How megachurches twist the Bible to defend billionaires and wealth inequality
A new paper looks at a decade's worth of sermons to discover how pastors reframe poverty to protect the wealthy
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It won’t surprise anyone that white evangelical megachurches have spent decades politicizing the Bible.
For everything Jesus said about caring for the “least of these,” there are “clobber verses” pastors will use to justify bigotry against LGBTQ people. The Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion, but there’s no shortage of verses pastors will point to when they want to condemn it.
When it comes to something less “controversial,” though, like fighting poverty, how do megachurches use the Bible to defend the conservative position on it? After all, helping the poor should be pretty clear-cut. Of all the things Christianity is supposed to stand for, lifting up those with fewer resources ought to be near the top of the list no matter what brand of religion you subscribe to... right?
That’s not how many white evangelicals see it.
One survey from 2017 found that “Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual failings.” In other words, either God wanted them to be poor or their poverty is the result of a lack of faith.
Dawson Vosburg, a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University, recently published a fascinating paper (which you can access for free) in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion trying to understand how conservative Christians twist the Bible to downplay economic inequality.
He looked at all the sermons delivered between 2013 and 2023 at one of the fastest growing megachurches in the country, found the ones that discussed anything financial—by searching for terms like “rich,” “tithe,” “debt,” “billionaire,” etc.—and analyzed the results to see how this typical white evangelical megachurch minimized the wealth gap.
Even though he only looked at one church, the paper offers a clear example of how conservative Christian pastors can convince their congregations to flat-out ignore one of the most glaring and obvious moral problems of our time. By doing this, Vosburg aimed to answer a simple question: “How do evangelical teachers justify inequality, even as they marshal and interpret the same religious scriptures and theological ideas used by others to condemn it?”
For the sake of anonymity, he called this place “New River Church,” led by “Pastor Tray Jarrett.”
Vosburg found that the church downplayed the wealth gap in four ways:
They condemned “rich shaming” anyone
Pastor Tray made clear that there was nothing wrong with being wealthy. He loved it. God loved it. And anyone calling for the abolition of billionaires, for example, was going against God’s Will. In one sermon, Jarrett even said, “I thank God that we have thousandaires and millionaires and billionaires in the church. What we can accomplish together!” He also delivered an anecdote about a rich couple that left another church and came to his because they felt personally attacked when their previous pastor condemned wealth from the pulpit. (At their new home, of course, their tithes would go into New River’s coffers.)
The moral was obvious: Be kind to the wealthy or else they’ll leave for a church that wants them.
If the pastor ever criticized wealth, it was only to say that while God’s okay with you having money, you better not let the money “have you.” In other words, money was a means to an end, not an end unto itself, so keep your eyes on God.
He had jokes, too:
There's nothing wrong with (owning a) lake house. God gave it to you and you should invite me over to your lake house. I would love to play in your pool. Nothing wrong with that—just be careful.
With sermons like that, it wouldn’t be surprising for the congregation to defend the outrageous amounts of cash hoarded by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Donald Trump— God must have wanted them to have it!—even as that wealth came on the backs of workers who have suffered and continue to suffer. Raising taxes on those same people would be seen as an unnecessary punishment for the gifts God bestowed upon them.
They downplayed U.S. inequality by focusing on global inequality
There are over 36 million Americans living in poverty making up over 11% of our population. A financial emergency would destroy them. They often don’t have permanent homes. And yet those concerns weren’t felt by the people at New River because their pastor constantly told the church that they were all rich!… relatively speaking, anyway.
… 3/4 [of] the world's population is living on $300 a year or less. If you earned more than $300 last year you are a top 25 percenter, if you could see what God sees. We're all concerned about what the other person has sitting next to us, but if you can see the whole world as God sees the whole world, you're kind of at the top. If you earn more than $33,000 a year, you're a top one percenter when it comes to all the wealth earners in the world…
Why think about the poor when, compared to poor people in other nations, they’re doing pretty damn good? It’s a simple way to get Christians to dismiss proposals like universal health care, free public transit, universal pre-K, etc. You may not understand why those things are necessary when you have no idea what low-income people are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. And this church never bothered to make that clear. Poverty doesn’t really exist in their church! Real Poverty™ exists elsewhere. Plus, everyone’s rich when they have Jesus!
They re-interpreted Bible verses about poverty—even the direct ones
Whether it’s the Beatitudes or other parts of the Gospel, Jesus repeatedly talks about the value of preaching to the poor for they are blessed. But at New River, that was always subject to interpretation.
