Bright-Sided (17 page)

In search of team spirit, team-building companies offered dozens of “fun” bonding exercises, indoor and outdoor—simple ones involving balloons, blindfolds, or buckets of water and more intensive ones such as weeklong wilderness excursions. The idea was to whip up a fervent devotion to the firm even as it threatened to eliminate you. As a downsized AT&T worker told the
PBS Evening News Hour
in 1996: “We went to Outward Bound, the phone center people, for a week, and you bonded with everybody in the country. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever been through. You were a family. You were the most dedicated people in the
world. I mean, if your kids didn’t stand up and do the Pledge of Allegiance to an AT&T commercial, you know—”
47

Team building is, in other words, another form of motivation, with the difference being that, in the desolate environment of the downsized corporation, this motivation was supposed to be generated from within the work group or “team.” One group offering both motivational and team-building services makes this clear on its Web site—though not too clear, given the garbled English that is another characteristic of the postrational corporate world: “In this team building workshop, you will learn both the team building skills and motivation skills guaranteed to make your team more cohesive, increase employee morale, and motivated. You’ll learn how to build a team that grumbles less and works more, discipline less and reward more, create more focused and productive meetings and get recognized by the organization.”
48

As for the connection to old-fashioned, Peale-style positive thinking, the literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.

Sometimes the motivational effort backfired, especially when combined with ongoing layoffs. In the mid-1990s, while shedding 20 percent of its workforce, NYNEX initiated a “Winning Ways” program aimed at instilling employees with “the mentality of a winner,” but the employees sneeringly relabeled it “Whining Ways.”
49
When E. L. Kersten was working for a Dallas Internet service provider, he took note of the motivational products the company president favored and got the brilliant idea of going into business selling parodies of them. One of the “demotivational” posters available at Kersten’s [http://despair.com] despair.com site shows a bear about to snap up a salmon swimming upstream. The caption reads: “The journey of a
thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.” Another one shows a beautiful shoreline at sunset, with the caption “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.”

But such creative cynicism was rare. By and large, America’s white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, “I’ve gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional.” Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the “cheese” was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview—a belief system, almost a religion—that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.

______________

*
Marketdata Enterprises estimates that in 2005 the total U.S. market for “self-improvement products”—including tapes, books, and coaches on business, diet, and relationships—amounted to $9.6 billion, but with the caveat that “information about the market and its privately owned competitors is still very difficult to obtain. Most companies or organizations are very reluctant to give out any information regarding their revenues, enrollments at their programs, or how they are doing/how fast they are growing.” In 2004,
Potentials
magazine gave an estimate of $21 billion a year for the market in all “motivational products” (Steven Winn, “Overcome That Gnawing Fear of Success,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, May 24, 2004). The International Coach Federation estimates that coaches worldwide garnered $1.5 billion in 2007 and that most of them were business coaches (Executive Summary, ICF Global Coaching Study, revised Feb. 2008).

FIVE

T
he most eye-catching religious development of the late twentieth century was the revival of fire-and-brimstone Calvinism known as the Christian right. But while its foremost representatives, televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, hurled denunciations at “sinners” like gays and feminists and predicted the imminent end of the world, a friendlier approach was steadily gaining ground—positive thinking, disguised now as Christianity. Calvinism and positive thinking had last squared off in the nineteenth century, when positive thinking was still known as New Thought, and they did so again near the turn of the twenty-first century, not in public clashes but in a quiet fight for market share—television audiences, book sales, and ever-growing congregations. Promulgated from the pulpit, the message of positive thinking reached white-collar suburbanites who had so far encountered it only at work, as well as millions of low-wage and blue-collar people who had not yet encountered it at all.

By any quantitative measure, the most successful preachers today are the positive thinkers, who no longer mention sin and usually have little to say about those standard whipping boys of the Christian right, abortion and homosexuality. Gone is the threat of hell and the promise of salvation, along with the grim story of Jesus’s torment on the cross; in fact, the cross has been all but banished from the largest and most popular temples of the new evangelism, the megachurches. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of megachurches—defined as having a weekly attendance of two thousand or more—doubled to 1,210, giving them a combined congregation of nearly 4.4 million.
1

Instead of harsh judgments and harrowing tales of suffering and redemption, the new positive theology offered at megachurches (and many smaller churches) offers promises of wealth, success, and health in this life now, or at least very soon. You
can
have that new car or house or necklace, because God wants to “prosper you.” In a 2006
Time
poll, 17 percent of all American Christians, of whatever denomination or church size, said they consider themselves to be part of a “prosperity gospel” movement and a full 61 percent agreed with the statement that “God wants people to be prosperous.”
2
How do you get prosperity to “manifest” in your life? Not through the ancient technique of prayer but through positive thinking. As one reporter observes of the megachurch message:

