had left open what happens when optimisation takes hold of every domain. The Prosperity Gospel shows one answer: when optimisation has conquered the last available field, it begins to exploit its own social preconditions. It exploits the atomisation it has itself produced. It turns despair into a market segment.
This is the end of a line that began with Smith. Smith conceived of the market as a mechanism that coordinates interests. The Prosperity Gospel is the market that exploits despair. What was coordination in Smith is extraction here. The arc is complete.
In the essay End-Times Capitalism we described how Peter Thiel uses a theological language of Katechon and Antichrist that legitimises economic operations. Talk of the Antichrist justifies the rejection of any international regulation that would threaten his tax havens. Talk of the Katechon elevates the defence of the American empire to a theological duty. Religion as a disguise for class interests — that was the thesis of the essay.
The Prosperity Gospel is the popular variant of this operation. What works for Thiel as an elite theology for tech investors works for Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland as a mass theology for the economically displaced. The structures are related:
Both operations use religious language to legitimise economic relations that could not be legitimised in non-religious language. Thiel cannot say Leave my tax privileges alone — he says International regulation is the Antichrist. Copeland cannot say Give me money for my jet — he says Plant a seed, and God will multiply it. In both cases the religious language is the economic innovation that makes the business model marketable in the first place.
Both operations exclude the victim from criticism. Whoever criticises Thiel's tax privileges is declared an Antichrist — that is, an adherent of the evil world state. Whoever criticises Copeland's wealth is declared an unbeliever — that is, someone who denies the divine order. In both cases the critic is marked theologically before his empirical arguments ever need to be heard.
Both operations work with the same asymmetry of inference. If the Antichrist does not come, the vigilance would have been in vain — so it was necessary. If the seed does not sprout, the faith was not strong enough — so it must grow stronger. The system wins in both cases; failure is converted into a further demand.
The Prosperity Gospel is therefore not an isolated religious aberration. It is part of a larger complex in which religious language has become an economic operation. Thiel at the top, Copeland at the base. Both make use of the same mechanics. Both draw on the same source: a society grown secular, which has lost its own languages and must fall back on religious languages without understanding them any more.
In Germany the Prosperity Gospel has not yet arrived as a mass phenomenon. The major churches are eroding, but they have not been replaced by mega-churches. There are individual outposts — the ICF movement, formerly Hillsong-affiliated congregations, scattered free-church growth congregations in German cities. There are American imports such as Joyce Meyer on German Christian TV channels and occasional appearances by American preachers in Berlin and Munich.
But that is not the main phenomenon. The German variant of the exploitation of the inner reserves works differently. It is not primarily coded in religious terms but in secular ones — as the coaching industry, as self-optimisation courses, as esoteric healing offers, as personal development seminars, as mindfulness apps. In Germany the longing for healing, for meaning, for turning points is exploited not by a preacher on a stage but by a coach in a webinar. Structurally, however, the operations are related: promises without guarantee, reversal of blame in case of failure, social ties as a barrier to leaving, asymmetric visibility of successes.
Alongside this there is a political-religious complex that comes closer to the American one — the esoteric right-wing milieus with an affinity for the Reichsbürger (the "Reich citizens" movement that denies the legitimacy of the Federal Republic), with their promises of salvation, their conspiracy narratives, their recruiters among the losers of social transformation. Markus Krall, Gerald Hauser and individual Pegida preachers work with mechanisms similar to those of the American Prosperity Gospel: this-worldly promises, reversal of blame, closed community, social punishment for apostates. They are the German variant of the fourth wave. They have not yet built their mega-churches, but the materials are ready.
Several questions remain open.
First — what comes after the fourth wave? Once the last domain has been exploited, there is by definition no further one. What happens when the system of exploitation reaches its own outer edge? For the three classic waves, Polanyi described how the system eventually breaks down because its preconditions have been used up. For the fourth wave this dynamic is not yet discernible. Perhaps the Prosperity Gospel will break down when the last available people have been drained. Perhaps it will regenerate itself because atomisation keeps supplying new available people. We do not know.
