Joel Osteen Is the Quintessential Religious Figure of the Trump Era
Last Friday, hours before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, Houston's most famous pastor tweeted out a teaser for his latest podcast, "The God Who Goes Before You." In a video excerpt embedded in the tweet, televangelist Joel Osteen, the city's wealthiest ecclesiastical son, is seen preaching in the altar of his 16,000-seat capacity Lakewood Church, formerly the Compaq Center, where the Houston Rockets once played basketball. "Many sports champions have been crowned there," Osteen said when the church took over the property in 2005. "We believe we can crown champions in life."
That's the heart of Osteen's notoriously saccharine version of a theology known as the prosperity gospel: You, too, can be a champion – like Osteen, who's worth a reported $40 million and lives in a $10 million mansion in Houston's River Oaks neighborhood. Just trust God.
Trusting God was Osteen's message in his unaccountably sanguine missive ahead of what was forecast to be a catastrophic weather event. Although it's not clear that the podcast was recorded with Harvey in mind, Osteen's decision to share it just as Houston was bracing for disaster turns out to have been a fraught one. "The good news is He's going ahead of you right now, lining up the right people, the right supplies, the right opportunities," Osteen said in his Texas drawl, his wide-toothed grin fixed like hard plastic across his face. "He has solutions to problems you haven't had."
But if God has a solution for the victims of Harvey's apocalyptic flooding, those solutions were not on display at Lakewood, which quickly came under heavy criticism for not opening its doors to Harvey evacuees, as many houses of worship in Houston did.
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