I’m not a big fan of Joel Osteen — I once told someone “He’s all crown and no cross” — and there’s a lot I find accurate and troubling in this dissection of the “Prosperity Gospel” from Slate.

But I especially appreciate the author’s final words:

Who can blame people for flocking to Joel Osteen when he reassures them that “God wants to make your life easier”? Recent news that Americans have become less religiously classifiable doesn’t mean a wave of Christopher Hitchenses so much as feel-good cafeteria spirituality stripped of tradition and dogma. It follows that organized religion has its analogue of this syncretism and that its smiling face bares an uncanny resemblance to Osteen’s. The Book of Isaiah commands, “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back,” and for many Christians, a man who can sell out Yankee Stadium has a very large tent indeed.

Read the rest. Ample food for thought. Or, maybe, indigestion.