Bright-Sided (18 page)

But Osteen’s universe is not entirely tension-free. Within his world of easy wish fulfillment an “enemy” lurks, and it is negative thinking: “The enemy says you’re not able to succeed; God says you can do all things through Christ. . . . The enemy says you’ll never amount to anything; God says He will raise you up and make your life significant. The enemy says your problems are too big, there’s no hope; God says He will solve those problems.”
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Robert Schuller, another leading positive pastor, invokes the same “enemy,” advising his readers to “
never verbalize a negative emotion
” because to do so would mean “giving in and surrendering your will to an enemy.”
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Neither of these preachers personifies the “enemy” as Satan or condemns negative thinking as a sin; in
fact, they never refer to either Satan or sin. But the old Calvinist Manichaeism persists in their otherwise sunny outlook: on the one side is goodness, godliness, and light; on the other is darkness and . . . doubt.

The God of Victory

There is nothing to mark Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which I visited in the summer of 2008, as sanctified territory—no crosses, no stained glass windows, no images of Jesus. From my hotel room window, just across a six-lane highway from the church, it’s a squat, warehouse like structure completely at home among the high-rise office buildings surrounding it. In fact, it used to be the Compaq Center, home stadium of the Houston Rockets, until Osteen acquired it in 1999 and transformed the interior into a 16,000-seat megachurch. Entering through an underground parking lot, I arrive in a cheery child-care area decorated with cartoon figures and lacking only popcorn to complete the resemblance to a suburban multiplex theater. Even the sanctuary, the former basketball court, carries on in this godless way. Instead of an altar, there is a stage featuring a rotating globe and flanked by artificial rocks enlivened with streams or what appears, at least, to be flowing water. I can find nothing suggestive of Christianity until I ascend to the second-floor bookstore—a sort of denatured and heavily censored version of Barnes and Noble, prominently displaying Joel Osteen’s works, along with scores of products like scented candles and dinnerware embossed with scriptural quotes. Here, at last, are the crosses—large ones for wall hangings and discreet ones on vases, key chains, and mugs or stitched into ties and argyll socks.

The Osteens—Joel and his copastor and wife, Victoria—when they step forth on the stage for Sunday service to a standing ovation
are an attractive couple in their forties, but Joel is not quite the “walking advertisement for the success creed” I had read him described as.
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He is shorter than she is, although on his book cover he appears at least two inches taller; his suit seems too large; and, what is also not evident in the book jacket photos, his curly, heavily gelled black hair has been styled into a definite mullet. She wears a ruffled white blouse with a black vest and slacks that do not quite mesh together at the waist, leaving a distracting white gap. In one way, the two of them seem perfectly matched, or at least symmetrical: his mouth is locked into the inverted triangle of his trademark smile, while her heavy dark brows stamp her face with angry tension, even when the mouth is smiling.

The production values are more sophisticated than the pastors themselves. Live music, extremely loud Christian rock devoid of any remotely African-derived beat, alternates with short bursts of speech in a carefully choreographed pattern. Joel, Victoria, or a senior pastor speaks for three to five minutes—their faces hugely amplified on the three large video screens above and to the sides of the stage—perhaps ending with a verbal segue into the next song, then stepping back as the chorus and lead singers move to center stage. All the while lights on the ceiling change color, dim and brighten, and occasionally flash, strobelike, to the beat. It’s not stand-up-and-boogie music, but most of the congregation at least stands, sways, and raises an arm or two during the musical interludes, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of themselves on the video screens as the cameras pan the audience. “Disney,” mutters the friend who has accompanied me, the wife of a local Baptist minister. But this is just a taping, and the twelve thousand or so of us in the sanctuary (the seats do not fill at either Sunday morning service) are only a studio audience. The real show, an edited version of what we are watching, will reach about seven million television viewers.

