Trump’s “Truthful Hyperbole” & Christianity’s “Money Cult”
by Gary Moore
“Exaggeration is the language of the Devil.”
Norman Mailer The Gospel According To the Son
During recent decades, this investment advisor/Christian financial author has increasingly felt my clients and readers are adrift on a sea of illusions, primarily as everyone was listening to entertaining politicians and televangelists rather than thoughtful if boring economists. I’d about decided to retire and stop writing as I thought Jesus himself could no longer help most Christians know the truth that America is vastly wealthy, even if we don’t steward it very well for most. Then I received an olive branch of hope regarding truth. I wish it was from a Christian source but it was my current issue of The Economist magazine.
The cover story was entitled: “The Art of the Lie: Post-truth politics in the age of social media.” That’s obviously a play on Donald Trump’s tweeting and book entitled The Art of the Deal. In that book, Mr. Trump enthused, when he should have confessed: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.” Dictionary.com defines hyperbole as “intentional exaggeration.” Before it became politically correct, we called it lies. Of course, we’ve all heard you can tell politicians are lying as it’s when they’re moving their lips. What’s new these days is that we’d add “or when tweeting.” For even GOP Senator Ted Cruz has said that when Mr. Trump lies, he doesn’t even know it as he’s immoral.
The Economist article began: “Consider how far Donald Trump is estranged from fact. He inhabits a fantastical realm where Barack Obama’s birth certificate was faked, the president founded Islamic State (IS), the Clintons are killers and the father of a rival was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F. Kennedy…Once, the purpose of political lying was to create a false view of the world. The lies of men like Mr. Trump do not work like that. They are not intended to convince the elites, whom their voters neither trust nor like, but to reinforce prejudices. Feelings, not facts, are what matter in this sort of campaigning.” The article included a chart that showed the more people believe conspiracy theories, the more they support Mr. Trump. It might have suggested his intentional exaggerations are more popular than checked by evangelical leaders preaching “prosperity theology,” a popular new media-centered cult-teaching that exaggerates what the Bible promises financially. The parallels between the new age theology and modern political/economy are frightening.
I studied political science in college and am a long-time Republican turned registered Independent. I may yet consider it my moral duty to abstain from this election. So I initially thought The Economist should have balanced its article by commenting on Hillary Clinton’s possibly poor recollections of Whitewater, Benghazi and emails. But then I realized I was reading an economic publication and even I couldn’t think of a major economic exaggeration by Mrs. Clinton, despite the fact most Americans have a habit of voting their wallets. True, during the relatively light recession preceding the election of 1992, I strongly disagreed when Governor Clinton adopted the dispiriting campaign theme of “The economy stupid.” Due to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I was writing our economy might enjoy a peace dividend and America’s real problems were spiritual and moral. From what I had heard about Governor Clinton’s sexual appetite, I didn’t think he would help with that. Of course, most voters didn’t care so “I did not have sex with that woman” entered our political lexicon, alongside Republican “hyperbole” such as “I am not a crook” and “Read my lips.”
Governor Clinton was simply playing to what voters were feeling, ironically often due to politically conservative evangelical leaders. The book-of-the-year in evangelical Christianity in 1992 was about a “coming economic earthquake” that would soon devastate America due to our five trillion dollar federal debt. Written by a one-time friend and evangelical media celebrity who is now deceased, it was a classic example of how evangelical leaders have baptized grossly exaggerated economic hyperbole, and hurt innocent evangelicals in the process. Millions were further hurt as my friend baptized “trickle down” libertarian economic philosophy when he wrote: “As cruel as it may sound, from the long-term perspective of the economy, it would be better to raise taxes on the poor than on the wealthy.” Biblically challenged, that could still be why GOP politicians have complained half of lower-income Americans pay no taxes but Mr. Trump says it is “smart” when billionaires like himself don’t.
Such exaggerations of biblical concepts, and common sense, have also further divided the Church. My friend and mentor the legendary mutual fund manager Sir John Templeton taught us that when my friend wrote his book, America’s federal debt to GDP ratio, the most commonly watched indicator, was actually about one-fourth of what it was at the end of World War Two, and one-eighth of what it was in Great Britain at that time. At the same time, credit card debt, which evangelical leaders also demonize, was about 1% of our nation’s assets. But when I suggested those leaders were straining economic gnats while swallowing camels by ignoring rising inequality and unethical conduct on Wall Street, I was “shunned,” to use an Amish term. An associate of my friend publicly called me a “tool of Satan.” When evangelical leaders later grossly exaggerated Y2K, I again wrote books and articles to help the confused and despondent. I was further shunned.
