Beyond the politics of resentment is the Calvinist notion that the frontrunner’s wealth marks him as God’s anointed.
as Sarah Posner has posited at Religion Dispatches, Trump is running a messianic campaign. Only in this case, the messiah, of course, is Trump himself.
.. On the right, the term “political correctness” essentially means a perceived proscription on speech that demeans groups of people based on the basics of their identities: African Americans, Muslims, Mexicans, women, et cetera. It’s an expression of resentment over a changing order of society, one in which people in those various groups assert their right to lay claim to positions, whether of power or mere citizenship, previously reserved only for white Christians.
.. Embedded in that DNA is the gene of Calvinism, one that has undergone a rather horrible mutation. While I’m hardly a John Calvin fan-girl, I will at admit that in his formulation of his principles, Calvin at least attempted some accommodation of the common good. But the populist Calvinism that has since engulfed much of American culture, both inside and outside the religious right, has jettisoned that piece of it, along with calls for the wealthy to exercise thrift and sexual morality, leaving only Calvinism’s veneration of the rich and damnation of the poor as its tenets.
.. In Calvin’s view, according to Chip Berlet, the longtime researcher of right-wing populism, there was nothing a human being could do to up his or her chances at getting into Heaven. God picked for you at birth for either the up or down path. Those tapped for celestial upward mobility were deemed “the elect.”
.. Calvinists justified their accumulation of wealth, even at the expense of others, on the grounds that they were somehow destined to prosper.
Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me
Joel Osteen, the pastor of America’s largest church, who told Oprah in his Texas mansion that “Jesus died that we might live an abundant life.”
.. Blessed is a loaded term because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward.
.. It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.
If Oprah could eliminate a single word, it would be “luck.” “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she argued on her cable show. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck. For me luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”
.. It is a perfect word for an American society that says it believes the American dream is based on hard work, not luck.
If Oprah could eliminate a single word, it would be “luck.” “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she argued on her cable show. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck. For me luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.”
.. The prosperity gospel holds to this illusion of control until the very end. If a believer gets sick and dies, shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that — those who have lost the test of faith.
.. There is no graceful death, no ars moriendi, in the prosperity gospel. There are only jarring disappointments after fevered attempts to deny its inevitability.