Inadvertently, I have come on a Sunday of immense importance to the Osteens, one of the greatest turning points, they aver, in their lives. In the preceding week, a court had dismissed charges against Victoria for assaulting and injuring a flight attendant. The incident occurred in 2005, when they boarded the first-class cabin of a flight bound for Vail, the ski resort, only to leave—or be thrown off —the plane after Victoria raised a fuss over a small “stain” or “spill” on the armrest of her seat. She demanded that the flight attendant remove the stain immediately, and when the flight attendant refused because she was busy helping other passengers board, Victoria insisted, allegedly attempting to enter the cockpit and complain to the pilots. Victoria ended up paying a $3,000 fine imposed by the FAA, and the matter would have ended there if the recalcitrant flight attendant had not brought suit demanding 10 percent of Victoria Osteen’s net worth in compensation for alleged injuries, including hemorrhoids and a “loss of faith” due to her mistreatment by a leading evangelist.

My friend’s husband, the Baptist minister, had predicted when we had coffee on Saturday that the Osteens’ Sunday service would make no mention of the whole ugly business. Why would they want to revive the image of Victoria behaving, as another attendant on the plane had testified, like a “combative diva”? He was wrong. Both Sunday services are given over to Victoria’s “victory” in court. When Joel steps forth at the beginning of the service, he covers his face with his hands, peekaboo fashion, for several seconds, and when he removes them his eyes are red and his smile is in temporary remission. He then takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket and rubs his eyes vigorously, although no tears are visible on his magnified video image. “It’s not just a victory for us,” he announces. “It’s a victory for God’s kingdom,” hence the entire service will be a “celebration.” As the service proceeds, he tells us that he spent his time at the trial writing out scriptural quotes
and shows us the yellow legal pad he used. He shares a long, muddled anecdote about how he had ended up wearing the suit he intended to testify in although he hadn’t known he was going to testify on that particular day, because he couldn’t “find another suit,” leaving us to think that he owns no more than two. More ominously, he tells us that God “is against those who are against us.”

When Victoria takes center stage, she’s as triumphant as David doing his victory dance through the streets of Jerusalem, even briefly jumping up and down in joy. The “situation,” as she calls it, was difficult and humiliating, but “I placed a banner of victory over my head”—figuratively, I assume, and not as an actual scarf. Oddly, there are no lessons learned, no humility acquired through adversity, not even any conventional expressions of gratitude to her husband for standing by her. This seems shabby even by the standards of that other positive preacher Robert Schuller of Orange County’s megachurch, the Crystal Cathedral. When he had a similar altercation with a first-class flight attendant in 1997—such are the hazards of commercial air travel when you are accustomed to having your own servants—he ended up apologizing in court. But for Victoria, the only takeaways are that “we can’t be bogged down by circumstances” and “don’t lick your wounds,” which echo Joel’s constant exhortations to be “a victor, not a victim.” In fact, sometime in the interval since the incident, God had revealed that he wanted her to write a book, and—good news!—it will be coming out in October, followed by a children’s book a few months later.

I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman, who happened in this case to be African American. The crowd, which is about two-thirds black and Latino and appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract
or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically, many raising their arms, palms up, to the deity who engineered her triumph. Maybe they hadn’t followed the case or maybe they are just trying to snatch a little of Victoria’s victory for themselves, because the message to this largely working-class congregation seems to be that they, too, will triumph, as Victoria has, because that is God’s promise to them. It just may take a little time, because theirs seems to be a forgetful God, who has to be “reminded” of his promises, Joel told us. “Remember your promises,” one of the songs goes, “remember your people, remember your children,” as if addressing a deadbeat dad. Focus on what you want, in other words, and eventually, after many importunings, God will give it to you.

There are traces of the old Christianity at Lakewood Church—or perhaps I should say traces of religion in general—lingering like the echoes of archaic chthonic cults that could still be found in classical Greek mythology and ritual. “God” makes many appearances, often as “God in Christ Jesus,” and Victoria refers often to anointings with oil—something she says she had wanted to do to “that whole courtroom.” Joel makes much of the fact that a turning point in the trial occurred on “8/8/08,” which he claims has some biblical numerological significance. At a small group meeting (very small, about twelve people in a room with 108 seats) I attended on Saturday evening, the speaker endorsed the Jewish dietary laws, or at least the avoidance of pork and shellfish, although most Christians believe that these laws were lifted two thousand years ago by Peter and Paul. But where is Christianity in all this? Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, “If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also”?

