I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:
It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.
Yup. Prosperity theology is wrong in so many ways. It’s selfish, it’s materialistic, and it has the point off religion ass-backwards: worshipping God is supposed to help you find happiness in what you have, not bring you more things to make you happy. I 100% agree with this analysis.
I appreciate the note of support, but for the sake of maintaining a clear argument rather than inviting readers to fight over confusions, it’s worth spelling out some things explicitly:
* The people about whom I’m being grumpy, here, are not “prosperity theologians” by any stretch of the imagination. They are almost exclusively Catholic or Orthodox. Most of them have enough knowledge and sophistication to know what doctrinal orthodoxy looks like, within their churches, and to care about it.
* My point – which may not align with your own views, of course – is definitely not that “worshiping God is supposed to help you find happiness in what you have.” It’s that worshiping God is not supposed to help you find happiness, period. It’s not done for your own benefit: not materially, not emotionally, not socially, not in any way. It’s something that you do for God. If you’re doing it right, it will probably just make you a little more annoyed with the world and a little more miserable with yourself, and that’s OK, you’re paying that personal price in order to do something that you think is right. The closest analogy I can offer, outside the realm of explicitly religious thought, is @nostalgebraist‘s concept of “Mundum.”
The tradcons often have stories about how they came to their faith because they despaired of the empty soulless hedonism that they found in the secular world (or whatever), and how they were looking for meaning and health and contentment in some transcendent place. To which the remaining religious sentiment in my heart replies: Why the fuck do you think it’s God’s job to give you meaning and health and contentment? You’re just as selfish and grasping as the guy who’s praying for a winning lottery ticket, you just have a classier sensibility underlying your self-obsessed greed.
But, like, wanting your religion to provide meaning and health and contentment is not actually identical to praying for a winning lottery ticket.