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Satan and a Virus Won’t Stop Us

The Prosperity Gospel of Coronavirus Response

PAUL A. DJUPE AND RYAN P. BURGE

Satan and a virus will not stop us.

—REV. TONY SPELL (qtd. in Seipel 2020)

At the time of writing, the coronavirus is sweeping the world with over 72 million cases and millions dead; the United States leads the world in both counts (more than 16 million cases and more than 300,000 dead).¹ In the face of the pandemic, some congregations are still meeting in person (or think they should be) with an apparent devil-may-care attitude. In this chapter, we ask what drives reactions to the coronavirus, with a focus on one rapidly growing religious belief system—the Prosperity Gospel. This belief system is particularly well tuned to trigger a strong reaction to the societal response to the spread of the coronavirus. With roots in the “power of positive thinking,” Prosperity Gospelers believe that God controls access to earthly comforts and thus vest power in their beliefs and in the church to achieve earthly goals like health and wealth. As such, Prosperity Gospelers react negatively to collective action encouraged by secular authorities and express a desire for the instrumentality of their well-being—the church—to remain open, despite the likely consequences (Burke 2020).

An Overview of the Prosperity Gospel

This chapter is part of a broad set of work in the social sciences about religious belief (e.g., Bloom and Arikan 2013; Froese and Bader 2010; Jelen and Wilcox 1991).² Beliefs are understandings of how the world is and how it works—they are effectively perceived facts. This definition helps to categorize and distinguish religious beliefs, which include answers to questions about whether there is evil in the world, what behaviors are sinful, what is the nature of God, what happens after death, and what returns practitioners get for investing in worship. Beliefs pair well with values, which are commandments about how the world should be and how people should act. Together, beliefs and values in conversation constitute worldviews.

One of the most popular strains of Protestant theology in recent years is the Prosperity Gospel. This belief system rests on the assumption that those who are faithful to God and God’s church will not just reap benefits in the afterlife but will gain health and wealth during this life as well. This is succinctly summarized in the title of Joel Osteen’s best-selling book, Your Best Life Now, which sold over eight million copies in the decade after its release (Johnson 2014). Osteen, along with other such internationally known pastors as Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, and T. D. Jakes, reaches tens of millions of followers per week through television broadcasts and a social media presence with a message that is tinged with various levels of prosperity theology (Dougherty et al. 2019). In fact, there are some data that indicate that half of the largest churches in the United States (over 10,000 attendees) teach a theology that is rooted in the Prosperity Gospel (Bowler 2018).

Despite the apparently pervasive nature of Prosperity Gospel theology among American Christians, it has been dramatically understudied in the United States (though see, e.g., Harris 2010; McDaniel 2016). However, there has been a good amount of research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that indicates that prosperity beliefs serve as a catalyst for entrepreneurial attitudes and social mobility (Marsh and Tonoyan 2009; Woodberry 2006) as well as political participation (McClendon and Riedl 2019). However, there are mixed findings about the link between prosperity beliefs and income across countries (Beck and Gundersen 2016; Koch 2009), with a strong negative cross-sectional relationship between prosperity beliefs, income, and education (Burge 2017; Schieman and Jung 2012).

However, the full implications of the Prosperity Gospel and how it orients individuals to the social world are not well understood. For instance, does the Prosperity Gospel act to comfort people or to elevate perceived threats? Do believers act individually as if the belief itself is sufficient, or do they react to threats to the collective set of believers?

Prosperity theology teaches that illness is a sign of sinful behavior (Bowler 2018) and that healing can be achieved through faith alone (Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose 1996). Thus, when confronted with the possibility of a global pandemic, such as COVID-19, a faithful believer should have nothing to fear. For instance, R. R. Reno, the editor of the influential Christian magazine First Things, argued that churches should defy government orders and continue gathering. He wrote, “When we worship, we join the Christian rebellion against the false lordship of the principalities and powers that claim to rule our lives, including sickness and death” (Reno 2020). While Reno is no prosperity theologian, this is one piece of the argument made when many churches remained open in the early weeks of the virus spread in the United States. For instance, Rev. Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church in Louisiana told a Baton Rouge newspaper, “When the paramedics can’t get there, when the law enforcement can’t get there, the Holy Ghost can get there and it will make a difference in someone’s life” (Rocha 2020).

