Cash Blessings

Holy Watermelon

There might be nothing more American than the emergence of Capitalist Jesus and the Prosperity Gospel. This episode explores the men behind the phenomenon, and the scriptural passages that are abused to defend it.

Not all Pentecostal Christians fall into this trap, but these pastors have millions of followers around the world. Many of them are fundamentalists in some ways, though radically anti-scriptural in other (more important) ways.

Mesmerism and the New Thought Movement are significant stones in this foundation, and Televangelism--especially the Word of Faith ministries--has brought a global audience to these hateful preachers, including Oral Roberts, Kenneth Hagin, Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Creflo Dollar.

Oral Roberts led a tremendous empire, including a whole university (more successful than Trump's), and he was the personal mentor of Kenneth Copeland, who raised big money for Angel Flight 44, only to refuse to fly relief to Haiti. Of course there are high profile prostitution scandals, and preachers who later admit that they've never taken the time to read the Bible until they were locked up with nothing but time and their 'favorite book' after fraud convictions. Some of these men will demand you go into debt to pay tithes, others later claim that tithing isn't biblical (Creflo Dollar).

All of these preachers, and more, are comfortable asking you to fund their lavish lifestyle, while their fancy words let them off the hook for any return on your investment. Senate financial probes, and fraud charges aren't enough to protect the most vulnerable people among us. Only education can fix this problem; Holy Watermelon is here to help.

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In this episode, we also mentioned John Oliver's take on televangelists, and PreachersNSneakers