Despite his best efforts, Donald Trump did not receive the warmest of welcomes from the Religious Right activists at last week’s Values Voter Summit, but he did find one segment of the movement that has seemingly embraced his message: Prosperity Gospel televangelists.
HBO’s John Oliver recently did an entire segment on those who preach the Prosperity Gospel and grow insanely wealthy in the process, and two of its leading practitioners — Kenneth Copeland and Jan Crouch — were among a group of right-wing Christians who recently met with Trump at his office in New York City, where they laid hands on him and prayed for him.
As Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, explained to Politico, “the people that Trump has so far identified as his evangelical outreach are mostly prosperity gospel types, which are considered by mainstream evangelicals to be heretics,” yet Trump had no qualms about courting them and allowing them to pray over him:
It is especially amazing that figures like Copeland and Crouch would be among the invited guests, as both lead highly controversial ministries that have faced serious questions about misuse of funds. On top of that, both Copeland and Crouch are the sorts of preachers who claim that they can, respectively, cure Ebola by speaking in tongues and bring a chicken back from the dead through prayer:
