Fakery and Wealth in African Charismatic Christianity: Moving beyond the Prosperity Gospel as Script

Abstract

The prosperity gospel has gained visibility and prominence over the past decades as an empirical and theological trend, as well as in scholarship on African charismatic Christianity. This chapter provides a critical discussion of how the prosperity gospel has been approached in the literature. It discusses in particular how giving and receiving, and the relationships this entail, has been analyzed from an instrumental perspective by seeing it as a disrupted relationship of exchange if the giver does not receive a material blessing. I argue that most analytical approaches have seen the prosperity gospel as a script in the sense that it is approached as a coherent system of thought. Instead of taking the prosperity gospel as the analytical focus, I suggest that studying different modalities of exchange provides a broader understanding of what is considered legitimate and what is considered dubious or fake in the charismatic Christian context and beyond. The argument of the chapter is that by combining the study of the prosperity gospel with an analysis of everyday theology we gain a more nuanced understanding of the role of wealth and money in charismatic Christianity in Africa that moves beyond what is encapsulated in the idea of the prosperity gospel.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.