This is a worldview that seeks to wage not a war against poverty but a war against the poor instead—those who have, in his view, shown insufficient faith. This might come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, but it represents the culmination of a long strand of American Protestantism that gained hold after World War II.
Emerging from the New Thought movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson and friends in the 1830s, ideas about “mind power” found an amped-up audience in America’s new world primacy. Reds were under the beds, and evangelicals believed that this was an existential threat to the self-made, God-fearing man. Fretting that the New Deal was welfare masquerading as communism, Protestant leaders—who until then had largely set themselves outside and above the political realm—began making common cause with political opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historian of the prosperity gospel Kate Bowler describes the merger of faith and conservative politics as incorporating the “American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility.”
At the same time, a renegade movement called New Order of the Latter Rain emerged to challenge the established Pentecostal hierarchy by promoting the idea that God’s blessings could be obtained on demand rather than by waiting for them to be bestowed on the pious. “Inverting the well-worn American mantra that things must be seen to be believed,” Bowler says, the prosperity gospel “rewards those who believe in order to see.” To this day, the majority of proponents of the prosperity gospel come from the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition. (There is one important exception, though: the Reformed Church of America minister Norman Vincent Peale, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking had a lot of purchase, not least on the Trump family who were fixtures in the front row of his New York church.)