By Casey, guest contributor.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash? That’s the overblown title of this month’s cover story in the Atlantic Magazine.  Underneath the flashy headline is a well-written story about Latino immigrants and their attraction to the Prosperity Gospel, a “God Wants You to Be Rich” theology all too common in Pentecostal churches, the fastest growing faith among Latin Americans and Latino immigrants alike.

Journalist Hannah Rosin checks in at Casa del Padre, a mostly Latino church in Charlottesville, Virginia and finds a faith that promises to make immigrants “rich in the here and now.”

Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass–”because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me–and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed.  The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips . . .  It can be hard to get used to how much [Pastor Fernando] Garay (photo left) talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me once recent Sunday on the  steps out front. Back in Mexico, Goznales’ pastor talked only about ‘Jesus and heaven  and being good.’ But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales:  money is ‘really important,’ and besides ‘we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!”

It should go without saying that Jesus did not love money, famously overturning the tables of the moneychangers at the Temple in Jerusalem and declaring it was easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to get to heaven.

That part of the gospel is vaporized at Garay’s church, where the church’s central tenet is that parishioners tithe 10 percent of their income, as proof of commitment and as “seed money” that will be returned to them as greater wealth. The 10 percent tithe a tenet borrowed from the teachings of Oral Roberts, a Pentecostal televangelist who founded the Prosperity Gospel movement after World War II.

But it’s also a financial hook very familiar to Casa del Padre’s Garay, a former Miami coke dealer who became a born-again Christian in 1989.  While building Casa del Padre up over the past decade, Garay was also a loan officer at Countrywide, hired explicitly for his street-hustle sensibilities and his ability to reach out to Latinos, many of whom took out risky, sub-prime loans. In short, “to many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.”

The article isn’t out just to knock the prosperity gospel though.  The reporter interviews Billy Gonzales, a Sunday regular at Casa del Padre who says the church led him to give up a serious coke habit, marry, and take care of his wife’s two kids from a previous marriage as if they were own his flesh and blood.  Today, Gonzales’ outside hobbies are limited to bible study and soccer.

That’s common says Tony Tian-Ren Lin, an academic at the University of Virginia who studies how Latino prosperity gospel churches mainstream and assimilate Latino immigrants into US consumer culture. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They  become part of the elect, the chosen.  They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”  Tian-Ren Lin, who grew up in Argentina, says pastors at prosperity gospels teach immigrants, “not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money–manage complicated pay rolls, invest in equipment . . . While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American.” But as Rosin notes,  “Tony Lin is careful–and of course correct–to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of non-believers.

Latinos are from the only believers in the prosperity gospel, which has two main groups of adherents, working-class Latinos and blacks who live in cities and inner-ring suburbs and the largely white managerial class who live in exurbs like Rancho Cucamonga, California and Plano, Illinois. The latter latch onto mega-church preachers like Joel Osteen (video below), whose 4-million selling book Your Best Life Now, touches very little on the gospel but is full of anecdotes on how God keeps providing bigger and bigger houses for Osteen. And here lies the Prosperity Gospel’s connection to our current market crash.  According to prosperity preachers, a house is not merely a place to live, or even an investment in good times, it’s a sign of God’s providence.  As Pastor Garay noted,  “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house.  In nine of the cases, it will go bad.  The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine?  “For them, there is always another house.”