Chris Lehmann is editor-in-chief of the Baffler magazine and author of the new book The Money Cult, about capitalism, politics and American Christianity, from the founding to the future. He corresponded with the Washington Examiner Wednesday and Thursday about the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks, Donald Trump, the prosperity gospel and why many liberals can’t understand religion. What follows is a lightly edited version of that conversation.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: What do you think of the Democratic convention so far?
CHRIS LEHMANN: The Democratic convention so far has made a powerful case that Hillary Clinton is a compassionate, peace-loving and selfless guardian of the public interest. I look forward to getting to know this Hillary Clinton better — and particularly to learning just what time-space wormhole she’s emerged from.
EXAMINER: Can you tell us a little bit about the Bernie Sanders insurgency and what its failure means for the Democratic Party and/or America?
LEHMANN: I don’t have any particular insight into the Sanders movement or its broader significance, save to note that I think it’s always a good thing when shouty egalitarians get a public platform.
It is also striking that, in 2008, the Democrats experienced a similar surge in idealistic young support and wound up embracing it as a key plank of the Obama campaign; in this case, it’s been hard to miss the insiderish, wised-up derision that many Democratic higher ups have shown for Sanders and his supporters.
That’s one of the disheartening revelations of the otherwise mundane and officious cache of DNC emails unleashed by WikiLeaks. If the party is serious about economic fairness and the plight of debt-ridden young Americans, it should take a good hard look at how its message is now playing for that constituency.
EXAMINER: You were recently made editor-in-chief of the Baffler. Could you explain to our readers what makes the Baffler different from most liberal magazines?
LEHMANN: The Baffler differs from most liberal magazines, first of all, in weight, volume and fragrance. It also lends itself to a much wider range of domestic multitasking purposes, from the efficient slaughter of irritating insects to ambitious experiments in juggling.
As to its place along the liberal spectrum of political, cultural and literary debate, we like to think we are more direct and less highfalutin than the general run of left-leaning “little magazines.” We also place a high editorial premium on humor, which let us just say is a novelty in this corner of the liberal marketplace of ideas.
EXAMINER: You’ve also recently published a book called The Money Cult. What is the Money Cult?
LEHMANN: The Money Cult, apart from being an attractively packaged and fragrant literary accessory in its own right, is my shorthand term for the distinctive ways that American Protestantism has come to embrace a deeply market-driven conception of individual salvation and apocalyptic reckoning. This antinomian, gnostic brand of Protestant revival preaching has culminated in the enormously influential rise of the prosperity gospel.
EXAMINER: Is the prosperity gospel a uniquely American phenomenon?
LEHMANN: Not uniquely American, no — it’s now being preached fairly widely in Africa and South America. But I’d argue that its various tributaries of social origin and theological precepts are distinctively American, and indeed partake deeply in the ur-American Protestant tradition.
EXAMINER: How does The Money Cult help explain Donald Trump?
LEHMANN: So glad you asked! Trump has direct links to prosperity-gospel preaching via his alleged second-birth conversion at the hands of prosperity pastor Paula White.
Trump also hails Norman Vincent Peale — the midcentury apostle of the Power of Positive Thinking and the pastor of the Trump family’s Marble Collegiate church — as his favorite religious thinker. Peale’s ministry was a direct forebear of the latter-day prosperity faith.
I also think Joel Osteen — a longtime close ally of Trump, who had Trump as his first guest on his Sirius XM radio show — is a perfect spiritual avatar of Trumpism.
Without belaboring the point here, Trump’s fanciful battery of unachievable policy pronouncements — from the Mexican-financed border wall to the conspiratorial versions of political reality he peddles — are all secular appropriations of the prosperity faith’s “name it and claim it” message, which holds that the high-achieving believer can summon personal success into being by incanting the right sort of positive-thinking phrases and scriptural nostrums.
EXAMINER: What does the Money Cult Jesus look like?
LEHMANN: I think the Money Cult Jesus is basically Joel Osteen’s younger brother.
EXAMINER: In the book and in your writings generally, you take religion very seriously, often challenging popular liberal interpretations of why the faithful believe what they believe. Why do so many on the left have a hard time getting religion?
LEHMANN: I think the Left has long been associated with intellectual skepticism and the debunking of institutional tradition, and that heritage tends to select for religious scoffers.
But I also think that’s a big reason why the intellectual left has gained so little traction in American political culture. I think you really can’t understand much about how that culture is put together, and how it continues to evolve, without comprehending how deeply it’s steeped in the tradition of Protestant dissent.
I also think that a sympathetic approach to religion is a simple question of responsible inquiry. You don’t understand much about a belief system by reflexively denouncing it as an infantile superstition.
