{"id":11602,"date":"2026-11-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11602"},"modified":"2026-11-03T22:54:24","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T03:54:24","slug":"everything-happens-for-a-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/04\/everything-happens-for-a-reason\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything Happens for a Reason."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A few weeks ago, I wrote in <a href=\"https:\/\/keithlaw.kit.com\/\">my newsletter<\/a> about hearing Dr. Kate Bowler on <em>The Hidden Brain<\/em> podcast and reacting to her use of the phrase \u201ceverything happens for a reason,\u201d a hackneyed response to bad news that implies some pretty terrible things about the universe. Dr. Bowler used as the title for her book <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780399592089\">Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I&#8217;ve Loved<\/a><\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you\u2019ve listened to the podcast, <em>Everything Happens for a Reason<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s the core idea behind televangelists\u2019 message \u2013 send me money, I\u2019ll put in a good word with the Big Guy Upstairs, he\u2019ll hook you up \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Bowler\u2019s cancer diagnosis came at a time when she might have called herself \u2018blessed.\u2019 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\u2019t find anything wrong with her to run additional tests that found that she had bowel cancer and \u201cit\u2019s everywhere,\u201d in the words of the nurse (or PA?) who called with the news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js\" data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9780399592089\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Much of the second half of the book documents what came next, especially in her faith community, and then with the online responses to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/02\/14\/opinion\/sunday\/death-the-prosperity-gospel-and-me.html\">the column she wrote<\/a> in <em>The New York Times<\/em>. 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, \u201ceverything happens for a reason,\u201d 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 \u2013 in an appendix, she lists some do\u2019s and don\u2019ts to say to someone in that situation \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019t supposed to be a vending machine, but there\u2019s a broad strain of American evangelicalism that treats it as such. I noted in that newsletter how often I see \u201cprayers up\u201d posts and comments on social media; the next time that works, let me know, I won\u2019t be waiting. It\u2019s performative nonsense. It doesn\u2019t work, and also, it\u2019s not how the whole Christian God thing is supposed to work. What Bowler starts to get at, and what I wish she\u2019d delved into more deeply, is <em>why<\/em> 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\u2019s a pernicious influence on our culture and our politics, and understanding it better would help the rest of us \u2013 the majority of Americans \u2013 keep it relegated to a loud minority. For its brief length, however, Bowler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next up: Randall Kenan\u2019s novel <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9780802159298\">A Visitation of Spirits<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u201ceverything happens for a reason,\u201d a hackneyed response to bad news that implies some pretty terrible things about the universe. Dr. Bowler used as the title for her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[938,225,766],"class_list":["post-11602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-non-fiction","tag-religion","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11603,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions\/11603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}