Prospertity Gospel and the Lack of Community

One can have many issues with organized religion, like the catholic church, but one benefit that it has provided over the decades is that it provided community. Over the last couple of years there have been growing research into the increase in people feeling lonely – potentially leading to increase in drug addiction and increase in accepting conspiracy theories. I know too little about those, but at the end of the day, I think the idea that loneliness can lead to those things is at least plausible to me. What always struck me was that to me the US felt like a much more religious country, compared at least to Europe, where I come from. So I always thought it was odd that a country that had higher levels of people going to church had higher levels of loneliness sounded odd. Now there are likely many reasons for that, but one thought that cross my mind the other day was that maybe the type of religious affiliation in the US is leading to increase loneliness, while the more traditional religious affiliations (catholic and protestant churches) in Europe have the opposite impact. To me the traditional Christian church usually focused on the poor, the ones that need help. That meant that the poor or less well off, felt supported by the church. It also made those that were able to help those in need feel good about themselves since they were able to support the community. In the US the growth of the Prosperity Gospel to me could be a key reason for loneliness. Prosperity Gospel at the end of the day focuses on the individual over the community, and especially the individual’s success. So if you are successful God loves you, the opposite of that being that if you are not rich you could interpret that as God doesn’t love you, so that you are a failure in front of God, in front of what is supposed to be the community that supports you. This nicely helps justify their wealth for the rich (and justifies the private jets and nice cars for the pastors of those “churches”) but it does so at the expense of the community support the traditional churches provide.