This sort of thinking has been characterized as bearing the hallmarks of individualism—that individual agency to believe or not is the critical choice to leading a successful life. In many ways, such individualism is at the heart of American evangelicalism (e.g., Guth et al. 1997, 59), where it is commonly thought that bringing the population to Jesus is the key to alleviating the world’s various problems (Guth et al. 1997, 58) rather than building institutions and jump-starting collective action. One evangelical pastor argued, “Our problems are not drugs, divorce, abortion, greed, etc. These are but the symptoms of a much larger problem, that of alienation from God” (qtd. in Guth et al. 1997, 59).

However, a crucial aspect of prosperity theology is the belief that the church becomes the instrumentality of defense. The church enables followers to demonstrate their belief through giving and attendance, serving as a support network to overcome setbacks. Solid Rock Church in Ohio, one of the megachurches that gained considerable attention for remaining open at the beginning of the pandemic in March (Kaleem 2020), prominently displayed the passage from Hebrews 10:25 on their website, “Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are doing. Instead, let us encourage one another all the more, since you see that the Day of the Lord is coming nearer.” As, again, Rev. Spell argued, if a parishioner became sick, pastors serve as first responders: “If that is our command, they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover” (Rocha 2020). That is, it is not just the healing power of individual belief that matters but the physical connection to the church and its pastorate that will bring the blessings of belief (and a stunning reversal of the Protestant Reformation). On that basis, we would hypothesize that strong adherents to the Prosperity Gospel profess lower levels of concern about COVID-19.

However, where there is smoke, there is likely to be fire. One reason why prosperity preachers make claims about dominion over death is because of the profound fears that their followers have. The other reason is that such claims are a priming exercise that elevate those concerns—if you are told you have power over it, you understand it is to be feared—which serves to maintain reliance on the pastor’s services. From this perspective, we hypothesize a greater sense of threat from COVID-19 among Prosperity Gospel believers as well as greater defiance against social-distancing / gathering-size orders.

A central thread to Prosperity Gospel belief systems is not just that belief can cure life’s deficiencies but that unbelief can harm. Put another way, poverty and sickness are signs of sin, a lack of belief, and perhaps even the work of the devil. The latter is what Paula White was talking about when she called for all “Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now” (Zaveri and Diaz 2020). Other Prosperity Gospel preachers make the link to the social dimensions of sin. For instance, Joel Osteen explicitly tells followers to avoid the sick and the poor: “You need to be careful about whom you surround yourself with, especially in difficult times. Misery loves company” (Osteen 2018). One implication is the belief that individuals are responsible for social problems, which has a natural affinity with American conservatism (McDaniel 2016).

It’s hard not to see this as a direct attack on the fundamentals of collective action (see also Harris-Lacewell 2007). Others in similar circumstances are to be avoided—they are untrustworthy by dint of sharing your same circumstances and concerns. The solution to those problems is not working with others but increasing reliance on belief and the church. Such Prosperity Gospel solutions are vertical, individual, and antisocial rather than horizontal, organizational, and social. In particular, we hypothesize that Prosperity Gospelers are more distrustful of others. They seem to take seriously the admonition of St. James, who implored Christians “to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27 NIV).

The same logic can be applied on a societal scale, as well. If individual people who are sick and poor are not to be trusted because of their sin, then the widespread existence of poverty and health problems signifies an active, working presence of evil to promote so much sin. As such, we would expect that Prosperity Gospelers would be especially prone to conspiracy theories. We don’t quite have the data to test that, except that early in the U.S. outbreak, right-wing commentators, including the president, were arguing that the hysteria over the coronavirus was politically motivated. We hypothesize that Prosperity Gospel followers would be more likely to believe that notion as an analog to the working presence of evil in the world—since good and bad things happen for a reason.

But this also suggests a potential causal problem—are attitudes and beliefs that we find linked to the Prosperity Gospel just a function of being a Republican and being exposed to right-wing ideas? We grant it is possible that conservative commentators are driving these relationships, which is why we test interaction terms between party identification and Prosperity Gospel beliefs. That is, we hypothesize that prosperity beliefs will have less of an effect on Republicans, who are more frequently exposed to arguments consistent with the Prosperity Gospel. That means that prosperity beliefs should be linked to greater attitudinal shifts among Democrats and, to a lesser extent, independents, who are hearing messaging in church that differs from what Democratic elites are communicating.

Data and Measurement

We draw on data collected from March 23 to 27, 2020, which was well before the coronavirus spread peaked in the United States, as well as survey data from October, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election. In late March, many, but not all, states had issued “stay-at-home” orders. Some states, such as Michigan, had exempted religious organizations from gathering limits (often ten people), though they encouraged houses of worship to close voluntarily (as in Ohio), which most had done (RNS 2020). Only five states in the Great Plains remained holdouts with no statewide policy by mid-April. By October, the spread of the virus was in its third wave with cases soaring toward 150,000 new infections per day. North Dakota, ironically the hottest of hot spots in the nation, only imposed a mask mandate on November 14 to run through January.

In the March data, we found that only 12 percent of respondents reported their congregations to still be worshipping in person. Some high-profile congregations stayed open and, in some cases, defied orders to close—that was the case in Florida (Mazzei 2020) and Louisiana (Rocha 2020; see also Reuters 2020). This is to say that at the time of our spring data collection, there was still a national debate about whether houses of worship should close. By October, much of that had been resolved in favor of state power, though a recent Supreme Court decision pushed back against New York’s orders (see chapter 7). However, most of the states reopened in the summer and had not locked down again in response to the rampaging pandemic. By the time of our October survey, two-thirds of respondents who attend worship services report that in-person worship had been canceled because of the virus. Thus, many had opened back up by the fall.

The roughly 3,100 respondents to our survey in March and 1,740 in October were supplied by Qualtrics Panels, filled according to quotas that matched current U.S. Census distributions on age, region, and gender.³ The data are not generated by a probability sample but instead from a set of panelists whose responses were screened for speed (those who took the survey too quickly were kicked out of the sample) and accuracy (we included several attention check questions).

Social science has just begun to operationalize the Prosperity Gospel into survey questions in recent years. As such, there is no widely accepted battery that can be drawn upon. However, the questions that were employed in our survey closely mirror those used by Dougherty et al. (2019) and McDaniel (2016), as well as by McClendon and Riedl (2019) in their research situated in Africa.

We used a three-question battery refined across several survey efforts (α = 0.90 in March, α = 0.92 in October).⁴ Shown in Figure 1.1, we see substantial agreement with these core Prosperity Gospel beliefs and little rejection of them. Near majorities believe that followers will be rewarded with health and wealth and will be “richly rewarded in this life.” The least agreement is with the belief that God will give you the material things you want—“name it and claim it”—but the notion is still favored by 41 percent of the sample. Less than 30 percent of the sample rejects these beliefs. Simply put, the Prosperity Gospel is incredibly popular according to these data.

Figure 1.1 Distribution of Prosperity Gospel Beliefs (Source: March 2020 survey.)

As Bowler (2018, 5) has argued, “The Prosperity Gospel cannot be conflated with fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, the religious Right, the so-called black church, or any of the usual suspects (though it certainly overlaps with each).” While it would be easy to assume that the Prosperity Gospel has no place in mainline Protestantism, it is important to note that the gospel of wealth had its roots there (Bowler 2018, 31–32). Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, was himself a pastor of a mainline congregation in the Reformed Church of America (George 2019). We likewise find that Prosperity Gospel beliefs are spread across American religious traditions in relatively high and not terribly distinctive concentrations. It is notable, though, that almost every group shows higher concentrations in October compared to March. The only religious group with demonstrably low values is the religious nones (see the appendix, Figure A1.1).

Moreover, the Prosperity Gospel is spread across American politics as well. As we show in appendix Figures A1.2 and A1.3, Republicans do have a stronger concentration of Prosperity Gospel views (hovering around 0.65 on a 0–1 scale), but Democrats are not far behind (at 0.59) and are indistinguishable from the sample mean. Only independents show less commitment to prosperity, which is partly a function of the high rate of religious nones among their ranks. Even when we control for religious tradition, though, independents still score lower on the Prosperity Gospel scale. The differences intensified by October as Republicans shifted markedly toward stronger prosperity beliefs, while Democrats split (some higher and some lower).

One key strategy of ours is to assess whether relationships with the Prosperity Gospel are simply masking partisan reactions by interacting partisanship (3-point scale; partisans include leaners) with the Prosperity Gospel scale. We do this for two reasons. First, partisanship appears to be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in American politics, driving everything from economic beliefs (Enns et al. 2012) to religious behavior (e.g., Djupe et al. 2018; Hout and Fischer 2002; Margolis 2018). The default expectation is that reactions to the coronavirus will simply warp to fit the interests of the parties. Second, public officials and commentators, such as the president and Fox News, have been explicitly claiming that the coronavirus response is the Democrat’s “new hoax” and the hysteria is a Democratic ploy to hurt Trump (e.g., Harvey 2020). This view has been widely repeated, including by a Virginia pastor who eventually succumbed to the virus (Palmer 2020).

