A recent Time magazine article looks at just that. The author notes that these prosperity preachers have been telling people for years:

That God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

It also caused some people to ignore their current income and the obvious results of an ARM assuming that God would have doubled their income by now, but in most cases he hasn’t.

That branch of the church has been left with very little good financial sense, people are just as in debt as the rest of the world. I myself and struggling with the hangover of a little of this easy credit drug, I do not feel able to give what I would like to because of my current financial situation, and believe me, I am not as bad off as some people I know. Or lack of biblical sense and financial sense along with the financial situation of the time has left us washed up on the beach after being pounded against the sand.

It seems that we have gotten into a place as a people where we don’t want to know about God through old fashioned ideas like doctrine; we simply want to know God through what ever means that could be. We are super humans who can ignore common sense and the rules of the universe and human nature. You can not know someone if you know nothing about them; human or divine.

I am becoming more and more convinced that it will be this group of “Christians” that will be part of the great falling away because they have no root of doctrine to hold to but are like that double minded man James talked about; thrown about by every wave of doctrine. Orthodoxy (correct thinking) leads to orthopraxy (right living).