My books and articles usually encouraged less selfishness, or more social responsibility, on the part of Wall Street investors. Socially responsible investing is one of the fastest growing movements on Wall Street as its firms and academic research has suggested ethics may even produce superior returns. But again, the most popular evangelical financial leaders have actually discouraged ethics when investing. Some say it just doesn’t matter. Most have argued ethics will cost us money. That alone explains what many “values voters” have truly valued despite Moses teaching managing one’s wealth in a socially responsible fashion is a matter of life and death (Exodus 21:28). Many evangelicals still ignore such teachings as prosperity gospel is about “your best life now” while the Bible says salvation in the next world is a matter of having fulfilled our social responsibilities to the poor, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and helping the imprisoned (Matthew 25).
We punish ourselves when we preach cultural exaggerations rather than biblical truths. Twenty-five years after the earthquake book, most economists have seen little evidence of any tremors caused by the federal debt. Most agree it was actually the huge debt of Wall Street institutions, which troubled no evangelical financial pundit I’m aware of, which ignited the Great Recession as “liar loans,” also ignored by evangelical pundits, imploded in the mortgage market. It was largely bailing Wall Street out of those lies and exaggerated leverage that caused Washington to take on even more debt. Yet a recent article in Christianity Today, to which I contributed, quoted an assistant professor of political science as saying it is “consensus” that the federal debt is a giant in our children’s promised land. That is anything but true. Even the past chair of Wheaton’s economics department wrote a book about how evangelical leaders exaggerated fears over debt.
So most evangelicals still feel Mr. Trump is correct to continue demonizing the federal debt. That’s particularly ironic, and double-minded. Mr. Trump himself says his real estate empire has been built on borrowing OPM, or other people’s money, including millions from his father. And a recent report by the Petersen Institute, perhaps America’s severest critic of the debt, said Mr. Trump’s Reagan-like policies of large tax cuts for the wealthy combined with increased military spending would be “horribly destructive.” David Stockman was President Reagan’s budget director and warned such policies would cause the debt to balloon during the eighties. He has just written: “What is profoundly disappointing about the Trump campaign’s stab at a semi-coherent economic plan is that it is a dog’s breakfast of some plausible policy ideas, really bad fiscal math and a relapse to the discredited, 35-year-old dogma of sweeping income tax cuts which pay for themselves. They don’t.”
If Mr. Stockman wasn’t a Trump supporter, I expect he would have closed with “Fool me once…” For most economists agree Mr. Trump’s warmed-over policies from the eighties will add another ten trillion dollars to the nearly twenty we owe today, creating a thirty trillion dollar debt for our children. Economists at the IMF have suggested that’s the limit of our government’s borrowing ability. But spiritually it’s impoverishing. It only took five trillion of debt to cause evangelical leaders to feel and preach the end was near twenty-five years ago. If you’ve read American Apocalypse you know evangelical leaders, and televangelists in particular, habitually preach the end is near. That is simply their worldview. And it takes a lot of money to buy media time. So after disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker went to prison, he called resetting the doomsday clock a great fundraising tool. It’s likely one reason many haven’t saved for retirement and such. Yet somehow, prosperity theology was also supposed to guarantee wealth in this world. The irony is the same leaders are usually so double-minded they often raise money for institutional improvements that will serve their ministries far into the future. The past thirty years of increasing theology and political hyperbole suggest double-mindedness rather than holistic thinking simply contributes to a sluggish economy and growing inequality as wages stagnate for ordinary Americans but asset values rise for the wealthy.
Fortunately, there is good reason to believe Mr. Trump himself knows his policy proposals are simply more intentional exaggeration intended to appeal to those disenfranchised by three decades of trickle-up economics. Mr. Trump hosted an economic special in 2011 on The Discovery Channel. After criticizing those who considered America to be an economic weakling, Mr. Trump estimated America’s net wealth, after all debts are repaid to foreigners, as being $280 trillion. Though exaggerated, that sounds pretty “great” to me. The last budget of President George W. Bush’s White House estimated our net wealth at about half of that. Yet it still said our net debt was “relatively small” given the size of our assets. So I assume the businessman Trump was simply exaggerating to convince upper middle-class Discovery Channel viewers that they could afford his luxury condos, high-end golf courses, foreign-made clothes, and ostentatious casinos and hotels.
But now that he’s a politician trying to appeal to the disenfranchised voter, he’s lamenting the state of our economy, demonizing the debt and suggesting only he can fix our problems, a humanistic claim if there ever was one. But he might just be right for his supporters. All he’d have to do to make America’s economy “great again,” at least in their minds, is to confess the numbers he shared in his television special. Ideally, he’d also confess they are exaggerated. But that’s not the style of Mr. Trump. Major financial publications have long said Mr. Trump has grossly exaggerated his own wealth, a likely reason voters will never see his tax returns.