Results

Our dependent variables are depicted in Figure 1.2. Though there is some variation, most respondents (86 percent) agreed that the coronavirus is a major threat. Even so, many (43 percent) believe that the hysteria over the pandemic is politically motivated. Given the widespread elite rhetoric making this point, especially early in the spread across the United States, it is no surprise to find it heavily tilted to the right.

Coronavirus protection measures clashed with First Amendment liberties, with some congregations remaining open because, in the words of one megachurch pastor in Louisiana, “The church is the last force resisting the Antichrist” (Reuters 2020). If evil lurks and people rely on the church as the instrument of their protection, we would expect Prosperity Gospelers to favor staying open and to urge defiance of government orders to close. Figure 1.2 shows that 28 percent agree that houses of worship should stay open; by October that number swelled to 45 percent. A random half of the March sample was given the additional words “even if more people die as a result.” While support did drop overall as a result of this treatment, the difference was small and not significant—people were well aware of the consequences of houses of worship remaining open.

Figure 1.2 Distribution of Perceptions of the Coronavirus and Its Potential Response (Source: March and October 2020 surveys.)

We went one step further and anticipated the current skirmishes, asking: “If the government tells us to stop gathering in person for worship, I would want my congregation to defy the order.” A defiant stance is not common, but neither is it absent—22 percent agreed/strongly agreed in March, but it jumped to 34 percent in October. We also embedded an experiment here, substituting “the Trump administration” for “the government” in half the March cases, though again it made no difference to support overall (or among partisans who might react strongly to Trump).

We also include two measures that we believe are linked closely to pandemic politics—social trust and belief that we are entering the “prophesied ‘end times.’” In many ways, pandemic politics are massive collective action games. The selfish course of action is to continue on as normal, even though, in the aggregate, selfish behavior will greatly help spread the virus through the population. Clearly, government action is a necessity for “flattening the curve,” which could be hampered if there is little trust in government and each other (e.g., see Coyne 2020 on Idaho). It comes as little surprise that many (69 percent in March, 62 percent in October) agreed that “You can’t be too careful in trusting others.” Though asked differently in the General Social Survey, 59 percent in 2018 said that people usually or always can’t be trusted, so our results are in the ballpark, but it is no surprise that caution increased as the pandemic got underway. Regardless, we expect that Prosperity Gospelers will be less trusting of others given that people’s problems are the result of their own sin and unbelief.

Lastly, we asked about a specific aspect of Christian theology regarding the end of the world. Some previous work has found that such beliefs affect how people think about time-dependent policy options, such as environmental protection (Barker and Bearce 2012; Guth et al. 1995). We investigate it here as a way to index how Prosperity Gospelers think about the virus as an existential threat—a mechanism that helps to tie together the other findings. In March, 35 percent of respondents agreed that we are entering the “prophesied ‘end times,’” which had grown to 40 percent in October. Given the concrete frame of the question, this is much higher than previous reports,⁵ suggesting just how context-dependent this belief is.

Model Results

In what follows, we estimate each of the first four dependent variables using the same statistical model, and Figure 1.3 contains these results.⁶ The figure shows the estimates (lines) with confidence intervals (lighter area around the line), which is a way of demonstrating the range in which we have confidence that the true estimate is likely to lie. They allow us to assess statistical significance visually—if the intervals do not overlap, we can say that the estimates are statistically distinguishable.

Figure 1.3 The Interactive Effect of Prosperity Gospel Beliefs by Partisanship on Coronavirus Threat and Response. Note: Comparison of any two confidence intervals is equivalent to a 90 percent test of significance at the point of overlap. (Source: March 2020 survey.)

Coronavirus Threat

Given the messaging from conservatives and inaction from many Republican governors in the early months of the outbreak, it is no surprise that independents and Republicans are less likely to agree that the virus is a threat. Regardless, belief in the Prosperity Gospel boosts a sense of threat from the virus for each partisan group, backing our “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” thesis. And our expectation of an accelerating effect with higher prosperity belief finds support. There is no growth in agreement that the virus is a threat until roughly the midpoint of the scale. Moreover, the effect is greatest among Republicans, whose sense of threat climbs to equal that held by Democratic Prosperity Gospel believers. In this case, Republican elites have been downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic, which means that Republicans had more room to change their opinions due to their Prosperity Gospel beliefs.

