Prosperity Gospel: the 5th column of dumbism*
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| Mammon, by George Frederic Watts |
I.
What do I mean by "dumbism"? Dumbism* is the informal term that I and a few others have given to the total absence of critical thinking in people. And what is critical thinking? It is the ability to analyze, interpret, and evaluate claims made by others before accepting them as truth. Someone who thinks critically questions whether there is evidence to support the claim, whether the sources for such a claim are reliable, who benefits from making the claim, and its origin. Critical thinking is the ability to judge information logically, skeptically, and without bias; or at least, to judge it in the most logical, skeptical, and least biased way possible. Given this definition, the intelligent reader (or listener) of this text realizes that we are screwed. We are in the eye of the storm of dumbism. We have been living in the age of messaging apps for quite some time, and they amplify great imbecilities, such as anti-vaccine conspiracies, flat-Earth conspiracies, Illuminati, among many other incredibly stupid conspiracy theories.
Prosperity theology and other related religious movements are the fifth column of dumbism. Note that "fifth column" doesn't mean the origin, but rather a supporting column that comes to the aid. Dumbism, the absence and even aversion to critical thinking, is something that prosperity theology and other related religious movements help to support. It was born in the 20th century, during one of the various evangelical revivalist movements in the United States of America, a country that has had, as one of its pillars since its foundation, an aversion to critical thinking. This theology fit like a glove in the hands of the West during the Cold War. The United States, whose education had already emulated Prussian education in the 19th century and implemented eugenics at the beginning of the 20th century, became virtually shielded from socialist and communist influences thanks in large part to evangelicals involved with prosperity theology and other related ideas.
The purely utilitarian education of the post-World War II era, which reserved the teaching of critical thinking skills only for the children of the elites, now had as an ally a religion that, unlike traditional Catholicism and Protestantism, was blatantly pro-money, pro-rich, and pro-powerful, a religion that defecated on its own sacred text, the Bible, shamelessly corrupting it. The brilliant aspect of this was the appeasement of the population. A few decades earlier, unions and labor movements in the United States had been able to exert enough pressure for legislators to create social security, and minimum conditions of dignity. Afterwards, however, the population became docile and ready to react emotionally against anyone who spoke ill of the rich and powerful. Of course, it also helped that, between the New Deal of the 1930s and the mid-1970s, taxes on large fortunes were extremely high, and the American federal government financed the middle class, whose growth was not due to laissez-faire economic policies, quite the contrary. It's no coincidence that since these policies were completely dismantled in the early 1980s, the American middle class has shrunk decade after decade.
But how was all this possible? To understand, we need to study American history beyond propaganda and myths.
II.
Aside from half a dozen of its Founding Fathers, mainly Benjamin Franklin, the rest of them already represented dumbism a lot. Look: dumbism doesn't prevent a group from becoming very strong and very powerful. Especially since it manages to parasitize those intelligent enough to create the technologies without which power cannot be sustained. The United States is still the most powerful country on Earth. Despite its clear economic, social, and cultural decline, a decline that originated precisely in the 1980s, China, now the second largest economic and military power in the world, doesn't come close to the power of the American empire. The US still have a lot of fat to burn before that happens. However, it's a fact that the United States, since its founding, has been guided in such a way as to have an aversion to critical thinking. This, in fact, even helped it become the empire it is today. In a way, if that was the goal, then congratulations. You can't dominate almost the entire planet with soldiers who think critically; and I'm not just talking about military soldiers, but also diplomatic and business soldiers.
King George III, who was the English monarch during the American Revolutionary War, was called a tyrant by the leaders of the thirteen colonies. Even today, he is referred to as a tyrant in American textbooks. However, although he was not a great Enlightenment figure, George III's power was limited by the British Parliament, and he was a great promoter of education and the arts, not only in the metropolis but also in the North American colonies. Independence was marked by the cry of "no taxation without representation," meaning they wanted to be represented in the Parliament of the metropolis, which is valid. However, the Declaration of Independence, a historical document signed by illustrious figures such as Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, accuses the British monarch of some very strange things that go beyond the curtailment of political representation, unless one considers genocide and slavery a political right of the thirteen colonies. An excerpt from the declaration states that King George III:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
The internal uprisings to which the United States Declaration of Independence refers are revolts by enslaved Africans. I'm not joking. The United States Declaration of Independence states that one of the reasons for independence was the British monarchy's encouragement of slave revolts, encouraging them to seek liberation. In 1775, Lord Dunmore promised freedom to enslaved people who escaped from their owners, owners who were rebelling against the metropolis. This is why the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, states that the King of England was encouraging "internal uprisings." According to the Founding Fathers, slaves were the property of their owners and should obey them. Rebellions, even those of human beings forcibly subjugated by others, were considered "uprisings" by the leaders of American independence.
The racist allusion to borders and indigenous peoples touches on another point. The British Crown recognized territories of indigenous nations west of the Appalachian Mountains after the Seven Years' War between the major European powers. It didn't do this out of kindness, of course, but because the North American colonies were also part of that world conflict. Many indigenous peoples participated, allying themselves with either France or England. England was victorious, but indigenous revolts against the colonists led the English to seek appeasement, aiming to avoid further expenses they considered unnecessary. Therefore, from the proclamation of 1763 onwards, only the British Crown had the right to negotiate the purchase and sale of territories with the indigenous peoples. The colonists, especially the landowners who would later lead the American independence movement, thought this was outrageous. They wanted to be able to expand their lands through less than legal means, without the consent of the metropolis.
