The Prosperity Gospel says God wants you to be rich. That if you tithe, believe, and work for it, the blessing comes back to you in this life, in your bank account, in your driveway, in your annual physical. Millions of people find this persuasive. But why? We go deep on the Prosperity of Gospel (and the Gospel of Luke), not to dunk on any denomination, but to ask where this theology comes from, what it’s doing, and what it’s missing.

Joey questions whether Prosperity preachers really understand their Protestant priors and what’s abundance, anyway, before Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson claimed it? Haroon brings in barakah, the Muslim belief that faith doesn’t promise you more but transforms the relationship between what you have and what it yields. We argue about sacrifice, formation, and whether your tradition produces people who feel like believers — generous, present, uncomfortable with the right things — or if money’s filling the hole where God goes.

Along the way: hair transplants in Turkey (something we can both refuse to get behind and look principled — and shiny — doing it), the Muslim prohibition on usury, the Protestant Reformation’s role in sanctifying wealth, Haroon produces the single verse from the Qur’an that rebuts the Prosperity Gospel, and whether we’re actually, at all, content with what we have. We can podcast the podcast, after all. But do we walk the transcript?

Our sponsor is The Brueggeman Center for Dialogue at Xavier University, here in Cincinnati, which is dedicated to deepening understanding across faiths and promoting systemic change.

Avenue M is produced by Bespoken Live with music by Zach Swelber, who plays in Circle It and Mosant.