The idea that people don’t trust government, the banks, and the Federal Reserve, and yet will send money to “gospel of prosperity” preachers spouting spurious claims of causality is somewhere between blackly comedic and deeply depressing.
Stephen Biellier, a long-distance trucker from Mount Vernon, Mo., said he and his wife, Millie, came to the convention praying that this would be “the overcoming year.” They are $102,000 in debt, and the bank has cut off their credit line, Mrs. Biellier said.
They say the Copelands rescued them from financial failure 23 years ago, when they bought their first truck at 22 percent interest and had to rebuild the engine twice in a year.
Around that time, Mrs. Biellier first saw Mr. Copeland on television and began sending him 50 cents a week.
Others who bought trucks from the same dealer in Joplin that year went under, the Bielliers said, but they did not.
“We would have failed if Copeland hadn’t been praying for us every day,” Mrs. Biellier said.
Source:
Laurie Goodstein, “Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich,” The New York Times, August 16, 2009, sec. US, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16gospel.html?ref=global-home.
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