Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

by Kate Bowler

In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin—a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined attitudes, or careless words.

Christmas cards were prosperity gospels writ miniature, stacks of pictures of a family in matching denim sitting on lightly distressed couches in fields of waving wheat. Does every field in America have a photo couch? But I was taken with the white light brightening their smiles as they turned to each other and laughed. They were the good news. Some bodies can’t bear up under this regime of divine perfection. A friend of mine looked at his newborn daughter, dewy from birth, and could not acknowledge what he saw with his own eyes. She was plump and pink with the lightly hooded eyes of a perfect child, but a perfect child with Down syndrome. Despite all the love in his heart, or perhaps because of it, he could not say those words aloud. Down syndrome. And that sliver of iron became a commitment never to proclaim, never to “negatively confess,” that his baby girl was anything less than typical. He began to believe that the God of all that is whole and complete would make his daughter so, even if it was not until Judgment Day, when Jesus came through the clouds. What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American Dream that says, “You are limitless”? Everything is not possible. The mighty Kingdom of God is not yet here. What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.

The prosperity gospel has a very simple way of explaining why life as it is must be inherently just. As it is told, God established a set of principles that keep the world in order. Just as there are natural laws of gravity and thermodynamics, there are spiritual laws that steer the courses of lives and ensure that good things really do happen to good people. The Law of Confession activates the power of positive thoughts, drawing our desires out of the heavens and into reality. The Law of Agreement allows two or more people to harness their spirituality corporately to create an answer to prayer. The Law of the Tithe supernaturally multiplies an offering of 10 percent gross income given to the church, often with a guaranteed tenfold or hundredfold return. The number of these spiritual laws depends on who is preaching. There are the Law of First Fruits and the Law of Seed Faith and an entire Laws of Life book series by the televangelist Mike Murdock, advertised as people’s “favorite book outside the Bible.” It’s also the same premise as anything your aunt sent you about the Oprah-endorsed book The Secret. (Spoiler alert: The secret is to think positively.) Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness. They create a Newtonian universe in which the chaos of the world seems reducible to simple cause and effect. The stories of people’s lives can be plotted by whether or not they follow the rules. In this world there is no such thing as undeserved pain. T...

In the study of religion, we use the word magic sparingly because, so often, it is employed as a cheap way of describing faiths whose supernatural forces we simply don’t credit. No, that dance did not make it rain. No, that buried statue in the yard did not help you sell the house. No, that special prayer did not heal your leg. The causality seems simultaneously too direct (this action yields this exact result) and too vague, like you’re pulling on a thread with nothing at the end.

Not to mention that religious people tend to get really pissed off if you refer to their beliefs as 'magic' rather than 'god's power' or 'faith manifest' or something.

We have words to evaluate how likely it is that our attempts to harness the supernatural are of any use. Black cats and ladders and spilling the salt are put in a box dubbed superstition, and failed prophecies are classified as fantasies or delusions. But the prosperity gospel asks you to set aside your doubts and bet it all on God’s supernatural power to reach down and remake the world according to your prayer. When everything in your body says believe, believe, believe. When you find yourself turning to your neighbor and saying: “You can’t imagine what I just saw.” You are not just an observer anymore, you are a witness. So then the question is always, Will it work?

They are teaching me the first lesson of my new cancer life—the first thing to go is pride.

I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should-haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible—separation. Brokenness. An end without an ending.

In a theological universe in which everything you do comes back to you like a boomerang—for good or for ill—those who die young become hypocrites or failures. Those loved and lost are just that, those who have lost the test of faith.

When I was in the hospital, I learned that when doctors want to tell you something, they will tell you at 4:00 A.M., when they start rounds and you are sleeping, and if it’s really bad, they will send the person with the shortest lab coat. Seniority works in white coats, from the longest (read: fanciest head doctor) to the shortest (read: the greenest and most anxious doctor in the universe). So when I first heard how long I had to live, I drew the short coat.

To believers in the prosperity gospel, surrender sounds like defeat. They write books with titles like Deal with It! to remind readers that there is nothing so difficult that God cannot accomplish it, and that you, sir or ma’am, had better get cracking. There are no setbacks, just setups. There are no trials, just tests of character. Tragedies are simply opportunities to claim a bigger, better miracle. I often wonder if the prosperity gospel’s never-give-up spirit produces resilient believers. Does it make happier people? Do people find themselves emboldened, shielded from the trials of daily life by the promise that they are more than conquerors? I can’t tell. All I know is that a cheerful person can look a lot like someone with total mastery over everything that would weigh a lesser person down.

Or a cheerful person is someone putting on cheerful mask. If showing how miserable and overwhelmed they are is admitting failure, they've no reason to do so normally.

At the hospital, I can always spot prosperity believers by their desk space, because there will inevitably be Post-its taped around their monitors with little positive sayings (“You can’t change the past, but you can change the future!”) or scripture (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!”). The nurses are harder to identify but come out like preachers if I happen to say anything negative. “As they say, you got to name it and claim it,” said one nurse as she was drawing blood. “I just know that everything is going to work out!” Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can master the future with our words and attitudes. I can barely admit to myself that I have almost no choice but to surrender, but neither can those around me.

