It won’t surprise anyone that white evangelical megachurches have spent decades politicizing the Bible.
For everything Jesus said about caring for the “least of these,” there are “clobber verses” pastors will use to justify bigotry against LGBTQ people. The Bible doesn’t say anything about abortion, but there’s no shortage of verses pastors will point to when they want to condemn it.
When it comes to something less “controversial,” though, like fighting poverty, how do megachurches use the Bible to defend the conservative position on it? After all, helping the poor should be pretty clear-cut. Of all the things Christianity is supposed to stand for, lifting up those with fewer resources ought to be near the top of the list no matter what brand of religion you subscribe to... right?
That’s not how many white evangelicals see it.
One survey from 2017 found that “Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual failings.” In other words, either God wanted them to be poor or their poverty is the result of a lack of faith.
Dawson Vosburg, a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University, recently published a fascinating paper (which you can access for free) in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion trying to understand how conservative Christians twist the Bible to downplay economic inequality.
He looked at all the sermons delivered between 2013 and 2023 at one of the fastest growing megachurches in the country, found the ones that discussed anything financial—by searching for terms like “rich,” “tithe,” “debt,” “billionaire,” etc.—and analyzed the results to see how this typical white evangelical megachurch minimized the wealth gap.
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