Politicized Hysteria

The threat relationships just discussed do not mean that the threat is viewed in the same way. We expect that Prosperity Gospelers will view threats in an agentic way—that is, they see problems as the result of supernatural forces working through human action and inaction, sins of commission and omission. In this case, we expect that they will see the coronavirus hysteria as politically motivated, which is what Figure 1.3 shows. Surely as a result of elite communication, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe this, but all three partisan groups shift their views higher based on their Prosperity Gospel beliefs. And, again, the effects gain in strength with greater Prosperity Gospel beliefs. It is astounding to see that Democratic Prosperity Gospelers are more likely to agree that the hysteria was politically motivated than many Republicans. Prosperity Gospelers truly stand alone in their degree of agreement with this conspiracy theory.

By October (appendix Figure A1.4 compares the results from the two surveys), the relationship patterns look about the same, except that Republican belief in political motivation had grown by half a point—Republican Prosperity Gospelers now average just over “agree.” Moreover, the shift driven by prosperity beliefs among Democrats is just enormous. Those who reject the Prosperity Gospel average “disagree,” but those who affirm prosperity beliefs average “agree.” After a year of the terrible spread of the pandemic throughout the United States, the parties polarized on the coronavirus response, exacerbated by belief in the Prosperity Gospel.

Keep the Churches Open

The bottom panels of Figure 1.3 highlight the positive effect that prosperity beliefs have on support for keeping the churches open despite public health threats that may pose. The left panel shows the priority of freedom of worship despite the coronavirus, while the right panel gauges support for defying (potential) government orders to close. Neither of these positions occasions considerable support, but, in both cases, the Prosperity Gospel serves to move people from opposition to support (even if very slim in the case of government defiance). There are minor differences by partisanship. Democrats who completely reject the Prosperity Gospel are more opposed to the idea of keeping churches open, but prosperity Democrats show the most support for keeping them open. The Democratic Party is quite ideologically diverse, and that heterogeneity may reach its peak over the role of religion in society.

The rhetoric of the Prosperity Gospel suggests that only belief is necessary to attain the desired benefits. But, instead, it is remarkable how believers have come to rely so heavily on intercessory agents in the Prosperity Gospel sector, a link we explore with our own data below. If the church is the instrumentality of health and wealth, then it is easy to imagine supporters wanting to keep them open at almost any price. There are a number of potential explanations for this that rely on the experiential nature of Prosperity Gospel services, since many are Pentecostal and believe in the necessity of laying on of hands in order to faith-heal believers (for a minority). But perhaps the simplest is that the church serves as a marker of the ingroup where “we” believers stand united against “they” unbelievers who have chosen to be poor and unhealthy by their sin and unbelief.

Likely Mechanisms

We can find evidence for our view of the effects of the Prosperity Gospel in a variety of other relationships that signal high barriers to those outside the group (full model results are available in appendix Table A1.2). For as sunny as are some proponents of the Prosperity Gospel, such as Joel Osteen, the worldviews of adherents shade considerably darker. We included a standard trust question that captures the perceived risk of relying on others, asking whether respondents agree or disagree that “You can’t be too careful in trusting others.” The results indicate the dramatic rise in distrust that accompanies prosperity beliefs, moving respondents almost 40 percent of the scale. Only among those who reject the Prosperity Gospel are there partisan differences—Democrats are more trusting. Among full-throated supporters of the Prosperity Gospel, partisanship is immaterial.

It is no surprise that the same distrusting orientation finds expression in how to organize social relations with respect to the church. That is, Prosperity Gospelers have much stronger exclusive orientations, which encompass social and economic cloistering with fellow religious identifiers. Among Democrats, exclusivity climbs almost the same amount as distrust, though the effect is a bit weaker among the other partisans. Together this helps to make sense of the CNN (2020) interview with a woman attending in-person worship at a Prosperity Gospel megachurch outside of Cincinnati. She felt protected not just because she was “covered in Jesus’s blood” but because she was attending with other “covered” believers.

