Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel by Jonathan Root (review)

Reviewed by: Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospelby Jonathan Root Allison Coudert Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel. By Jonathan Root. Eerdmans, 2023. 271pages. 26. 00 softcover; ebook available. As Jonathan Root modestly claims in his analysis of the life and times of Oral Roberts, his book "shouldn't be the last on Roberts. " Instead, it should be the starting point for "other scholars much more capable than myself" to investigate further the man who embodied so many facets—good, bad, and downright ugly—of American culture (206–07). Roberts was both a product and representative of the economic and cultural shifts that occurred in the United States after World War II. The height of his power and influence came during the "age of evangelicalism" in the 1970s and 1980s. Although not as famous as Billy Graham, Roberts was a close second. By the mid-1980s, he was head of a 120 million-a-year business with 2, 300 employees and the founder of Oral Roberts University—with 5, 400 undergraduates—a medical school, and plans to add schools of End Page 114religion, law, and business. He had written more than 130 books, translated into over 100 languages. By 1980 he was so famous that 84 percent of Americans recognized him. During his seventy-year career, he conducted more than 300 healing crusades in 35 countries and laid hands on over two million people. While Billy Graham attracted mostly white middle- and upper-class evangelicals, Roberts appealed to the lower-and middle-class remnants of the Midwest and South's agrarian and Pentecostal traditions. As his radio and television empire grew, so did his popularity among all classes of Americans. He frequently appeared on talk shows and late-night television. He even received a handwritten letter from John Lennon, reflecting his admiration for a man he saw as a potential role model: "maybe if I'd had a father like you, I would have been a better person" (1). But, as the saying goes, pride goeth before a fall, and Roberts fell mightily as his empire crumbled under the weight of his financial extravagance, his personal idiosyncrasies, and the tragedy that befell his family with the death of his oldest daughter in a plane crash, the suicide of his eldest son, and lawsuits filed against his younger son and evangelical partner for misusing university funds and creating a hostile work environment among university staff. Root claims justifiably that it would be a mistake to see Roberts' rise and fall as an isolated incident. His life represented a microcosm of what happened in the larger world of post-war America, especially during the Reagan years. So much mythology surrounds Reagan's presidency that it is refreshing to find a realistic description of the 1980s as far from "golden, " characterized as they were by corruption in government, the corporate world, and the evangelical establishment. The 1980s witnessed the spectacular fall from grace of a number of TV evangelists—Peter Popoff, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggert—whose sexual escapades were matched by their greed and financial chicanery. The same moral turpitude permeated Wall Street with the indictment of financial titans like Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Dennis Levine, and Michael Milken. It also infected the Reagan administration with the Iran–Contra Affair. In the twenty-first century there has been a growing recognition of the way globalization, increasingly unregulated capitalism, and neoliberal economic theory contributed to this moral morass as well as the role Reagan played in creating the antigovernment fervor we are witnessing today. Oral Roberts was a poster child for these developments. He is best remembered as a fervent evangelical supporter of the prosperity gospel and for his aggressive fundraising. In 1970 he published Miracle of Seed Faith, in which he claimed there was a direct causal relationship between the amount of money supporters gave to his ministry and their personal health and prosperity. Roberts claimed he came upon this idea after reading 3 John 2: "Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth" (KJV). In actuality, Roberts' insight was hardly original. . .