“If your teaching is being promoted by Oprah, that might raise some warning flags.”

The history of the Word of Faith movement and the rise of the televangelists of the 1980s are well documented phenomena. When encountered in the wild, in front of crowds and cameras, where the swell of music and the dimming of lights can help to persuade the senses, these swindlers eagerly play on the emotions of susceptible believers. A rush of adrenaline and the elicitation of a quasi-spiritual response is often deemed miraculous by those who attend these events. People claim their ailments are healed by these spiritual gurus, and they empty their wallets to pay for jumbo jets and mansions. But if you sit back with a level head, read about the exploits of these charlatans and compare their message to the bible, and apply even the most amateur of thoughtful analyses, it becomes utterly clear that these men and women are false prophets. They are scam artists with ulterior motives, preying on narcissistic people whose desires are met by something that tastes sweet but has no lasting sustenance.

American Gospel: Christ Alone refutes this false version of Christianity by approaching it from several different angles. First, it lays out the basic teachings of Protestant Christianity as developed by the Reformers. There should be nothing controversial about this—it’s what American churches have traditionally taught for the past few hundred years. But as culture has eroded, the family unit has broken down, children have grown up without fathers, social media has hijacked our pleasure reward system… we have become increasingly absorbed in our own selves. We’ve also been leaving the church in droves, and those of us that remain in church are being rapidly syphoned off—from bible-preaching churches with grounded pastors who shepherd their flocks with genuine care, to megachurches with celebrity pastors who give motivational speeches during the intermissions of Jesus-flavored rock concerts and care more about the offering plate than the eternal fate of the soul.

What draws people to these heretical churches is that they preach a message of self-gratification, self-empowerment, self-improvement—the health and wealth gospel, the name it and claim it gospel. In other words, they replace the center of traditional church teaching—Jesus Christ—with the self. Perfect for the self-absorbed culture we live in. The sermon is no longer geared around a response to the life and death and resurrection of Christ, but around how He can help you achieve your goals. If you just have faith—and fill the coffers, of course—God will bless you and heal you and make you rich. (To be clear, it’s not wrong to pray for things like healing and income; but the modern understanding of prayer is atrocious and—unsurprisingly—self-centered.)

In the hands of Prosperity Gospel peddlers like Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Todd White—who all feature heavily in the documentary via published video clips, but declined to be interviewed—the Evangelion becomes unrecognizable. Instead of the challenging, beautiful revelation of God’s love for humanity and a call to repent and believe, the Gospel as preached by these snake oil salesmen is a twisted of amalgamation New Age teachings, the American dream, and hollow self-help tips, veiled with vague, inoffensive Christianese language—a diluted Jesus for the masses. While this message has broad appeal, it is ultimately damning to those who subscribe to it. As Dr. Bryan Chapell explains, a Gospel that only requires you to have faith and be good will either lead to pride or despair. Either you will falsely believe that you have checked off the necessary boxes to achieve God’s grace (there are some humorous clips of Donald Trump pre-Presidency basically saying that he doesn’t make mistakes so he need not ask for forgiveness), or you will find yourself buried beneath the weight of your sins.

The fulcrum of this argument is that Scripture states that only God is good (Matthew 19:17 and elsewhere), while Joel Osteen et al. routinely claim that man is also good. Quoth Osteen: “99.9% of people are not bad people. They may make poor choices, but deep down they got a good heart.” But the bible clearly teaches that we are bad people—hence the core of the Gospel message to mankind is that they need to be born again, given a new heart, etc.¹

The documentary is packed full of well-credentialed interviewees, from professional theologians like Michael Horton and Julius Kim to pastors and teachers like Paul Washer and Justin Peters, many of whom wade into some fairly deep waters for a film that found its way to Netflix—trichotomy, Gnosticism, kenosis, scriptural refutations of specific claims from Prosperity preachers. There are also a number of laymen who provide some unfiltered views of their interactions with the church at large, and Costi Hinn—nephew of televangelist Benny Hinn—features heavily, describing his gradual realization that his uncle was peddling a false gospel. Two stories resonate the most. Katherine Berger, an Alabama resident who went through a half dozen different serious medical issues over the course of a few years, emerges from her ordeals physically damaged but spiritually healed, the exact opposite of the Prosperity message. Nabeel Qureshi—who opens the documentary by chastising silent American Christians who, he explains, either don’t actually believe the Gospel or don’t care if non-believers go to hell—sadly passed away at the age of thirty-four from stomach cancer, not understanding why he had to die but accepting his death as part of God’s will. The film is dedicated to his memory.

I only have a few nits to pick. First, the criticism of the Catholic “faith + works” version of salvation feels like it’s straw-manned. My current understanding of these different schools of thought is that there is a large amount of agreement between them, but that each casts the other in the worst light possible when trying to make an argument.² But that’s minor, and may be due to a flawed understanding on my part. In any case, it doesn’t really get in the way of ripping the Prosperity Gospel to shreds. I think they did a pretty good job of that. Second, and in a similar vein, it kind of reduces all other religions to some version of “be good, attain heaven.” That’s not the case, even if you believe that all other religions are false. I prefer to look at other religions through the eyes of second century saint Justin Martyr, who stated: “All right principles that philosophers and lawgivers have discovered and expressed they owe to whatever of the Word they have found and contemplated in part. The reason why they have contradicted each other is that they have not known the entire Word, which is Christ.” In other words, he claims anything found in other religions that is consistent with the Christian faith to be good and true.

American Gospel: Christ Alone has caused quite a bit of controversy for a variety of reasons, but what it mostly boils down to is that America is a nation of self-centered navel gazers who have no fear of God. When confronted with the clear biblical teachings that contradict their narcissistic worldview—which they claim is Christian—rather than respond with charity and tact, they resort to bluster and name-calling. Sometimes the truth hurts.

1. While most Christian traditions will agree with the bulk of this documentary, the proposition that “man is fundamentally not good at all” is a piece of Reformed dogma that not all adhere to. It gets kind of technical and pedantic, and it’s really more of an in-house argument for Christians to have than one to have out in a secular/evangelistic setting, but let’s follow it for the sake of argument. If man is not good at all, then he can’t choose to give his life to Christ, because that act would be good. That means that only someone specifically called by Christ can repent of his sins. That leads quickly to a specific definition of election that affirms the existence of the reprobate—the sinner created by God who is not part of the elect and is damned to hell for eternity. That’s hard to swallow. Other traditions grant that man has some goodness, even if only just enough to recognize and turn to pure goodness when confronted with it.

2. Pastor Nate Pickowicz kind of addresses this in the documentary. James 2:26 clearly states “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” He explains that the “correct” understanding of this (and other similar) passages is to transform the Catholic equation of “faith + works = salvation” into “faith = salvation + works.” In other words, our fruit comes as a response to our lives being changed by God’s gift of grace as a result of faith, but plays no part in helping us achieve it. “You know a person’s been saved because of their fruit, but the fruit is not the reason they’re saved,” he says. So… a person doesn’t need works to be saved but to prove that they’re saved? Why can’t we just agree that the doing of good works is somehow bound up in the very act of believing (which is itself a “work”) and if your faith is genuine it will immediately lead to some measure of fruit. See how much overlap there is here?

Sources:
Greenwell, Andrew M. “St. Justin Martyr: The Spermatikos Logos and the Natural Law”. Lex Christianorum. 14 March 2010.