Often resembling motivational speeches, the sermons are generally about how to live a successful life—or, “Jesus meets the power of positive thinking.” They are encouraging, upbeat and usually follow on the heels of a music and video presentation. (After this, the last thing those in attendance want to hear is a sermon about “doom and gloom.”) One will often hear phrases
such as “Keep a good attitude,” “Don’t get negative or bitter,” “Be determined” and “Shake it off and step up.”
3

Televangelist Joyce Meyer writes that “I believe that more than any other thing, our attitude is what determines the kind of life we are going to have”—not our piety or faith but our
attitude
. “It’s especially important to maintain a positive attitude,” she explains on her Web site, “because God is positive.”

Like many other proponents of the new theology, Meyer has good reason to be “positive.” Her ministries—which extend to weight loss and self-esteem—have made her the centimillionaire owner of a private jet and a $23,000 antique marble toilet. So egregious is the wealth of top positive-thinking evangelists—much of it, of course, tax-deductible—that in 2007 Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) launched an investigation, not only of Meyer but of televangelists Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. If these pastors have been incautious about displaying their wealth, it’s because, like secular motivational speakers, they hold themselves up as role models for success. Follow me, is the message—send money, tithe to my church, employ the methods outlined in my books—and you will become like me.

Joel Osteen of Houston’s Lakewood Church is hardly a high roller among the positive evangelists. He flies in commercial planes and owns only one home, but he has been dubbed the “rock star” of the new gospel and called “America’s most influential Christian” by the
Church Report
magazine.
4
Unlike many others who make their money by motivating people, Osteen has no history of painful obstacles overcome through sheer grit and determination. He inherited his church from his father, assuming the pulpit with no theological training after dropping out of Oral Roberts University. Once ensconced, he “grew” the church at a furious rate, till
today it boasts a weekly attendance of forty thousand people and a weekly income of a million dollars. Osteen doesn’t collect a salary from his church—there are already three hundred people on its payroll—because he is apparently content to live off his royalties. His first book,
Your Best Life Now
, has sold about four million copies, leading to what was said to be an advance of $13 million for the sequel,
Become a Better You.

Osteen’s books are easy to read, too easy—like wallowing in marshmallows. There is no argument, no narrative arc, just one anecdote following another, starring Osteen and his family members, various biblical figures, and a host of people identified by first name only. A criticism directed at Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s applies just as well to Osteen’s oeuvre: “The chapters of his books could easily be transposed from the beginning to the middle, or from the end to the beginning, or from one book to another. The paragraphs could be shuffled and rearranged in any order.”
5
One of the best of Osteen’s anecdotes involves a man who goes on a cruise ship carrying a suitcase full of crackers and cheese because he doesn’t realize that meals are included with the price of his ticket. In other words, there’s plenty for everyone—wealth, delightful buffet meals—if only we are prepared to demonstrate our faith by tithing generously to the church. His worst anecdotes, however, make the eyes glaze over, if not actually close, like the one that begins: “Growing up, my family had a dog named Scooter. He was a great big German shepherd, and he was the king of the neighborhood. Scooter was strong and fast, always chasing squirrels here and there, always on the go. Everybody knew not to mess with Scooter. One day my dad was out riding his bicycle. . . .”
6

How to achieve the success, health, and happiness God wants you to have? Osteen’s proffered technique is lifted directly from the secular positive thinkers—visualization. Other positive evangelists
often emphasize the spoken word as well, and the need to speak your dream into existence through “positive confessions of faith and victory over your life.” As Kenneth Hagin, one of the first positive preachers and a role model for Osteen, puts it: “Instead of speaking according to natural circumstances out of your head, learn to speak God’s Word from your spirit. Begin to confess God’s promises of life and health and victory into your situation. Then you can begin to enjoy God’s abundant life as you have what you say!”
7
For Osteen and Hagin, as for Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale before them, success comes mainly through “reprogramming” your mind into positive mental images, based on what amounts to the law of attraction: “You will produce what you’re continually seeing in your mind,” Osteen promises. “Almost like a magnet,” he writes, echoing Hill, “we draw in what we constantly think about.” As evidence, Osteen offers many small “victories” in his life, like getting out of a speeding ticket and finding a parking space—not just any space, but “the premier spot in that parking lot.” He suggests that the technique will also work “in a crowded restaurant”: “You can say, ‘Father, I thank you that I have favor with this hostess, and she’s going to seat me soon.’ ”
8