In other words, two of the main aspects brought about by the architects of the independence of the thirteen colonies were the maintenance of the enslavement of Africans and the invasion and theft of indigenous lands. Things already started badly. But, up to this point, we can say that practically no nation, if any, has noble and benevolent origins, even recently born nations. The issue is that the elite that led the independence against the English not only harmed Black and Indigenous people, but also their own children, through a culture of almost blind obedience to authority and a national mythology of distrust towards intellectuals. Yes, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers were intellectuals close to the European Enlightenment, but they were also slaveholders, racists, and murderers of Indigenous people. To make matters worse, despite being honored by American history, they were quickly sidelined. People like Andrew Jackson — an anti-intellectual populist — took the reins of the country in the following generation.
Andrew Jackson was the seventh president. He served two consecutive terms, governing between 1829 and 1837. He already embodied the archetype of the man who distrusted experts, intellectuals, and social elites, groups that increasingly sought the abolition of slavery. Although Jackson positioned himself against the social elites, he was a landowner, slaveholder, and absurdly wealthy. His mansion featured Greek-style columns and wallpaper imported from France. Jackson took office shortly after John Quincy Adams, who was seen as a snobbish intellectual. Yes, that's John Quincy Adams who, years later, during the presidency of Martin Van Buren, advocated for the enslaved Africans who rebelled and seized the ship Amistad. The case gained notoriety because Martin Van Buren, who had been Jackson's vice president and was his ally, wanted to return the slaves to Cuba, then a Spanish colony. Adams, however, advocated for their freedom in the American Supreme Court and succeeded in securing their release. They returned to Africa, to the Sierra Leone region, from where they had been kidnapped. The United States government refused to pay for the trip, which was financed by American abolitionist groups.
III.
Throughout this entire period, especially throughout the 19th century, from beginning to end, the United States expanded its territory far beyond its original scope, through legitimate negotiations, but also through forced annexation. It was this century that definitively shaped the myth of the American as a self-made man, the man who builds his life through his own effort and merit. The myth of the frontiersman, who explores territories and accumulates a fortune, originated from this era, merging with the very mythology of the Old West in the second half of the 19th century. That time and place form a paradise for libertarians: an almos lawless land, where everything is (supposedly) negotiated on equal terms by economic agents free from the pressures of the evil state. This frontiersman doesn't need a regulatory state to manage his life, he doesn't need experts; he buys expectorant syrup from self-taught doctors (charlatans) on the Oregon Trail.
Many evangelical revivalist movements gained strength in the United States during the 19th century. However, well before independence, when English Puritans were supposedly fleeing England and colonizing North America in the 17th century, it was already a land that gave voice to all sorts of theological nonsense. The Puritans, in fact, didn't come to America because they were being unfairly persecuted. If they were truly persecuted, if the English crown's objective was to exterminate them or forcibly convert them, it wouldn't have helped finance their journeys to America, and they wouldn't have been considered English subjects when they arrived in the New World. But no, they were considered subjects. In fact, many returned after they couldn't stand the miserable, shitty life they led in America. The Puritans admittedly came to establish small theocratic societies in America. Read their documents, the things they themselves left written. Freedom, for them, was freedom to govern in the way they believed God wanted.
Here we see the cultural melting pot that ultimately enabled the production of this disgrace that is the prosperity theology, or prosperity gospel, of the 20th and 21st centuries, a plague that, starting (mainly) in the 1980s, began to spread to many countries in Latin America and Africa. It was thanks to this specific type of Protestantism that there was an explosion in the total number of Protestants in Brazil from 1980 onwards — a type of Protestantism that managed the feat of making the Christian religion profoundly devoid of any intellectuality; and mind you, I am an atheist. Yes, despite being an atheist, despite considering the more traditional forms of Christianity as enemies of critical thinking, I do not consider them enemies of intellectuality altogether. I don't do this because, for centuries, even millennia, although Christians persecuted and killed heretics, they developed a diverse theological framework to defend their faith from these "enemies" that they imprisoned and killed. But this abortion of theology that emerged in the United States during the 20th century, this abortion that is now spreading to parts of the world and to Brazil, has neither critical thinking, nor intellectuality, nor anything else. It is the fruit of the culture of the self-made man, a man that doesn't need the help of experts, who doesn't bow his head to intellectuals and to the state — these, in fact, are his enemies and must be dominated and silenced by men of God.
The entire course of American history has ultimately given birth to this plague, this soulless ideological waste, a true nihilism that worships Mammon, the god of money, a plague that assails us day and night, night and day. This is the fifth column of dumbism, which is perpetuating and helping to increase the number of people who throw their brains away in the trash and have zero critical thinking skills, people who accept everything their religious preachers say. It's not something exclusive to Brazil. Even the United States, which despite everything I describe about its history, has had and still has many wonderful things, suffers from this evil. I would dare to say that it is one of the main reasons for the current American decadence. For many decades, megachurch preachers who spread prosperity gospel have accumulated immense power to elect presidents, presidents who then help ensure that their private jets will not be taxed and that they can use donation money to buy stocks on the New York Stock Exchange with the help of insider information. Any resemblance to what is happening in Daniel Vorcaro's* Brazil and in other countries in Latin America and Africa is not a coincidence.
by Fernando Olszewski
__________
* In the Portuguese version of this text, I used the word "burrismo". "Burrismo" is a neologism describing people who lack all critical thinking skills, and end up believing in the most egregious shit: from Reptilians, to Flat Earth, to antivaccine conspiracy theories. "Burrismo" is derived from the word "burro", which, besides "donkey," but it also means "dumb" in Portuguese. Hence "dumbism."
** Daniel Vorcaro is a relatively young banker who was a former evangelical presenter. His church is one of the biggest prosperity gospel churches in Brazil, with several branches in the United States catering to Brazilian immigrants.
