The Craven Prosperity Gospel at the Core of MAGA
Trump & Sons gorge at the "Golden Crypto Trough" the Presidency has become. It may not bode well for the MAGA faithful.
As Trump’s cryptocurrency hit the market yesterday Trump made $5 billion in one day. This is thanks to the largess of the Supreme Court and the skids greased for him by Congress.
Meanwhile, his sons courted Asia. Trump himself is skipped meetings to handle the imaginary money business, and is destroying some of America’s alliances in the process. Case in point:
Trump sold out India’s Modi to make a crypto alliance with Pakistan, and Modi promptly sidled up to Russia—in China—with Erdoğan of Turkey, already allied to Putin, there to plot with the others how they’re going to destroy Ukraine.
And what Erdoğan will expect from Putin is help remaining dictator against a rising pro-liberal movement whose leader, Ekrem Imamoglu, Istanbul’s extremely popular mayor, languishes in prison. Corrupt Turkish courts have jailed on two separate charges since Erdoğan had him imprisoned in March just weeks before an election. Legally, Erdoğan isn’t allowed to run again, but he wasn’t allowed to run last time, either, and got away with it by moving the goal posts, as he’s done three times now.
So, while Trump is playing crypto games—and enrolling other countries, not necessarily trustworthy ones, by using his power as president of the United States, he has run Modi into Putin’s arms and lost control of the conversation in China, allowing Erdoğan to court Putin over the fate of everyone in the Black Sea area and potentially turn the Mediterranean into Lake Vladimir.
But I digress.
I want to explain something because America is just about to get “rug-pulled” as Krugman defines it—and we’ll be looking into soon. What’s incredibly important to realize that this is not a fluke. It is not an anomaly.
No, it’s the natural culmination of a materialistic deformity of Christianity.
Read that again: It’s the natural culmination of a materialistic deformity of Christianity.
That’s how we got here—and how MAGA got duped by a guy whose taste in decor is best defined as Early Dumpster.
Trump told MAGAns what they wanted to hear: that they’re the ELECT because in the most degraded understanding of Calvinism and Puritanism:
ABUNDANCE = APPROVAL BY GOD.
Bottom line: It’s John Calvin’s fault.
Woven into the philosophy of John Calvin—and that of the Puritans who followed later—was a concept of purity that required hard work—and the accumulation of wealth. The dangerous part of this is that the Calvinists and the Puritans saw wealth as a sign that you were elevated in the sight of God. Wealth meant you really WERE better than others. You were spiritually superior. And no matter how you got wealthy, THAT you were wealthy meant God approved of you.
Any religious studies scholar would say that’s a grievous oversimplification, and I would agree, but this is how Evangelicism has reduced the “conflict over whether one is saved” to its lowest and most craven level.
The conflict began during the Reformation. When the Roman Catholic Church ran everything, the imprimatur of the Holy See was proof one was saved. If the priests said you were saved, you were. But when the Reformation stripped away the magical powers of the priesthood and brushed away the velvet, jeweled robes and the dramatic rituals, how could you tell?
Seventeenth-century Protestants floated several solutions, and Calvin, who almost single-handedly invented the concept of “work ethic,” to which one is to subscribe. One is to work hard and become prosperous, because prosperity proves you are one of the elect.
This theory holds that wealth is a SIGN of your status in the eyes of God in one of several ways:
If you achieve great success, it means you have “made it!” You have attained a spiritual level that God rewards with wealth.
If predestination is involved in the dogma, it means that if you are wealthier than those around you, you are one of the elect, not one of the damned. In pure social terms, this leads to racism as wealth in America is heavily concentrated in the hands of whites. In its worst form, this way of thinking justifies slavery. See Cloud Atlas, an underrated film that demonstrates this in multiple ways.
Preaching a strain of this virulent philosophy has made Joel Osteen $100,000,000.00.
However, the problem created for Protestants in losing the yardsticks of salvation provided by the Catholic priests is now solved! It is heartbreaking to note how this has played out in poorer countries.
The Third World is awash in prosperity gospel preachers, and its appeal is understandable. The fear your life is ordained, with all of its pain and suffering, is not very appealing, especially when the future looks as bleak as the present. God's ordaining of your suffering may give it meaning, yes, but in the long run, such a life has little hope in it. So, what is the answer to suffering? Instead of placing the responsibility on God, prosperity gospel teachers teach that you haven't yet applied the Laws of Prosperity! Your suffering comes from your ignorance and now, all you must do is exert your faith and access God's wealth. Of course, the best way is to tithe money into such a church and God will multiply it over and over for you! You just need to exert your faith, BOOM! Wealth, health and a prosperous life are yours!
