One Nation Under the Prosperity Gospel

As the grandson of a Pentecostal preacher, I can quote each of the thirty-five verses of Exodus 32, in which the recently liberated Hebrew peoples, fed up waiting for Moses to descend from Mount Sinai with divine orders, ask his brother, Aaron, to make them new gods. After beckoning them all to give up their gold earrings, the text explains, he melted down the gold and “fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf.” As a child I often imagined just what the calf looked like: how big it was; how gold it was; how long it took to sculpt the gold and wait for it to cool.“Let me say this plainly,” the evangelical pastor Mark Burns said upon the unveiling of a twenty-two-foot gold statue of Donald Trump on the president’s private Miami golf resort this past May: “This is not a golden calf.” Burns, the televangelist and cofounder of the NOW Television Network, joined a few dozen other evangelical leaders and fans in prayer at the dedication of the statue, Don Colossus, which Alan Cottrill—a pizza franchise owner-turned-sculptor known for his depictions of famous Americans like Thomas Edison—had made on a $300,000 commission from a group of some sixteen cryptocurren...