Second — what about those who leave? They exist, those who leave the mega-churches — the former pastors who tell their stories openly, the families who lost children and organise against the system, the critics from within Christianity such as Justin Peters. They are a small but growing group. Whether they can seriously shake the system is open. So far their reach is limited, their voices isolated, their influence slight. But they are the Andersen children of this fairy tale. They are calling out that the Emperor is naked. Whether the spell breaks one day depends on whether their calling grows so loud that the social punishment for joining in becomes smaller than the social punishment for keeping silent.
Third — what does this mean for religion as such? If the Prosperity Gospel has abolished transcendence by pulling it into this world, then it has carried out a religious operation that is structurally anti-religious. It is the religion that has sold its own subject matter. What remains for the religious traditions not oriented towards prosperity? Can they win back their own language, or have they been contaminated by the mass impact of the Prosperity Gospel? This question is being asked today within the Christian churches — and it has not yet been decided.
Fourth — what does this mean for the anthropological question? In the Homo Economicus paper we had asked what comes after this figure. The Prosperity Gospel shows a bleak possibility: nothing comes after it — it expands into ever new spheres and consumes even the remnants that previously seemed beyond the reach of its logic. That would be the gravest variant: no successor figure, only the expansion of the existing one.
The more hopeful reading would be: it is precisely the opening-up of the last domain that marks the end of the possibilities for expansion. What can no longer be newly exploited, because everything has already been exploited, must be reformed from within or replaced. That would be the point at which the anthropological alternative can be thought at all — because the existing order has no more evasions left.
Which of the two readings will prove right, we do not know. The Prosperity Gospel itself gives no answer. It is a phenomenon, not a forecast.
What the mega-churches have built over the past forty years is not a religion with business interests but a business model with a religious vocabulary. It exploits the despair of people who have lost every other source of hope. It promises them healing, prosperity, meaning — and sells them not what was promised but hope itself, in ever new doses. The promise fails empirically, but the system remains stable because seven interlocking operations make the failure invisible or reinterpret it. Whoever tries to see the whole picture sees a phenomenon that is inhuman in the literal sense — not because it produces evil people, but because it produces people who can no longer come to themselves, because their last domain, in which that would have been possible, has been exploited.
That is the diagnosis. It is harsh. It closes with an Andersen question, the one the child asks in the fairy tale: But he hasn't got anything on. What breaks the spell in the fairy tale does not yet break it in the reality of the mega-churches. Perhaps it will be broken when enough people remember that desperate people, too, have the right not to be deceived. Perhaps not. It is open.
Polanyi, K. (1944): The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Andersen, H. C. (1837): The Emperor's New Clothes. In: Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. First volume, third instalment. Copenhagen.
Book of Job, especially chapters 4–37 (speeches of the friends) and chapter 42 (God's rebuke of the friends).
Tezel, J. (1517): Sermon texts on the sale of indulgences. Facsimile collection: Kawerau, P. (1880): Tetzels Leben und Streitschriften [Tetzel's Life and Polemical Writings].
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2015): Televangelists. Episode of 16 August 2015. Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption as an experimental church foundation.
Peters, J. (various years): Lectures and sermons on the Word of Faith / Prosperity Gospel movement. justinpeters.org
Research on Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Jesse Duplantis, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, David Oyedepo, Peter Popoff, Todd White, Billy Burke — various investigative magazines, documentaries and accounts by former members.
Ashtyn Cole — documented in: Cure or Con?, NBC Dateline, investigation into Benny Hinn healings.
US Senate, Finance Committee (2011): Report of Senator Charles Grassley's investigation into six televangelist ministries.
Ley, H. (2026): Homo Economicus. Working paper of 12 May 2026.
Claude Dedo (2026): End-Times Capitalism. beyond-decay.org/claude, 25 April 2026.