Host kate boler, where did you get the title everything happens for a reason and other lies i have loved . Oh, i think it just came to me because it was one of the many boomerang theologies that people give to you when youre sick is surely everythings gonna workout. God is making a way. When i wrote the book, i was trying to explore that maybe this was a lie i loved all along. So the book is kind of a theological excavation project where im trying to dig into my own secret terrible belief. Host how sick are you . Well, stage 4, cancer is not decorative, so its its its hard. But i am doing better than a lot of people. I moved from the Crisis Management to the more chronic part of this. But thankfully, so far, drugs and doctors and all kinds of things are making a way. Host went to first find out you have cancer . Guest two years ago, 35, and theres no cancer in my family. I didnt imagine that it was possible. And then one day out of the blue i got a phone call that explained my stomach pain and i realized i was in deep. Host what kind of cancer . Guy cancer. I didnt imagine everyone imagining me and my colon for the rest of my life, but as it turns out, it is increasingly, it is increasingly, that young people are getting this traditionally thought to be an Older Persons illness. Host you say in your book that it is in the liver . Guest its fred often to the lip it spread often to the liver, as it did with mine. Host what is magic cancer . Guest that was just a little phrase. They give you a series of horrible options when you have stage 4 cancer. Like, it could be this and this treatment might work, or it could be this other much worse horrible thing, immediate death sentence or this tiny little i have a they call a mismatch repair disorder. Where the cells replicated incorrectly. It could be genetic or not, but if you have this group cancer, the data therapy there were no immunotherapy possibilities available for me. So when i found out that i had this tiny little 3 kind of cancer, then i declared it was the magic cancer because it was one of the only kinds that opened me up for new treatment. Host where do you live . Guest durham, North Carolina. But in from canada. Canadians bring up stuff all the time. Host where do you live and what do you do in durham, North Carolina. Guest i am a professor of American Christian unity at duke divinity school. I teach all kinds of pastors and nonprofit workers. Dogooders of all kinds. I specialist in modern american am a christianity. And then for the last ten years ive been studying televangelists and mega churches and just people with beautiful hair. [laughter] host i want to show you a picture you had on your blog of your husband tobin and your son zach. How old is zach in that picture . Guest that is his baby dedication. We all grew up mennonite, and so he has an i heart anabaptism onesie to just make clear that he is being dedicated and not that bad, because otherwise, ill be honest, baptists would immediately reject us. I think he was nine months or something, and thats in tobins parents backyard among all mennonites. Host what is a mennonite . Guest people who loved about their suffering. Menno simons was their leader in the 1700s, and they moved largely communally through germany and then russia, and then a whole bunch of them moved to canada in the late 1800s. They populate a lot of rural manitoba and ontario and in the states, indiana and nebraska, kansas and then pennsylvania. Different kinds of groups, but all have a really thick account of their suffering which is largely why they commit to doing things together. Simplicity, pacifism, the desire to rule and salads with jello. Sometimes deli meat. [laughter] i have always gone to a Mennonite Church and have found that they are my very favorite people to be wonderfully sad around because they almost expect it. Host what kind of things do mennonites do that say baptists dont or catholics dont . Guest they are most famous for their pacifism. My husbands grandpa, for instance, was a Conscientious Objector in world war ii. My grandpa was flying bomber planes. His grandma was in the mines. So its an entirely alternate history. Theyre most famous for their pacifism, often for their anti materialism. Usually cant tell anymore the difference between them because they are often pl ainclothed like the rest of us. They look like every average capitalist, but deep down, they feel really guilty for the things they have. Host how many are in the world . Guest there is a tremendous growth in like rwanda, uganda, theres some a lot of international growth. A lot in the plains of canada. Not sure what the overall total is. Host when you teach that duke, what kind of degrees are the people that youre teaching getting . Guest i teach in the graduate program. Most of them will get ph. Ds, but most of them will get a masters in religious studies or a masters in divinity, which means they will become a reverend and go off to inflict my views on other people. Host why did you want to teach this . Guest i like the idea that ideas always have traction and we are beholden to communities of care. Maybe that has become more and more important now that i have been living with my diagnosis, is you realize that you are giving people a worldview and they have to go out and live in the hospitals and boardrooms and the living rooms holding peoples hands during the most important moments of their lives. Host during this process of finding your cancer, how many doctors did you see . Guest i had a number of undiagnosed, entirely unrelated, it turned out, illnesses. So i saw over 100 within the last few years. In the last stretch, 15. Host you ended up having another illness before the cancer, what was that . Guest it sounds it ended up being 1000 times more dramatic than it seems. I lost use of my arms for over a year. As it turns out, it was just an an some kind of very easy to fix nerve disorder related to having overly laxed joints. Its so boring. But when i had it, it was very dramatic. I find i was like locked in bathrooms for too long because i couldnt turn the door handle all of a sudden. So it made writing my first book blessed mostly a nightmare because i would often have to