evanmorris.com
This just in: people who believe giving the local televangelist money will bring them good fortune also tend to believe mortgage con artists:
Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”
Obviously these cases constitute a tiny fraction of mortgage defaults (the majority of which involve some form of fraud on the agent’s part), but the symbiosis between the despicable “prosperity gospel” and the more secular bloodsuckers is striking.
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