Before I can find out whether I’ll make it into the trial, however, I need to get my medical insurance to cover it. About an hour after I hear the news I begin to work the phones, slowly making my way through all the customer service representatives in the Emory and Duke insurance systems. Each university has a chain of people accustomed to saying no or, as I am beginning to suspect, they are evil robots masquerading as humans programmed to decline your every reasonable request. I try everything. My premium insurance will not cover anything outside of the Duke hospital system. I’m too poor to pay for it myself, but I don’t qualify for charity care because I am not American. No matter how I parse it, paying as I go until I can get new insurance in January, just two months away, will cost me upward of $100,000. I know because I have had them price out the treatment down to every needle and scan. By midafternoon, there is no one left to call, and the trial is not going to consider me without promise of payment. Either I have to come up with an impossible sum of money in the next few weeks or I will never get into the trial, and all my hopes built on magic cancer disappear into the ether. I slam down the phone at the end of the last call, blood boiling. I turn toward my parents. They have been staying with me since the surgery, trying to entertain Zach, keep the refrigerator full, and take me to my hospital visits. “Don’t worry,” says my dad, putting down his book. “Your mothe...

That's not cancer, that's the private healthcare system.

But most everyone I meet is dying to make me certain. They want me to know, without a doubt, that there is a hidden logic to this seeming chaos. Even when I was still in the hospital, a neighbor came to the door and told my husband that everything happens for a reason. “I’d love to hear it,” he replied. “Pardon?” she said, startled. “The reason my wife is dying,” he said in that sweet and sour way he has, effectively ending the conversation as the neighbor stammered something and handed him a casserole.

And that's one of the many reasons why you don't say shit like that.

What if everything is random? A woman who has left the faith for science writes: “I find it comforting to believe the universe is random, because then the God I believe in is no longer cruel.” This is a painful conclusion for so many who comb through the details of their tragedies and find no evidence that God was ever there. The world, it seems, is also filled with fathers and mothers begging for their children’s lives and hearing nothing but silence. And, ever after, every church service that sings that God is good rattles like tin in their ears. There can be only one reasonable conclusion, says a father whose children have all been cut down by disease: no one is listening.

MY FRIEND JODY IS sitting in my office, her head in her hands. Her mom is dying of a brain tumor and it is exhausting. Dying is exhausting. “But I’m sure you are feeling so very fortunate for all the shared time you had together,” I say. She looks up abruptly and then immediately catches my mood. “Yes, so very fortunate,” she replies with a tone that suggests homicide is a viable response to people who say these kinds of things. “People keep telling me how fortunate I am.” I let the sarcasm drop from my voice and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, hon. I wish I never had to hear the words ‘at least’ again.

A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first. Maybe now?

“I suppose that this is the ultimate test of faith for you,” one man muses, hoping that I will have the good sense to accept God’s will. “Anyway,” he says at the close of the letter, “I’ll pray for your remission, and if you die that your suffering is minimal.” Thanks, Joe from Indiana. Sometimes I want every know-it-all to send me a note when they face the grisly specter of death, and I’ll send them a cat poster that says HANG IN THERE!

Because of my background in the prosperity gospel, I receive hundreds of letters from those inside the movement. These are people who, crushed by the weight of solution-focused theology, have been unable to grieve. A Nigerian woman sits through weekly meetings at her job encouraging her to “talk faith-talk,” but she wants to acknowledge that, outside her office window, the bodies of abandoned babies are being collected and hauled away in black refuse bags. A bitter seed has been planted in a young father who must take his brain-dead child off life support while his extended family, steeped in prosperity theology, rails against him for his inability to prevent his child’s death. I receive so many stories like this, the laments of bereaved parents who are asked to keep a smile on their faces. There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. Those letter writers are not simply trying to give me something. They are also, always, tallying up the sum of my life, sometimes for clues, sometimes for answers, always to pronounce a verdict. But I am not on trial.

ABSOLUTELY NEVER SAY THIS TO PEOPLE EXPERIENCING TERRIBLE TIMES: A SHORT LIST 1. “Well, at least…” Whoa. Hold up there. Were you about to make a comparison? At least it’s not…what? Stage V cancer? Don’t minimize. 2. “In my long life, I’ve learned that…” Geez. Do you want a medal? I get it! You lived forever. Well, some people are worried that they won’t, or that things are so hard they won’t want to. So ease up on the life lessons. Life is a privilege, not a reward. 3. “It’s going to get better. I promise.” Well, fairy godmother, that’s going to be a tough row to hoe when things go badly. 4. “God needed an angel.” This one takes the cake because (a) it makes God look sadistic and needy and (b) angels are, according to Christian tradition, created from scratch. Not dead people looking for a cameo in Ghost. You see how confusing it is when we just pretend that the deceased return to help you find your car keys or make pottery? 5. “Everything happens for a reason.” The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. Because of my aversion to Brussels sprouts. I mean, no one is short of reasons. So if people tell you this, make sure you are there when they go through the cruelest moments of their lives, and start offering your own. When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw...

GIVE THIS A GO, SEE HOW IT WORKS: A SHORT LIST 1. “I’d love to bring you a meal this week. Can I email you about it?” Oh, thank goodness. I am starving, but mostly I can never figure out something to tell people that I need, even if I need it. But really, bring me anything. Chocolate. A potted plant. A set of weird erasers. I remember the first gift I got that wasn’t about cancer and I was so happy I cried. Send me funny emails filled with YouTube clips to watch during chemotherapy. Do something that suits your gifts. But most important, bring me presents! 2. “You are a beautiful person.” Unless you are of the opposite gender and used to speaking in a creepy windowless-van kind of voice, comments like these go a long way. Everyone wants to know they are doing a good job without feeling like they are learning a lesson. So tell your friend something about his life that you admire without making it feel like a eulogy. 3. “I am so grateful to hear about how you’re doing and just know that I’m on your team.” You mean I don’t have to give you an update? You asked someone else for all the gory details? Whew. Great! Now I get to feel like you are both informed and concerned. So don’t gild the lily. What you have said is amazing, so don’t screw it up now by being a Nosy Nellie. Ask a question about any other aspect of my life. 4. “Can I give you a hug?” Some of my best moments with people have come with a hug or a hand on the arm. People who are suffering often—not always—feel isol...