have like double arm casts. The healing crusade. Or then have to try to replicate Research Notes or my book while using terrible voice Dictation Software to a computer. So i look back on that as a very dark, lightly comical time of my life. Host your first book, blast, was about and when was it published . Guest 2013. It was a history of the prosperity gospel. The first historical account of this widespread movement. It took me 10 years of obsessive research stalking people in order to map the contours of it. It was really hard to study at the time because no one calls themselves a prosperity preacher, so you cant do an easy survey, like, will all the prosperity preachers in the room please put up your hands . Because it sounded so naturally insulting to assume that they were just preaching the gospel. Host i wanted to ask you whether these men were about to show you in about a minute is a prosperity minister, and if he is, how do you know that . I got money. I got land. I got houses. Do you mind me bragging for just a moment . Do you my new dragon . [applause] [speaking another language] i dont have anything god didnt give me. Everything i have came from god. If you are my protege, if i wanted a debtfree house, i would do what i did. I sold a seed equal to one months mortgage payment. A preacher said if id sow a seed equal to my monthly house note, my mortgage, it was 3400. He said i would have a debtfree house in 12 months. I didnt see how that could be, but i got my debtfree house in eight months. Guest mike murdock. He is one of the most unrepentant of prosperity preachers. He doesnt mind talking about money all the time. So, if anyones up too late, theyve usually watched mike murdock on 24hour christian tv. He is a famous kind of old school prosperity preacher. When it was uncommon for pentecostals at that time to really talk that much about money. Mike came along and talked about it all the time, and sold like seven secrets to seven kingdoms, he does a lot with spiritual numbers. You can see him doing that spiritual math with people, like, if you give me this much, god will reward you in this way. Host based in texas. Talks about a seed . Guest yes. It was a new language pioneered largely by oral roberts, a handsome and charismatic founder of oral roberts university. He pioneered this ecocultural language. The idea is kind of genius insofar as it helped explain how many was the post work when you give it to someone else. The idea is your donation is that is needed and you have to planted in the ground, the ground being the righteous pastor. And there is a time of waiting. Oral roberts wrote his first book, i think in 1963 or something, called the miracle of seed faith vehicle he explained that every good believer is almost like a spiritual farmer and has to learn how to live according to these seasons of sowing and reaping. It also really helped explain what happens when you give money and you dont see a return. The answer is that it is still in the ground and then you have to pray for the rain and the seasons to change so you can fairly receive your harvest. Host how much of that do you believe . Guest none of that. I think that is partly why i was trying to remain so open when i was doing this study, is, someone like mike murdock is the caricature of that late 1980s televangelist who weeps in front of the camera and for donations. I mean and ask for donations. I mean, he is the caricature. But so often, the people i met in the pews wanted average things. If you look at the little letters people used to write to pentecostal healers and like the early mike murdocks, they would write for things like a new washing machine or like the nerve to go to a new sewing circle and make friends. Selfesteem, tiny advances. All the Little Things that make life a little more bearable. And that gave me a lot of compassion for the people who stay up late watching mike. Host the next clip is of a man that we knew years ago. He went to prison. Guest yes. Host name is jim baker. He was married to tammy faye baker. Shes dead and hes remarried. His new wife is named lori graham. Lets watch this. Its got a couple of clips and i want you to explain how this always works. [video clip] [laughter] donald trump donald trump is president [applause] this was a miracle not by man. You know, god called him to do it. And i am going to be bringing the prophets in and they are going to talk. And those who prophesied and those who watched this thing. Because it is the hour of the church in america again. Host 78 years old. Still active. He does television every day like this. What do you make of him . Guest i had not seen that with, but it doesnt entirely surprise me that so much of his ideas of more than enoughness were always rooted in p judaism. There is a slice of prosperity gospel in which republicanism and the sense that the prosperity gospel of both the individual and the nation are connected come together in someone like jim baker. He and tammy were the king and queen of 1980 still evangelis he had the mostwatched christian program. Their theme park which they called heritage usa that was built around the border of North Carolina and south carolina, was meant to be this expression of their jubilant more than enough ness. You could come down and slide the water slide and watch a live taping of jim and tammy in their living room. They called everyone family. They reached into peoples living rooms and asked people to celebrate a pentecostalism that had come of age. Of course in the late 1980s, jim is toppled by both a sexual and financial scandal that sends him to prison. And weirdly enough, i ended up eating a number of people he had met while in prison when i gave a talk in, as it turns out, the federal prison where he had been held. I was giving this history of the prosperity gospel talk, and normally i usually have to talk people into caring. A bunch of guys in the back put up their hand and said, we knew jim [laughter] they had all kinds of stories. Host did you interview him . He is now in branson, missouri. Guest no. I never did. I would love to. He wrote a book called i was wrong, saying that he repented of much of his prosperity theology. But then as you can see, hes