A question emerged during a television preacher's week of hard-boiled fund-raising efforts about the testimonials offered. Did giving money to the preachers really cause an increase in prosperity? I began looking at this question, and saw a deeper pattern.

Most television preachers subscribe to what I will call "prosperity theology". At its core, the concept they claim to find in the Christian scriptures is that people should give away their resources (most specifically money, but also time, talents, etc) to God's kingdom (most specifically to them) and God will give them more in return and cause exponential prosperity in the people's lives. (The specifics on how this theology is derived from the Bible is beyond the scope of this editorial, but it would flunk most generally accepted methods of Biblical exegesis.) Various proponents of prosperity theology take it to different extremes. Some are so specific as to demand from God an exact percentage return on what they give away, and some even say God is obligated to give someone money. The prosperity theology movement has developed a para-biblical jargon. Money given away is called "seed", the act of giving is called "sowing seed", and money received from God is called "harvest". Their own ministry is called "fertile ground". Etc.

Remarkably, then, there are both testimonies of this theological system working exactly as advertised as well as many who wonder how this system could be true because it doesn't seem to work at all for most people. How can these points of view be reconciled?

The most important fact about the testimonials is from basic statistics: a correlation does not imply causation. Yes, some people who watch the television programs and who send in money do prosper. But the correlation between the two can't be used to infer that one resulted from the other. The truth is, no real conclusions about prosperity theology can be drawn from the testimonials at all, for several reasons.

First, the sample population is too small. Two or three people are not enough to establish any statistical trend. (One ministry brazenly shows the same testimonials year to year. Surely God blessed someone since the original testimonials were filmed?) With a small sample population, it is impossible to isolate contributing factors.

Second, the ministries get to hand-pick the examples they put on the air. They, of necessity, only show those for whom this theological system "works", and in almost all cases, the details of how prosperity occurred are shrouded in mystery.

Third, I believe it would be difficult, or impossible, to demonstrate that giving money led directly to increased prosperity. Presumably, the testimonial cases have undertaken to improve their lot in life on their own through continued education, job advancement, new careers, investments, and so forth. Also, an amazing number of people who do not give money also prosper. In fact, America in general has prospered since it was founded. The prosperity theology did not gain much traction until after World War II, when America entered into one of its greatest boom times. Perhaps this is just a coincidence, or perhaps a rising tide lifts all boats.

Fourth, there is no verifiable, longitudinal tracking by a third party of anyone who gives money. (That I know of. I would be interested to see such a study.) Most prosperity preachers claim that "seed" and "harvest" are laws of God which always work regardless of who is involved. In this case, ministries should be completely confident that any time someone sowed seed, a harvest would come, and would be thrilled to let skeptics observe these laws, which always work, in action. Yet, ministries are notoriously opaque, and unwilling to have their dealings examined by independent parties.

Without a longitudinal study done by an independent third party, it is impossible to establish any cause and effect situation. Such a study, I predict, would reveal the results to be like an upside-down bell curve with a few extremely prosperous people on one end, a few with significant financial disasters on the other, and the greatest part relatively unchanged in the middle. After all, these television programs are seen nation-wide in America, and all around the world, and therefore the people who respond are a cross-grain spectrum of society.

Preachers who preach prosperity tend to make a sweeping overgeneralization from personal experience. The life of an itinerant preacher or television ministry is spent asking for donations, and getting them. They take their experience of getting money and fit it into the prosperity theology, and they see that the theology works in their case. They then overgeneralize, without any real reason to justify it, that it works in any case. (Most of the books available on prosperity theology are dominated by preachers' personal experiences. The portrait these preachers paint of themselves as celebrities who are given cars, boats, and money by wealthy congregants is somewhat disturbing and certainly does not happen to the greater population as a whole.)

The overgeneralization breaks down quickly, because most people do not receive huge lump sums of money. God doesn't send people checks. Unlike preachers, for whom it is natural for people to walk up and give donations, most people do not get free gifts of money from strangers.

Since these "laws" have to work in all cases, prosperity preachers begin to go to ridiculous lengths to find evidence of God blessing people, no matter how absurd these examples are in light of the prosperity preachers' own theological framework. A preacher who claims God would never cause any sort of sickness or injury will also turn around and say that someone who receives a judgment from a personal injury situation is getting a return from God on past giving. Apparently, any money that a person gets is an act of God to bless them, even when a person benefits from errors made by banks (traditional Christian values would call this stealing). Even an inheritance lump sum is cited as a harvest: Did God cause someone's relatives to die because they gave away money and he had to recompense them? Most testimonies of God's "supernatural blessing", when any concrete details are given at all, seem to be like this; most of the time, the testimony is similar to a check appearing in the mailbox the day before a bill was due, with absolutely no explanation of how that check related to giving money at some indefinite time in the past (or how that explanation compares to more prosaic ones). A theological system in which God wants people to give him money at a point in time so he can cause an accident a little later so he can generate a personal injury award after that to pay people back for their giving is bizarre.

The desperate lengths prosperity preachers go to try to find examples of people who get a return on giving shows something is amiss. I believe a much simpler explanation exists for why preachers of prosperity theology are, themselves, prosperous and why the people who send them money generally are not.

I believe preachers of prosperity belong to a class of people who use a system in which their message is broadcast to a huge worldwide population base, which then directs a deluge of many small payments to a central point when, taken together, the sum becomes significant. Quite simply, television preachers have the most in common with other infomercials. Like other infomercials, television preachers buy time on television stations to air their programs. Their programs are not purchased from them, as are other programs.

A tiny number of people and companies make a whole lot of money on infomercials. The similarities are overwhelming, although the offers couldn't be more different. All of them offer something to a broad national audience, and even if only a small percentage responds, the sum can still be significant.

No matter how different infomercials are in their offers, the effectiveness of these offers is amazingly small. The fact that prosperity theology doesn't work for many people is not as interesting as the fact that most offers on infomercials don't work for most people. If people bought Tony Robbins' tapes, a real-estate course, computer training CD-ROMs, a diet program, and an exercise machine, then why are most people unsuccessful, poor, computer illiterate, fat, and out of shape?

What is offered on an infomercial is consistently among the most ineffective products known to mankind. I am positive that some people do benefit from these products, but the amount of money that is made from infomercials is consistently out of any realistic proportion to the benefit the target audience receives. Almost every offer on an infomercial has two or three testimonials of what are certainly atypical results.

Yet infomercials work. Why? The truth is, the medium itself causes the prosperity. I believe a fundamental property of the infomercial medium causes the success: given a message that is broadcast to the population of America and around the world, enough people will respond to make anyone rich. The actual message being broadcast, and the product, service, or message being offered is quite irrelevant. Most people who have used infomercials for their message to seem to genuinely believe that their message itself is what leads to their own prosperity, and to the prosperity of their testimonial cases, when in fact their prosperity is a function of using infomercials, and the prosperity of the testimonial cases is a statistical aberration.

The merit (or demerit) of the product is actually irrelevant. The prosperity of Tony Robbins (self-help tapes), Benny Hinn (prosperity theology), John Scherer (computer training), ad infinitum is because they learned how to sell a product through mass-media channels. Television preachers have more in common with infomercial personalities than they do with traditional preachers: a slick, personable, affective people person who can establish instant rapport with viewers through being extremely telegenic and using well-known voice techniques. Although television preachers do not claim to be selling prosperity theology as a product, what they offer is essentially the same difference. Wealth comes from the use of the infomercial medium. (Given the interesting products I see on infomercials, I believe someone could make an infomercial about anything and make a lot of money.)

Of course prosperity preachers are prosperous, but the reason is a side-effect of broadcasting their message as an infomercial, not because of the message itself. My conclusion is that prosperity theology "works", but it works for a reason that is not the stated reason, and works for the people who peddle it, and not the people who send money for it.