Generalized distrust and religious exclusivity go hand in hand with a belief that evil exists, that it is embodied, and that it is active in the world. A belief that evil exists is common (index mean = 0.7 on a 0–1 scale), and the only item in the scale that truly shows variation across religious traditions is whether the devil exists. In any event, Prosperity Gospelers occupy the highest end of the scale without distinction among partisans. Only among those who reject the Prosperity Gospel do partisans differentiate, with Democrats less likely to believe that evil exists.

Lastly, we examine the eschatological belief that the “end times” are near. There are many shades to beliefs about the end times, also known as judgment day, last things, and the apocalypse. In perhaps the most common form, the end times involve a battle between good and evil at Armageddon. Under this interpretation, it is no surprise to find Prosperity Gospelers 25 percent more likely to agree that “We are very likely entering the prophesied ‘end times.’” As noted above, levels of this belief appear to be very high in the population at the moment, surely driven by the spread of the coronavirus. This is critical because it suggests believers expect evil to be on the loose and are on the lookout for battles between good and evil.⁷

Discussion—The Special Role of Race?

While race features prominently in the literature on the Prosperity Gospel, up until now we have only included a control in our models for racial identity differences. But race is essential to consider at a deeper level in the public expression of religion. Despite considerable religious similarities with white evangelicals, Black Protestants have diametrically opposed politics, at least in terms of partisanship (Burge and Djupe 2019), if not necessarily on some social issues, such as same-sex marriage (e.g., Sherkat, de Vries, and Creek 2010). As Shelton and Cobb (2018) put it, “Differences across Protestant affiliations pale in comparison to structural and cultural similarities resulting from the legacy of racial discrimination and inequality” (see also Shelton and Emerson 2012).

Does race similarly condition the effects of Prosperity Gospel beliefs? We took the same models used above for two dependent variables—government defiance and freedom to worship is too important to close—and interacted Prosperity Gospel, race, and partisanship. With some minor variation, the effects are no different. That is, nonwhite Prosperity Gospel believers have the same reaction to stay-at-home orders as white Prosperity Gospelers. Put another way, in this policy area, Prosperity Gospel beliefs function independently of race and partisanship, the two dominant sources of variation in American politics.⁸

It is also notable that the effects of the Prosperity Gospel are consistently lower for Republicans than Democrats. For nonwhites this variation in effect is insignificant. For whites, the effect of Prosperity Gospel beliefs is significantly lower for Republicans than it is for Democrats when predicting “freedom to worship is too important to close.” The difference is reasonably close to significant in the government defiance model as well. While still very large effects, these differences are telling about the communication environment of the parties. Democratic messaging does not loop in arguments that are consistent with the Prosperity Gospel, while Republican “boot straps” economic policy aligns with the individualist prosperity approach. Moreover, Republicans have clearly joined forces with the COVID-rules resistance movement, reinforcing what Prosperity Gospelers are hearing from religious elites and what they are likely to think by dint of their beliefs.

Conclusion

Given its rampant spread around the world (Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose 1996), including throughout the United States (Bowler 2018), it is surprising that there is not more research on the Prosperity Gospel. We have attempted to show that the social effects of Prosperity Gospel beliefs are encompassing and deserve more of our attention. Using the coronavirus pandemic as the context, the results suggest that Prosperity Gospel believers have particularly high barriers to working with others that may translate into dangerous behavior when coordinated social distancing is the public policy of the day. Prosperity Gospelers are no more likely to report their congregations are open but were much more likely to indicate that they were still worshipping in person.

It is surprising to find a social force that is not limited by party or race. We did not determine this by simply controlling for racial and party identification differences but instead looked to compare effect sizes among these groups and found them to be largely invariant. There are differences in how much each group believes the Prosperity Gospel, but when they believe, their worldview dictates a very similar reaction to the coronavirus response.

Personal behavior during the pandemic is tremendously important, given that lives are at stake and simply attending worship in person can mean dozens, even hundreds of new infections as “Patient 31” in South Korea taught us (Shin, Berkowitz, and Kim 2020). But the relationships seen here suggest the Prosperity Gospel has much broader implications. Given that Prosperity Gospelers have such high rates of distrust, have a high belief in evil, feel religious commands to be rightly exclusionary, and appear to be imminent end-times believers, we see little that is encouraging of collective action. Indeed, the explicit rhetoric parallels the pandemic—remain socially distant from those who may share the same problems. Misery loves company, and you sin by working in concert with the poor and those with health problems.

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Material referencing an appendix in this chapter can be found online available here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/epidemic_among_my_people.