Ian Boyne, Contributor
AMERICAN preacher, George Otis, has received a mauling from angry Jamaicans who have been offended at statements he allegedly made while visiting Jamaica recently.
White American preachers who are perceived as merely cloaking their chauvinism under the guise of Christianity are not welcome by many Jamaicans.
However, many of these same Jamaicans are not as astute in discerning how some of the ideas that they enthusiastically embrace are similarly American or Western particularities disguised as Biblical truth.
A version of Christianity which has become very popular in Jamaica and which is being preached in many of our inner-cities is the health and wealth gospel, born and bred in the United States.
This gospel essentially says that if you have enough faith you can have as much wealth, prosperity and health as you want and that, conversely, those who are poor, sick and oppressed are those who lack faith and are disobedient to God.
There are Jamaican inner-city preachers whose congregations are overwhelmingly made up of poor people whose pastors are telling these people that God desires them to be wealthy, drive flashy cars, live in luxurious homes and that they can have it all if they only believe and, of course, pay generous tithes and offerings to them.
Much of what is called the charismatic movement represented and which appeals to a lot of middle-class people with this same Health and Wealth Gospel. Religion, therefore, becomes a vehicle of transporting American individualistic and materialistic values.
Granted that the Gospel which made a poverty a virtue and which was formerly used by the ruling class to suppress the aspirations of the majority was also an imbalanced, erroneous representation of the gospel.
The view as expressed famously by Abraham Lincoln that "God must have loved the poor for He made so many of them" was a justification for exploitation and oppression, and a mask for class rule. The old Anglican hymn, "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate" was a cleverly devised fable to use religion to legitimise oppression.
GLORIFICATION OF POVERTY
The glorification of poverty and the preaching which de-emphasised education and material advancement has held back many poor people and put a brake on their development. But the health and wealth gospel preached by people like Creflow Dollar, Frederick K.C. Price, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin and Rod Parsley as well as the host of TBN, Love-TV and Word Television preachers, is an over corrective. It is a false Gospel.
So while our youth in the inner-cities are being seduced by the Bling Bling culture; while their obsession for instant wealth and gratification is being fed by American secular consumerist values transported through its powerful and often irresistible cultural exports, the religiously inclined are also being duped by this same system through religion.
American charismatic Christianity and popular religion is an expression of American cultural values. It does not represent authentic Biblical Christianity.
The preachers, often woefully ignorant of proper exegetical and hermeneutical principles, rip passages from their context to support the view that if we are not wealthy and healthy, then we are lacking in faith.
Some of these preachers are even teaching that the wealth which the hard-working, worldly people have worked for will be turned over to them (before the second coming, mark you) the faithful, believing Christians. Talk about greed and red-eye masquerading as religious purity!
A major principle people like Creflow Dollar, Fred Price and their local promoters don't understand is that there is a vast difference between the Old and New Covenants.
Ironically, these fellows don't believe in the Old Covenant laws like the Sabbath yet they cling to the Old Covenant doctrine of tithing. Now isn't that funny? How come everything else is done away except the part which says you should send them your money?
The Old Covenant was made with Israel and the promises given to the Israelites were physical promises. The Old Covenant did not promise the Holy Spirit, eternal life etc. The people were promised the physical land of Israel, agricultural prosperity, protection from their enemies - all physical things if they obeyed.
David could say he did not see the righteous forsaken or his seed begging bread and that "those who seek the Lord lack no good thing" because the people had the Old Covenant promises of prosperity as long as they obeyed. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, represent the covenant blessings and cursings. The Biblically incompetent exegetes frequently refer to these scriptures - which say, for example, that "You shall be the head and not the tail" - and gloss over the fact that these were addressed to a covenant nation in a theocracy.
They rip out of context the text in 3rd John I:2 which was addressed to an individual, Gaius, and apply it to every single Christian: "I wish above that you prosper and be in health even as your soul prospereth".
The Health and Wealth Gospel presents us with a Christianity which is built around the satisfaction of believers' needs and drives. It is a religion of self-fulfilment, a religion of self-actualisation, a religion of self-empowerment - all expressing the values of selfism and meism which characterise Western culture.
Where is the religion which speaks of sacrificing for the community, of self-denial, taking up the cross, enduring suffering as a good soldier?
Where is the stress on the willingness to suffer deprivation to stand for an ethical principle, to live like a Mahatma Gandhi or a Mandela or like Martin Luther King Jnr? What about Jesus himself who "learned obedience by the things which he suffered" and who sacrificed himself so much that His sweat was like drops of blood?
What about the Christ who taught, "If anyone would be my disciple let him deny himself". Instead, the religion we are being literally sold on religious television is only giving us more ways to pamper the self, to feel good about ourselves, to indulge ourselves - all, of course, in the name of God and Godliness.
FEEL-GOOD RELIGION
There are those who will contrast this feel-good religion to the repressive, obsessive, guilt-producing, neurotic extremes one finds in some extreme versions of Fundamentalism. But I am rejecting the two extremes and saying that the Health and Wealth Gospel and the new Age Gospel are theologically immature and unbalanced and does not capture the complexities of life in the real world.
There is value to self-affirmation, self-acceptance, self-confidence, optimism etc. But a one-sided view which promotes a religion of just self is erroneous. Plus it is crippling to many of our people.
To tell poor people, many of whom are trying hard to make something of their lives, that they are poor and wretched because they lack faith is to doubly victimise them and to excuse oppressive structures which inhibit their self-actualisation.
When poor people in Franklyn Town, Rema, Craig Town, Waltham Park and Cassava Piece see the expensively dressed Creflow Dollar, Jesse Duplantis or the others telling them that if they can't pay their rent and drive a good car then they can't really claim to be pleasing God, these men are throwing these people on a helluva guilt trip.
It makes them more miserable, frustrated and can lead to people giving up on their faith and God, for try as they might on the minimum wage and hustling, they can't make it.
It is not just the sex and violence on HBO, Cinemax and Showtime which are distorting our values in Jamaica. It is much of religious cable television and the Jamaican preachers who have bought into this American Gospel.