a natural salesman and went on largely to sell dehydrated foodstuffs for the elderly on his new program. Host hold it right there. Host oh no, its happening. [laughter] some people know when they watch it. There is the big buckets. And if you keep your eye on the screen on the lefthand corner you can see that more buckets you buy, the more money you pay. But its a bargain, the more you buy. But anyway, this is jim baker setting the buckets of food. [video clip] this food, we will extend it a couple more days because i feel that we should. Its four months worth of food so you only need three of them to make a euro food. So actually give you four buckets. So, hey . This food lasts up to 30 years on your shelf. These are great because they are waterproof even if you are in a flood and it gets wet, and their ownership free today. You are getting 10,472 servings, so youre getting a lot of food. A lot of food for those grandkids. Host grandkids. 3700 dollars for that. What do you think of that . Why do they do this . Guest i know a very pragmatic reason. He was from day one and amazing salesman. He used to say i could have been , anything, but i just ended up selling the gospel. I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of old ptl footage that i watched for the research of the book, it was also fun because whenever tammy faye sings, my son dances. It was this roundrobin of different agitators and speakers. It really showed you how little they actually reached and how much it was this atmosphere very often pitched towards the elderly. For him to go from the prosperity gospel of theirs more than enough, just donate to me, to a more scarcity model in which theres not enough, also give money to me. It shows how incredibly pragmatic and adaptable these preachers can be. Host in your current condition of stage iv cancer, what would you believe if the minister says to you this is the future, what would turn you off . Guest one thing i did learn from pentecostals is their sense of openness to the idea that god can do surprising things. I try to take that in the spirit of generosity, but so often it is incredibly prescriptive. If you give this donation, here is this miracle oil. A lot of transsexualism. I get a lot of that stuff a lot of transsexualism. I get a lot of that stuff in the mail a lot of transactionalism. I get that stuff in the mail still. Host do you believe them . Do they believe themselves . Guest many of them do. They are consummate salesman. Always very pragmatic and entrepreneurial. So, for instance, even when they just had tents, they would travel around, these tent revivalists, the earliest ones were tent revivalists, when they were done with the tent either because their crowds were too big or too small, they sued to cut up the tent into tiny little squares and then sell the pieces as if all the spiritual power had been absorbed into the fabric. It goes to show that at every stage theyre promising Something Like a tactile reminder people want. Someone like me when i got very sick, right away i want to think that i could touch and feel, little reminders that i was still myself. I can see these very material things catch on. Host here is the president of the United States talking in 2015. President trump Norman Vincent peele, the great Norman Vincent peale was my pastor, the power of positive thinking. Everybody has heard of Norman Vincent peale . He was so great. He would give a sermon, you never wanted to leave. Sometimes we have sermons and everyone once know where we think about giving sermons. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale would give a sermon. I am telling you, i still remember his sermons. It was unbelievable. He would bring reallife situations, modernday situations into the sermon, and you could listen to him all day long. Host in your book, did you write about Norman Vincent peale . The prosperity gospel involved in these different streams and one of them was the pentecostal version we soften people like mike murdock. Host define pentecostal. Guest sure, it is a movement predicated on the idea that we are in a new era of science and wonders and it started in the early 1900s. Most often it looked to healing and the gift of tongues, so an unknown language. In some of the clips, you will see people switch into what does that sound like intelligible words. Host have you heard mike murdock talk that way . Guest yes. It is called glossolalia, and in some versions its supposed to be a translatable language, but in most iterations it just sounds like syllables that seem random. But they believe is a spiritual heavenly tongue that is given to them to communicate with god. Host so, Norman Vincent peale. Guest Norman Vincent peale does not come from that pentecostal strain unit he comes from mainline protestantism. He had a methodist background plus this theology of selfesteem. They are borrowing from this seedbed of theology new thought which was a movement that said the man was a really powerful spiritual incubator. Whatever you could think or articulate would come true. Like you are unleashing a surgical force. So, someone like donald trump who latches onto a figure like Norman Vincent peale, what we see there is a very respectable version of what you say and confess, you will possess. Host lets watch him, this is back in 1987. It is called the hour of power at the crystal cathedral. What do you want to be . Then dedicate it to jesus christ along with your whole life. And dont doubt him. Believe. And then form a picture in your mind of that goal. Hold it tenaciously in the conscious mind until by process of intellectual osmosis, it sinks into the unconscious. And when it gets into the unconscious, you have it because it will have all of you. Guest i mean, they really make visualization and mental processes the kind of theological infrastructure for how it works. So how is it then, like, what is different than having just good selfesteem in doing this . The answer is that you absorbed it in such a way that you can actually unleash it to the world. So Norman Vincent peale, he kind of browns his version of the prosperity gospel into positive thinking and it develops into this long lineage with other famous