Prosperity Memes are Just As Bad As Prosperity Gospel and Here’s Why

You’ve seen the memes like this one on Facebook or Twitter:

This idea that money is an “energy” that you can resonate with and that it flows to you easily and continually is a secular brand of the prosperity gospel. It’s the non-religious meme version of the same idea. Money comes from some outside force that must be aligned with in order to get it.

If you aren’t familiar with the term prosperity gospel, I will quickly get you up to speed. The prosperity gospel is a simple idea that if you give enough to a church and believe in god hard enough and are a good person, then god will give you more “blessings” in the form of money. This has deep roots in Protestantism. It’s a great fit for America’s obsession with money and material wealth. It fits right in with land ownership and our racist history of only certain people being worthy of land and wealth. The prosperity gospel is as American and Mom and Apple Pie.

Prosperity Memes Keep People from Agitating for Better Conditions

One of the big achievements of the labor class during the Depression was the advancement of worker rights. People were able to achieve high rates of unionization, better working hours, and safety conditions even in adverse economic circumstances partly because of decades of advocacy but also because they had nothing to lose during the Depression. Things were already bad, why not ask for some real concessions. Things like the 5 day work week, the 8-hour workday, and basic worker safety were all a result of a series of crippling strikes in the 1930s that helped unionized workers gain those privileges and those advancements helped them spread throughout the greater economy.

Keeping Working Hard and Money Will Come to You

This secular prosperity gospel keeps them working hard when we really should be working less and enjoying life more. People erroneously think that they keep manifesting and posting cutesy pictures about how they are opening to receiving money, the money will magically appear. It places the entirety of the economic burden on the individual and not on society. Economies are all about trade between people. How those economies work and how those actors within that economy act greatly determine the success of the people within that economy. If all the money is purposeful flowing to those who already have it leaving everyone else with less, no amount of memes and energetic alignment will help. Systemic change is what will get the money flowing in the pockets of regular people. Things like a minimum wage, paid family leave, and universal healthcare are what would really get money flowing. No manifestation required, just political will and activism.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

it keeps people thinking that their economic problems are only their fault when the reality is that our society has created a very small class of winners and a far larger class of losers. America has the greatest economy in the world. There is no reason that Americans should be scraping by on low wages. On the contrary, Americans should be living very well and having great lives but the economy has been subtly modified to advantage those with capital over those without it. Americans are going to work for less money than they did in the early 1990s and the cost of almost everything has increased. Household incomes are the highest ever and yet most Americans are living hand-to-mouth and can’t get ahead. Why is that? The economy does not work well for labor. It works very well for the capitalist classes.

But….I Want Money!

Who doesn’t want more money? The sad thing is that so many Americans have been screwed over for so long that instead of realizing that their wages haven’t grown since 1977 and that much of the wealth and productivity that has happened since then has flowed into the pockets of the upper 5% of people; they instead post cute memes on social media asking the universe for more money. They close their eyes and hope that if they can align themselves with the right force, they too can get more money. They can be successful if they align with the right energetic forces. American’s don’t need prosperity gospel or prosperity memes. They need systemic change. Where’s the cute meme for that?

If you want to read more about how the American economy has been shifted to advantage capital over labor and how corporations took over almost everything, then you need my book! You can get it right here: