On January 20, 2025, Donald J. Trump stood up to be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed, “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” This paper traces the rise of the rhetoric of “colorblindness” (the ignoring or overlooking racial difference, including the elimination of race-conscious policies and laws) among conservatives in post-civil rights America and its ideological relationship to prosperity gospel theology.
To many members of Middle America, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 seemed to usher in a new “post-racial” America––a society where, thanks to the legislative changes, racism was no longer a meaningful barrier to black Americans’ economic advancement. Major scholarly work has been done on the role of media and politics in shaping this narrative, especially the Left’s retreat from race-based politics in the late 60s and the rise of Nixon’s “Silent Majority” in the 70s. However, there was another significant cultural force that has little mention in the study of the rise of colorblind conservatism in the 60s and 70s: the American prosperity gospel movement. Through sanctifying the ideals of American individualism and consumer capitalism, this religious movement about faith, health, wealth, and victory provided a theological framework to morally affirm the post-racial politics of Middle America. This paper argues that the boom in prosperity gospel churches and platforms in the '60s and '70s is both a product of and contributor to the colorblind conservatism of the era, and that symbiotic relationship helped to solidify the myth of “post-racial” America after 1965 by providing a highly individualistic theology that paints a lack of success as stemming exclusively from personal moral failure and not from systemic barriers to upward mobility for black Americans. Because God and the free market would bless and chasten individuals as they deserved, any policies, like affirmative action, that took into consideration a degree of racial preference, could and would be labeled an infringement on the rights and freedoms of those they passed over.
Beginning with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s framework of the short vs. long narratives of the Civil Rights Movement and building on work on the American prosperity gospel by Kate Bowler, this paper looks at the dark underside of the prosperity gospel’s economic implications. By analyzing the rhetoric of prosperity gospel’s key figures, including Norman Vincent Peale, Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, and Jimmy and Tammy Faye, and connecting it to that of conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Jerry Falwell, and Richard Nixon, it shows that prosperity gospel theology gave its adherents a biblical basis for rejecting arguments about the continued existence of structural and systemic racism in America and bolstered conservative Christian support for neoliberalism. By maintaining that faithful obedience to the laws of scripture is the sole factor and activator for health, wealth, and victory, the prosperity gospel constructed a categorical understanding of racial hierarchy that dovetailed with the prejudices of the time, making black Americans’ higher rates of poverty a result of personal moral failure, not systemic barriers to their upward mobility.
This symbiotic relationship between the prosperity gospel and colorblind conservatism is one of the reasons for the boom in prosperity gospel churches that began in the late '60s and continued through the ‘70s, and was greatly aided by the movement’s key figures’ harnessing of new media strategies for widespread evangelism, particularly radio and televangelism. It is through these channels that the prosperity gospel’s reach spread far beyond just Pentecostal circles. As such, the prosperity gospel is an overlooked but important factor in the shaping of America’s collective narrative surrounding the Civil Rights movement, ultimately contributing to a “short” understanding of the movement that flattered Middle America’s sensibilities and required little action or sacrifice on their part to contribute to racial equality. This dynamic continues to this day, with either overt or “soft” prosperity gospel messaging present in many of the nation’s largest churches and contributing to the relationship between evangelicalism and Christian nationalism. There are white Americans still responding to conversations about racial equity-informed political interventions with accusations of “communism” and “socialism,” considering such policies an affront to both their individual freedom and the integrity of the free market.
This paper analyzes the relationship between prosperity gospel theology and colorblind conservatism in the years between Brown v. Board and the 1978 Bakke ruling. It argues that the boom in prosperity gospel churches and platforms in the 60s and 70s is both a product of and contributor to the rise of colorblind conservatism during those decades due to the way the prosperity gospel's highly individualistic theology paints a lack of success as stemming exclusively from personal moral failure and not from systemic barriers to upward mobility for non-white Americans. Because God and the free market would bless and chasten individuals as they deserved, under this framework, any policies that took into consideration a degree of racial preference—like affirmative action or today's DEI policies—could and would be labeled an infringement on the rights and freedoms of those they passed over—namely, white Americans.