Seventeen percent of American Christians followed the prosperity gospel by 2006

Evidence

By 2006, 17 percent of American Christians adhered to the “prosperity gospel,” which equated Christian faith with material success—particularly financial wealth. Rooted in Pentecostal traditions, prosperity preachers offered not just spiritual guidance but practical advice on getting rich, often framed as a divine reward. Parishioners were encouraged to tithe generously as an investment in God’s “hundredfold” returns. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 611

Over the twenty-first century, evangelical Christianity also increasingly adopted self-help tropes. By 2006, 17 percent of American Christians adhered to the “prosperity gospel,” which equated Christian faith with material success—particularly financial wealth. Rooted in Pentecostal traditions, prosperity preachers offered not just spiritual guidance but practical advice on getting rich, often framed as a divine reward. Parishioners were encouraged to tithe generously as an investment in God’s “hundredfold” returns. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 611

Categorization

• XREF: Direct supporting evidence for the omnivore monoculture thesis — evangelical faith itself flattened into materialist self-help, the same reduction Marx traces in every domain.
• SEED: Angle: the prosperity gospel as the religious wing of the omnivore monoculture — even salvation gets absorbed into the homogenizing self-help/status machinery.
• QUESTION: The claim is a specific statistic the reader may want to check against alternate sources.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 611