With Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel, historian Jonathan Root has produced a highly engaging, carefully researched biography of Oral Roberts (1918-2009), the Oklahoma-based preacher, televangelist, and pioneer of the Prosperity Gospel. After an early life of poverty and rebellion, Roberts followed his father into the life of an itinerant preacher, eventually attaching himself to the Holiness Pentecostal Church. He embraced the Pentecostal belief in modern-day miracles and faith-based healing and believed God spoke directly to him, issuing commands and direction as his ambitions for his ministry took shape. Most distinctive about Roberts’ brand of evangelical Christianity, though, was what he called “seed faith,” the belief that all are called to give generously to God’s work and that, in exchange, those who give can expect to receive material benefit in return.
This conviction, rooted in Roberts’ interpretation of biblical teaching, legitimized the drive for prosperity he believed lay at the heart of the Christian faith, and which Root speculates was in part motivated by Roberts’ insecurities about wealth—shaped by his desperately poor beginnings. At several points, Root cites close observers of Roberts, who remarked that what drove him most was the desire for acceptance, although for Roberts that acceptance was to be bought in the currency of material success.
While there is much in this book about the well-charted relationship between Pentecostalism and the pursuit of wealth, Root also captures a paradox at the heart of Roberts’ prosperity teaching, including his infamous notion of “seed faith.” On the one hand, maintaining that pledging a seed—most commonly understood as a donation to Christian work—will reap a material reward in this life reflects a close alignment with capitalist understandings of investment and growth. On the other hand, Roberts often dismissed anxieties about financial risk that would be commonsensical to secular financiers by invoking God’s invisible hand: “His economy, not our economy, regardless of circumstances, will meet our needs” (144). Roberts’ persistence, imagination, and remarkable skills in persuasion arguably gave him grounds for confidence, especially given his success in establishing a range of ambitious projects over the years, including a university, several TV series, and an international record of evangelistic crusades, much of it funded by donors and corporate sponsorship. What the Prosperity Gospel was incapable of doing was making sense of failure or economic decline, and Roberts’ indomitable appetite for material expansion blinded him to the risks of hubris, at significant financial, reputational, and personal cost later in his life.
Nevertheless, and despite these rather tragic misadventures, Root paints a picture of Oral Roberts that is often surprising, pushing against the stereotype of the backward-looking “holy roller.” His handling of the Oral Roberts University basketball team, which attracted many gifted black players in the 1960s and 70s, reveals a perspective on student achievement that borders on progressive. His motivation for encouraging faculty to find more effective ways of fostering academic achievement among more sports-oriented students may have been colored by his desire for national success on the basketball court, but it was also informed by a commitment to holistic education and awareness that those enrolled at ORU—encompassing privileged white students and poor black students—were not competing on a level playing field. The role of the university was, at least in part, to address that inequality of opportunity; as Roberts himself said: “The Bible says the strong should support the weak” (143).
Roberts’ work also embraced technological innovation, which, in some respects, was way ahead of its time. A striking example is the Dial Access Information Retrieval System (DAIRS), which was established at Oral Roberts University’s Learning Resource Center in 1965. DAIRS was a “$500,000 push-button computer system that allowed students to watch or listen to lessons previously recorded on motion picture film and slides, and on video- and audiotape” (90). University teachers who used lecture capture during the Covid pandemic during 2020-22 might recognize the principle and the challenge experienced at ORU in the 1960s—the challenge that is, of ensuring students don’t treat the video recordings as an excuse to miss lectures.
Like the best biographies, Root’s book is most impressive when it captures the humanity of his subject, getting beyond the hagiography of his admirers and the cynicism of his critics. Roberts was undoubtedly a primary exemplar of the Prosperity Gospel movement, his work and his life encompassing so much that came to characterize the movement’s momentum and influence. He was incredibly ambitious, single-minded, energetic, and enterprising, exhibiting the qualities one would associate with successful self-made entrepreneurs in the business world; indeed, the figures cited by Root speak to Roberts’ stunning achievements as a fund-raiser during the 1960s and 70s. He was also, by Root’s account, egotistical, at times bullying and controlling, and disinclined to learn from his better-informed associates. He embodied that element of 20th-century evangelicalism that was “infatuated with money and influence” (204), especially in his obsession with bigger and grander construction projects.
But Roberts also displayed the human complexity often found among those caught between a fervent sense of religious morality and the trappings of power, and Root does not shy away from the uncomfortable realities of Roberts’ life of faith and ambition. While an innovator at the height of his success, he failed to move with the times when it came to the tone and substance of his prosperity message. By the late 1990s, he was still preaching the “seed faith”-message of material reward despite the collapse in reputation suffered by his generation of televangelists, and while other influential preachers were promoting a more therapeutic, self-affirming model of prosperity teaching that resonated with younger generations. Here, Joel Osteen builds on the legacy of Oral Roberts but takes the message of Christian prosperity in a markedly different direction. We may not see the like of Roberts again, but with the help of critical, perceptive chroniclers like Root, we will have ample opportunity to learn from his eventful life.
Mathew Guest is professor in the sociology of religion at Durham University, UK.
Matthew Guest
Date Of Review:
November 30, 2024
