Making a Case for the Prosperity Gospel

Grant Brooke writing in the Huffington Post:

...in Nairobi I sat down for curbside soda with a local street vendor to chat politics and theology. Because of his liberal politics, I expected to hear a liberation theology, so I was surprised when he offered a simple prosperity Gospel message asserting, to paraphrase him, that God does not desire poverty for anyone, and that those who have faith can lift themselves from poverty. At its core, these beliefs are a statement of autonomy and upward mobility placed into theologized language.
This is a discovery I am not alone in. Peter Berger, father of American Sociology of Religion, went to South Africa and found the same core message as the Kenyan street vendor driving prosperity teaching there, leading him to pen a scathing sociological piece against the prosperity Gospel's opponents in The Wall Street Journal. And the late David Martin, of the London School of Economics, demonstrated in his comprehensive studies of Pentecostalism in Latin America that church-goers who believe in God-given prosperity are more autonomous, economically responsible, self-confident, and optimistic about life outcomes than their Mainline Protestant and Catholic counterparts. He called this belief "betterment" and argued that it bore itself out in greater chances for upward mobility into the emergent Latin American middle class. A belief in one's own prosperity, Martin suggests, is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.