Material Success

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 441.

The achievement of material success is probably the most widely respected form of self-improvement in the United States. Many scholars believe that the nation's mixing materialism and religion may seem contradictory. Religion is considered to be concerned with spiritual matters, not material possessions. How can the two mix?

Some of the early European Protestant leaders believed that people who were blessed by God might be recognized in the world by their material success. Other Protestant leaders, particularly in the United States, made an even stronger connection between gaining material wealth and being blessed by God. In 1900, for example, Bishop William Lawrence proclaimed, “Godliness is in league with riches. … Material prosperity is helping to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more unselfish, more Christlike”.

Russel Conwell, a Protestant minister who also preached at the beginning of the twentieth century, gave a speech about the duty to get rich, entitled “Acres of Diamonds,” more than six thousand times. In it, he said: “I say that you ought to get rich … it is your Christian and godly duty to do so.” His message was that all men in the United States have the opportunity to rise from poverty to great wealth if they will only use it. He would tell audience that they had within their reach “acres of diamonds,” by which he meant the opportunity to become very wealthy.

Conwell is an extreme example; many Protestant ministers from Conwell's time to the present have strongly criticized the view that God's blessing and great wealth go together. But Conwell's great popularity indicates that he was saying something that Americans liked to hear.