Even God plays only a supporting role, and by no means an indispensable one, in the Osteens’ universe. Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant.
He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction—that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes—you have granted humans omnipotence.

All of these departures from the Christian tradition have already been noted with shocked disapproval—by Christians. My Baptist friends in Houston can only shake their heads in dismay at Osteen’s self-serving theology. On scores of Christian Web sites, you can find Osteen and other positive pastors denounced as “heretics,” “false Christians,” even as associates of the devil, sometimes on highly technical grounds (Joyce Meyer has put forth the idiosyncratic view that Jesus served time in hell to spare us from that experience), but more often for the obvious reasons: they put Mammon over God; they ignore the reality of sin; they reduce God to a servant of man; they trivialize a spiritually demanding religious tradition. On a 2007
60 Minutes
segment on Osteen, a theology professor, Reverend Michael Horton, dismissed Osteen’s worldview as “a cotton candy gospel” that omits Christianity’s ancient and powerful themes of sin, suffering, and redemption. As for the central notion of positive theology—that God stands ready to give you anything you want—Horton describes this as “heresy,” explaining that “it makes religion about us instead of about God.”

Secular Roots

Whatever decorative touches positive preaching retains from the Christian tradition, its genealogy can be traced more or less directly to nineteenth-century New Thought. New Thought has its own extant denominations, like Christian Science and the smaller Unity Church, which arose in 1891 and, like Christian Science,
was based on Phineas Parkhurst Quimby’s teachings. Kansas pastor Will Bowen, author of
A Complaint Free World
and inventor of the purple complaint-free wristband, is a Unity minister, as is Edwene Gaines, who illustrates in her book,
The Four Pillars of Prosperity
, a breathtakingly bossy attitude toward God. When the two hundred dollars she needed for a plane ticket failed to materialize, she writes, “I sat down and gave God a severe talking-to. I said, ‘Now look here, God! . . . As far as I know, I’ve done every single thing that I know to do in order to manifest this trip to Mexico City. I’ve kept my part of the bargain. So now I’m going to go right down to that travel agent and when I get there, that money had better be there!’ ”
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Other streams feeding into modern positive theology can also be traced, ultimately, to the teachings of that nineteenth-century Maine clockmaker Phineas Quimby. Norman Vincent Peale, as we have seen, drew on New Thought sources, and his most prominent successor today is Robert Schuller, who in 1958 enlisted Peale himself to help build up the congregation of Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. Like Peale, Schuller teaches a form of mental reprogramming based on visualization, affirmation, and repetition, only he marks it as his own by calling it “possibility thinking” instead of “positive thinking.” But by the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of pastors were finding their way to New Thought without any help from Peale. Kenneth Hagin, considered the father of the Word of Faith movement, sometimes called “Word Faith” or the “prosperity gospel,” derived his ideas from the work of the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century evangelist E. W. Kenyon, whose ideas in turn have been painstakingly traced back to secular New Thought by D. R. McConnell.
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Among Hagin’s acolytes were Joel Osteen’s father, John Osteen, as well as the first African American televangelist, Fred Price. Introduced to Hagin’s work by a friend, Price later wrote, “I went home that night and read
every single book [by Hagin] and I was changed forever. It was like the scales came off my eyes.”
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The Word of Faith message resonated powerfully with African Americans, who were eager to see the gains of the civil rights movement transformed into upward mobility. Another prominent prosperity preacher was the Harlem-based Frederick Eikerenkoetter, or “Reverend Ike,” who had been a traditional fundamentalist until the midsixties, when he discovered what he called “Mind Science,” derived from his reading of New Thought literature.
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Sporting an enormous pompadour, he taught that poverty resulted from a wrong attitude and proved the correctness of his own thinking by acquiring a fleet of Cadillacs appointed in mink.