If God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, why are so many believers in foreclosure?

This is an important question to ask. Many Christian speakers on TV tell their audience that if they believe, God will reward them a hundred-fold, and by that they mean with stuff like a nice house. It's part of the reward scheme that you don't have to wait until you die for. But why are so many believers hurting in the recession?

"In times of record-high foreclosures and Treasury Department scrambling to shore up loan-refinancing initiatives, the Prosperity Gospel can sound as if it comes from preachers who live under rocks, not in mansions: "God wants to give you your own house," big-cheese pitchman Joel Osteen announced in 2007's Your Best Life Now, which he penned in an economic Indian summer of a bull market and excited homebuyers. "'How could that ever happen to me?' you ask. 'I don't make enough money.' Perhaps not, but our God is well able."

Osteen is everywhere these days. You see his coiffed pate smiling on Good Morning America, at the new Yankee Stadium for its first nonbaseball event, on the cover of Texas Monthly's ideas issue—all in one week. Yet he artfully disappears for housing crisis questions like "Why, if God wants to reward the faithful with material possessions, are so many believers in foreclosure?"

These high rates in particular have made some Doubting Thomases of Prosperity's controversial centerpiece: the belief in "positive confession," or the idea that the faithful can "name it and claim it"—even Waikiki timeshares or Rolls-Royces with corn-silk leather trim—and God will provide it. Prosperity nomenclature is varied (Word of Faith, the "law of reciprocity," Christianity Lite), but the movement owes as much to New Thought metaphysics and Norman Vincent Peale's "positive thinking" as it does to early proselytizers like Kenneth Hagin. In many ways, it is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Christianity's face-lift, whisking away specters of hellfire and brimstone with a message of self-empowerment. Preachers don't belabor sin if they mention it at all. "It's not my job to try to straighten everybody out," Osteen famously told Larry King in 2005, adding, "My message is a message of hope."

But reality, in the form of a housing-crisis fallout, is full of victims who ought to be a clarion call for Prosperity's out-of-touch-ness. Its territory—locus of the lower-middle-class and minority neighborhoods from which most followers are culled, like modest exurban areas in California's Southland and the edges of greater Atlanta has some particularly high foreclosure rates."

from Slate.com