“New Thought’s Prosperity Theology and its Influence on American Ideas of Success”

Hutchinson, Dawn. “New Thought’s Prosperity Theology and its Influence on American Ideas of Success.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 18, no. 2 (2014): 28–44.

Hutchinson defines New Thought as any American metaphysical religion affiliated with Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins—predominantly: Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science. Hutchinson documents how most New Thought religions, unlike Christian Science, expanded from their emphasis on healing to a focus on prosperity theology, framing it within familiar Christian rhetoric—citing, for example, Jesus’s command to seek first the Kingdom of heaven and God’s righteousness and all that goodness will be added to you (Matt. 6:33). Prosperity theology was thus able to realize “the universal nature of substance” (Fillmore, Prosperity, 1936, 25). Through affirmation of their divine oneness, people can actualize health, abundance and success in their lives. However, preoccupation with debt or failure attracts the very same. Prayer was “verbally making a truth manifest itself” (33). Hutchinson observes that since Mary Baker Eddy rejected materialism, this New Thought emphasis on prosperity, while popular in mainstream Christian America, differentiated it from Christian Science.

ISSN: 1541-8480
Print ISSN: 1092-6690

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2014.18.2.28