A few weeks ago, I wrote in my newsletter about hearing Dr. Kate Bowler on The Hidden Brain podcast and reacting to her use of the phrase “everything happens for a reason,” a hackneyed response to bad news that implies some pretty terrible things about the universe. Dr. Bowler used as the title for her book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, where she tells the story of her sudden diagnosis with stage 4 bowel cancer at age 35, and how the reactions she got to that news squared with her academic research on the prosperity gospel of evangelical Christianity.
If you’ve listened to the podcast, Everything Happens for a Reason will mostly be familiar to you. Bowler gives her backstory, growing up in a Mennonite community in Winnipeg, with two professors as parents, eventually getting her PhD at Duke and joining the faculty at their Divinity School, where she focuses on the prosperity gospel. That’s the popular idea that God will give believers material success and physical health if they pray hard enough (and do other performative things), an idea that to me, is wildly unsupported by Scripture. It’s the core idea behind televangelists’ message – send me money, I’ll put in a good word with the Big Guy Upstairs, he’ll hook you up – and a lot of megachurches have picked it up as well, notably Joel Osteen, who will have a very tough time passing through the eye of a needle when the time comes.
Bowler’s cancer diagnosis came at a time when she might have called herself ‘blessed.’ She was happily married, had a very young son she adored (she makes this quite clear), and was on her way to a very successful career. After a few months of being ignored by doctors, at least some of involved men doctors dismissing her because of her gender, she forced the latest in the line of people telling her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her to run additional tests that found that she had bowel cancer and “it’s everywhere,” in the words of the nurse (or PA?) who called with the news.
Much of the second half of the book documents what came next, especially in her faith community, and then with the online responses to the column she wrote in The New York Times. Many people blamed her lack of faith for her cancer. Some people pushed quack remedies or bogus medical ideas (like that sugar feeds cancer, a popular one today in wellness circles) on her, which leads to a lot of kale in her kitchen. Others said God must have had a plan and that, indeed, “everything happens for a reason,” although one wonders what possible reason there would be for a benevolent deity to kill a mother of two-year-old child. Some did rally around her, and try to say the right things – in an appendix, she lists some do’s and don’ts to say to someone in that situation – and many people put themselves out to help her get better care or help support her. But man, people said some horrible things, both people she knew and people who wrote letters or emailed her in response to her column.
Bowler uses her own experience as a springboard for talking about the prosperity gospel movement more broadly in American Christianity, an idea that I would call heretical if I were still religious (I was raised Catholic), and that often directly contradicts the messages of the New Testament. Prayer isn’t supposed to be a vending machine, but there’s a broad strain of American evangelicalism that treats it as such. I noted in that newsletter how often I see “prayers up” posts and comments on social media; the next time that works, let me know, I won’t be waiting. It’s performative nonsense. It doesn’t work, and also, it’s not how the whole Christian God thing is supposed to work. What Bowler starts to get at, and what I wish she’d delved into more deeply, is why this is so effective. In my lay view, at least part of it is that it allows people who have had material wealth, physical health, or other forms of success to believe they deserved it, because God gave it to them as a reward. It’s a pernicious influence on our culture and our politics, and understanding it better would help the rest of us – the majority of Americans – keep it relegated to a loud minority. For its brief length, however, Bowler’s book, mostly memoir with a dash of theology and history, is a brisk and compelling read, for her own personal journey and the way she uses it to frame this dangerous ideology as the aberration that it is.
Next up: Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits.