Adios Lou Dobbs

I’m sure Olbermann will indeed miss hamming it up with his baleful, slurping impression of (now former) CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. But hey, he’s still got a popular radio show on 160 stations…

Actually, aside from his constant harping on about illegal immigrants and nutty right-wing conspiracy theories like the “North American Union” and such, I didn’t mind Dobbs that much. I hear Sarah Palin is looking for a talk show, so maybe she could fill that slot on CNN.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

Here’s a rather provocative idea that may have a certain amount of merit, perhaps not as a “cause” of the crash per se, but another contributing factor in terms of the “magical thinking” promoted by so-called prosperity gospel — the perfect fuel for the crisis.

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

From the Atlantic article by Hanna Rosen:

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. “I would hear consistent testimonies about how ‘once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,’ or ‘I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,’” he says. “This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster.”

For whatever it’s worth, Rosen points that demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots.