"You Can Do It!" Prosperity teaching reconsidered

Peter Berger, imho, deserves a listening to. And certainly this article is a helpful corrective to a too-easy dismissal of prosperity teaching. "You Can Do It!" - Books & Culture In particular this quote probably encapsulates the challenge nicely: "Is there a theological warrant to propose that God wants us to be poor? Any more than he wants us to be sick? The prosperity gospel contains no sentimentality about the poor. There is no notion here that poverty is somehow ennobling. In that, speaking sociologically, the prosperity gospel is closer to the empirical facts than a romantic idea of the noble poor—a notion reminiscent of another romantic fiction, the noble savage. Such notions, of course, are always held by people who are not poor and who do not consider themselves to be savages. The notions are patronizing. They are implicit in the famous slogan of liberation theology: 'a preferential option for the poor.' Mind you, not of the poor, but for the poor—pronounced, as it were, from on high."
This is important, along with the sociological reflection based on Weber etc. However, I did feel that before we get too cosy with prosperity teaching, we should consider that the way that trade systems operate works against the poor. And in this I have, therefore, to place a question mark against Berger's assertion later on: "One does not have to be a dogmatic "neoliberal" to understand that the major beneficiaries of capitalist growth are, precisely, the poor—in the aggregate if not without exception, later if not sooner, and if the political context is not one in which an élite forcefully hoards the fruits of growth. If one truly cares for the poor, one will hold a "preferential option" for capitalist economics—and ipso facto will be cautious in one's criticisms of the prosperity gospel."
The question mark is that it is too easy to overlook the qualifier 'if the political context is not one ...'; because in international terms, that is precisely what we have. I have little quarrel with the decentralisation, devolution and subsidiarity that markets represent at their best; but let's be clear that markets 'at their best' require regulatory frameworks to make sure that they resist monopolisation and enforce level-playing fields and also to mitigate the human cost of their wastefulness at times. Frankly, global financial and trading arrangements do not do this. Real 'prosperity teaching' needs to take seriously the structural economic issues: and that is precisely part of our prayer-in-action in global solidarity. Part of the problem with prosperity teaching is that it absolves the rest of us from reflecting and acting on what it means for us to pray for daily bread not as 'I' and 'me' but as 'us' and 'our': our role is also to make sure that others' prayers for daily bread can be answered in the aggregate by systems that are not 'kleptic'. Until that happens wealth will not trickle down.