So, according to this theology, your faith is the antidote for suffering. God ordains, in this theology, a life blessed beyond measure, especially in the material realm, where we live. So hunger, disease, poverty and suffering are just a big cosmic misunderstanding, and once enlightened, heaven comes down to earth via our faith! — “Rhonda” from “At the Foot of the Mountain”
Meanwhile, the connection interwoven nature of racism and the Prosperity Gospels, spiked with Evangelicism and its targeting of women and people of color, appeal heavily rural Republicans who have faced rising costs, massive losses of family farms—and a radical loss of privilege.
Enter Trump and the Prosperity Gospel for the Perpetually Aggrieved
FP Dunneagin said it best, writing for the Daily. Kos:
There was a time when a certain kind of American believed their dominance was preordained. They ruled the factories, controlled the culture, and never had to question whether the world revolved around them. But then, a nightmare unfolded: others demanded a seat at the table.
Women stopped apologizing. Black voices got louder. LGBTQ+ Americans refused to hide. The social order was shifting, and rather than adapting, the entitled chose to declare themselves the real victims.
Enter Trumpism: a movement built on the sacred belief that losing privilege is oppression.
What goes along with a changing world, of course, is that wealth does become redistributed—back, for example, to the people who had it ripped off from them to begin with!
But those people, saith the Prosperity Gospel, were not the elect to begin with, so if we can’t continue to use them, underpay them, look down on them, and keep all the money, power and goodies, we are being … oppressed!!!
But lo! Here comes our savior!
He was born to wealth. He is elect.
He privileges whiteness and has no use for people of color.
He blames immigrants, and so do we.
He privileges maleness and doesn’t care if women lose their rights, and we don’t care, either.
Dunneagin again:
Trumpism isn’t an ideology — it’s a prosperity gospel of entitlement, promising its followers that America was meant for them and them alone.
If they succeed, it’s because they deserve it.
If they fail, it’s because wokeness, immigrants, or the Deep State stole what was rightfully theirs.
Losing is impossible — unless the system is rigged.
This delusional perspective is why every MAGA setback is a conspiracy, a fraud, or a betrayal:
Trump loses? Rigged election.
MAGA candidate flops? Mail-in ballot fraud.
A Democrat wins? The Deep State is at work.
MAGA Theology 101: You are owed control of America. If reality disagrees, reality is wrong.
Saint Donald and the Church of the Perpetually Aggrieved
Trump isn’t just a politician — he’s the Patron Saint of Self-Pity, a man who preaches that his followers are entitled to power, immune to consequences, and victims whenever they don’t get their way.
Trump’s Crypto and Krugman’s Fear of a “Rug Pull”
The danger now is that with Prosperity Gospel woven into Evangelicism and, for hundreds of years, into the capitalism that runs America—part of the never-challenged mindset of hyper-conservatism, already riddled with sexism, racism, and xenophobia and the mortal enemy of any political orientation of social fairness and equity—will dupe and trap MAGAns again. They are trapped now. Trump’s crypto—and his will to infect national politics and law with his Greed Is Good philosophy—may wind up bankrupting many of the people who think a get-rich-quick scheme invented (out of thin air) by their very own saint can’t possibly fail them. It can. Krugman, whom I urge to read all the time, wrote this piece back in March.
And now we’re there:
Krugman explains the “rug pull” that will almost certainly occur, potentially destroying the wealth of millions of people.
When it goes down, I hope the fury of MAGAns exceeds their fury over the Epstein files.
As exasperated as I am with them, they never deserved what Trump has already done to them, and they don’t deserve what he’s about to do to them now.
He is not Prosperity’s chosen one. It is not prosperity, but how you get it that matters. His way is the most craven of all. And the people who bow down to this fatted golden calf will be facing, for the rest of their lives, their part of the responsibility for the damage he has done. Because for Trump, there are no sacred cows, and the promise he’d make them the Elect again was always a lie.
They are going to need our help. Be willing to do that when the time soon comes.
Thank you for another thought provoking essay. Some of us who have organized Moral Mondays ( based on Rev. William Barber’s MM) in our small city have actually been talking about how do we help the people who are and will be hurt by this regime and will eventually turn away from this hurtful regime.
Putting this in the larger context of the so called ‘prosperity gospel’ helps.
I’m sharing this with our peaceful resistance group. It will start some meaningful conversations.
As always, superb! (And as often, shared.)