The phrase Gospel of Wealth is generally associated with the late 19th and early 20th century religious justification of laissez-faire capitalism in the United States. The sanctification of American capitalism came as frequently from industrialists as from Christian leaders. Whether it was John D. Rockefeller asserting, “God gave me my money,” or Andrew Carnegie claiming that only unregulated capitalist accumulation would allow the millionaire to be a trustee for the poor and bring “Peace on earth, among men Good-Will,” the purveyors of the Gospel of Wealth employed Christian rhetoric in the service of capital. While this discursive union of Christianity and capitalism was certainly a product of its times, the Christian authorization of American economic and social relations was not confined to one historical epoch. Indeed, a new gospel of wealth can be discerned in American Protestantism even today, a gospel that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as strenuously as did its predecessor, but that has different social and institutional sources and an entirely different audience.

My dissertation is a comparative study of these two Protestant defenses of capitalism: the “Gospel of Wealth” in the Gilded Age, and the “gospel of prosperity” first preached by certain Pentecostal and charismatic evangelists during the post-World War II healing revivals and growing in popularity today. By examining the writings and sermons of representative pastors, evangelists, and public figures in both eras, as well as the lay response to such writings, I hope to locate the social, historical, and intellectual sources of the Christian defense of capitalism in two critical periods of economic expansion in the United States. This dissertation is not simply a study of Protestant theology, but an examination of the changing face of American capitalism and the means by which Protestant leaders responded to, and ultimately positioned Christianity to defend, those changes. I hope to demonstrate that at certain critical moments in the development of American capitalism, some of the dominant voices in Protestant public life (mainline evangelicals at the turn of the 20th century, charismatic and Pentecostal evangelicals in recent decades) attempted to anoint laissez-faire capitalism as the “economic will of God” and to instruct ordinary Protestants how to live, and occasionally prosper, in a financial system that appeared to some Americans in each era as profoundly amoral, unjust, and even anti-Christian.