“He's not talking about financially poor people, he's talking about spiritually impoverished people,” said the pastor.
For other passages, Vosburg says, the pastor always took things very literally. The Bible has a lot to say about death, he explained, so no one needed to worry about the afterlife. The Bible “is not mute on the process!” You could just read the Bible and come away with all the answers you wanted.
But when it came to poverty, everything was figurative. When the Bible talks about the poor, it was constantly implied that they’re talking about those with weak faith. When the Bible says people should tithe, however, there was no interpretation necessary. They sure as hell better give 10% of their income.
Vosburg said that last point was stressed repeatedly, “over 150 times across 16 separate sermons.”
Vosburg concluded:
Only passages which can be read as challenging wealth, emphasizing the goodness of the poor, or criticizing inequality receive the spiritualization treatment—the tithe law is interpreted to mean congregants’ actual dollars, not just inward dispositions.
They said God owns everything, anyway
The pastor constantly made the point that it didn’t matter how much stuff you have because, ultimately, it’s all God’s anyway. So don’t be mad at people with private jets and yachts and multiple summer homes. It’s not theirs, it’s God’s! And if some people have less stuff, it’s only because God wants them to have less stuff.
That was what Pastor Tray said even when talking about James 5, which opens with a blunt attention-getter: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.” That passage also says rich people have “hoarded wealth” and failed to adequately pay their workers.
At this church, that passage isn’t about hoarding wealth at all. It’s just making sure you’re not directly hurting others with it.
This is clarified when Pastor Tray is presented with the text of James 5 which puts the accumulation of wealth in the context of injustice. He interprets it this way: “Don't use the blessing of wealth in your life that God has given you as an oppressive tool over those who are less fortunate.” Even in highlighting the possibility of oppression related to wealth, his wording makes it clear that he in no way thinks that the accumulation of that wealth was unjust.
In one sermon, the pastor lashed out at people who would criticize a hypothetical billionaire who made a “million-dollar donation.” (That’s a mere 0.1% of their wealth.) He said, “Stop worrying about what somebody else has. You be faithful with what you have.” That might be decent advice out of context, but in context, he’s telling the congregation to lay off on rich people who aren’t doing more to help the less fortunate.
The takeaway from all this is that conservative policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else in society are going to be supported by congregations like this one that are being brainwashed into thinking God loves the rich and the poor deserve their lot in life.
I asked Vosburg if, in his research, he ever saw anything in the sermons that contradicted this narrative. Did the pastor ever say taxing the rich was a good idea, for example, or did everything neatly fall into those four categories?
Nope, he told me. The only thing he heard to the contrary was the “encouragement to give money—primarily to the church itself—to help the less fortunate.” But urging people to tithe more obviously has a selfish component to it.
For what it’s worth, Vosburg told me he’s a “lifelong evangelical” who became more progressive with his politics starting when he was a teenager. He’s a faithful Christian who is troubled by the way people “are willing to justify inequality and domination using the language of faith.”
To be clear: None of that tainted this research. It just helps explain why he was so interested in this topic, and I’m grateful he’s now getting me to be more aware of that coded language in the future.
Ultimately, this isn’t some kind of theological drift. It’s a betrayal of what Jesus said for the sake of power and profit. Pastors like this one hollow out Christ’s teachings until all that’s left is a gilded throne for the wealthy. In their hands, Scripture is a weapon to shame the poor, a shield to protect billionaires, and a drug to keep their congregations quiet while the cancer of inequality grows around them.
They’re doing to inequality what they’ve done to so many other social issues: Downplaying empathy and decency while promoting faith-based cruelty. This is spiritual cover for a rigged economy. It’s a Prosperity Gospel pep talk for those who are already comfortable.
By the way, even though Vosburg took pains not to directly identify the church he studied in his paper, it wasn’t hard for me to figure out which church it was. I reached out to the church when the paper first came out to see if they had a response to it, but they never wrote back.
This whole business sounds like a justification for the "Prosperity Gospel" that Joel Osteen and others like him are promoting. It's a natural for them, too, because they are busy soaking their congregations to cement themselves among the millionaire class and insure that, while they may be poor in morality, they are seriously rich in the monetary department.
Still, it makes me wonder how they feel about that parable about the rich man, who was told to give away all that he had, if he wanted to follow Jesus. I guess camels and eyes of needles aren't supposed to be mentioned in those churches, eh?
Part of the appeal of religion, especially Christianity, is that it allows for interpretation, rather than providing hard and fast rules and obligations. The mere fact that two people can have vastly different interpretations of religious text is evidence that it's essentially opportunistic in nature.