Politics being the polarizing force it is in post-Christian America, most evangelicals will never warm to Mrs. Clinton. The irony is that she’s a life-long Methodist, perhaps America’s first evangelicals, who has taught Sunday school, as her mother did. (I am an Evangelical Lutheran, an even older form of evangelicalism.) And a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal by a former religion editor of Newsweek recently said Mrs. Clinton, “is by far the more religious candidate. What’s more, hers is the more religious political party.” He went on to explain Methodists believe public service is a form of ministry and Mrs. Clinton has long consulted the Methodist Book of Resolutions, the denomination’s official book of social and political positions. The editorial, entitled “The Democrats’ Methodist Moment” described how Democratic platforms have reflected Methodist positions since the 1972 campaign of George McGovern, the son of a Methodist minister who studied for ministry at a Methodist college. I’d add the Methodists were pioneers of the socially responsible investing movement, which routinely warned about liar loans. So in a very real way, America’s bi-polar politics is largely a result of new-age evangelicals disagreeing with traditional evangelicals.
I didn’t know that twenty-five years ago when I detoured through today’s evangelical subculture after my first book was picked up by an evangelical publisher. It troubled me for a while that I couldn’t think like these new evangelicals. But evangelical scholars from Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, Os Guinness and Chuck Colson have helped me understand today’s evangelicals don’t think as much as feel. Christianity Today has written about how biblically ignorant most evangelicals are. Still, it’s been a mystery to me how any evangelical leader remotely familiar with biblical financial teachings feel they should embrace an obviously nominal Christian who’s only qualification for office seems to be that he inherited a small fortune that borrowing and trickle-up asset inflation turned into a larger fortune. It’s even been estimated that had Mr. Trump simply invested his inheritance into an S&P 500 index fund, he’d have more money than even he now claims. And of course, there’s the matter of his bankruptcies, which he has described as personally enriching business strategies but the Bible calls “evil” when loans could be repaid (Psalm 37:21).
So I’ve been wading through another scholarly book entitled The Money Cult. It essentially explains why few of us can even imagine televangelist and best-selling author Joel Osteen—or Paula White, a leading televangelist, prosperity theologian and Trump supporter–holding a Bible aloft at the beginning of a show and stating they believe it says anyone who would be a disciple of Christ must give up all of his or her possessions (Luke 14:33). If asked, they’d rationalize that is simply encouraging generous giving in order to achieve a hundred fold financial return in this world. But Jesus’ disciples, St. Francis and Mother Teresa took that teaching quite literally.
Of course, we financial advisors also quote that passage as often as Mr. Trump tells his disciples to love their enemies. Yet no financial planner reasonably familiar with the Bible swears he takes it all literally before presenting a financial plan to Christians. We know the Bible forbids the earning of interest from fellow believers and our faith taught that until Protestant Reformers liberalized the teaching, legitimating banking and capitalism for Christians Still, if televangelists would simply acknowledge such biblical teachings, it might help evangelicals understand they may be socially and politically conservative but they also take more liberties with biblical economic teachings than any Christians in history. The humbling truth that we’ve all fallen short by taking liberties with the Bible might help reunite the Church. Maybe our nation and world.
Perhaps even politics. Disenfranchised voters who long for a leader of the people might prefer candidates more like Moses, who the Bible describes as the most humble man on earth (Numbers 12:3) and the poor shepherd-boy David. With all their human flaws, they knew the abundant life requires both virtue and government, not one or the other. We might then grasp that when St. Paul asked us to be “of one mind,” he wasn’t asking us to agree about all matters of political-economy. As C.S. Lewis also said, when God told us to feed the poor, God did not give us recipes. Paul was primarily asking us to avoid being as double-minded as many evangelical leaders have become today by compartmentalizing our faith and culture rather than integrating them. Paul knew we can’t prosper spiritually and financially amid the confusion of politicians and televangelists speaking the language of the Devil while claiming to speak for God, who told us we can’t worship both God and Mammon. Again quoting Lewis, when we shoot for heaven, we get earth thrown in; but when we shoot for earth, we get neither.
I grew convinced of that when I served on the board of televangelist Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power. It was the world’s most viewed at that time. When I first met Dr. Schuller, he challenged my financial advisors cannot afford to be optimists, we must be realists. He usually disagreed when I asked him to be more realistic about finances. After I left the board, I was pained but not surprised when the ministry fell into bankruptcy. That could be important for televangelists to understand at this time in history. As described in The Money Cult, Dr. Schuller was mentored by Normal Vincent Peale. Mr. Trump has said Dr. Peale’s “positive thinking,” which Dr. Schuller called “possibility thinking,” has been a major contributor to his growing wealthier. The bankruptcy tells me we need more realistic thinking in Washington, on Wall Street and among prosperity theologians.
The Economist might agree. It concluded its article by prophesying: “Whatever Mr. Trump comes up with next [which fact-checkers agree was confessing the birther conspiracy he led for years was another lie just before adding the exaggeration that the conspiracy was started by Mrs. Clinton], with or without him in the White House, post-truth politics will be with us for some time to come.” In language some might better understand, Mr. Trump could be a sign that the end of biblical and traditional Christianity is near indeed.
Gary Moore is the Founder of The Financial Seminary. He has forty years of Wall Street experience and has written many books and articles on religious approaches to political-economy and personal finance. He lives and works in Lakewood Ranch, Florida.
