Keith Butler: God and Mammon on the Republican National Committee

Keith Butler may have lost his 2006 bid for the US Senate, but he isn’t done with politics. Butler, pastor of the Word of Faith International Christian Center in Detroit, is poised to become the Michigan representative on the Republican National Committee. His opponent, incumbent committee member Chuck Yob, withdrew from the race recently, paving the way for Butler to take his seat on the national government body of the GOP. Most Michigan residents likely know of Butler as a former Detroit city councilman or as a Republican candidate for the Senate in 2006. But who is Keith Butler the man?

Keith Butler is the leader of one of America’s largest megachurches. The Word of Faith International Christian Center has over 22,000 members, one of the largest members of a community of non-denominational churches that are part of the Word of Faith movement. This movement is a subset of the larger charismatic or pentecostal movement within evangelical Christianity and traces its theological roots to a preacher named EW Kenyon in the late 1800s and early 1900s in New England.

Kenyon’s ideas were highly influential on Kenneth Hagin, who was the man who really built the movement by training hundreds of Word of Faith preachers at his Rhema Bible Training Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Perhaps the most famous of the Word of Faith preachers is Kenneth Copeland, but Butler isn’t far behind; both graduated from Rhema. Word of Faith is not an official denomination with a hierarchical organization and a defined set of doctrines, but there are dozens of churches associated with this movement around the country and around the world. Butler’s is among the largest.

(Photo: Keith Butler as featured on Hurston Ministries’ website)
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The core of Word of Faith theology is the notion that faith is actually a force, a power that believers can wield to accomplish things by declaring that power verbally. “The force of faith,” says Kenneth Copeland, “is released by words. Faith-filled words put the law of the Spirit of life into operation.” An often heard phrase in this movement is “name it and claim it”, the notion that a believer can name what he wants and, by believing in the power of faith to achieve it, it will be done. The power of words to bring forth a given reality is very important in Word of Faith theology.

Word of Faith ministers claim, quite literally, a direct line to God. Their sermons are filled with claims of direct revelation from God and that is where the core principles of the movement allegedly come from as well. Kenneth Hagin, in a booklet called How to Write Your Own Ticket with God, describes in great detail how he received the basic principles of his theology from Jesus himself, who appeared to him “in the Spirit.” According to Hagin, Jesus told him to write down a simple four-step formula and to teach his followers that if they will just follow those four steps, “he will always receive whatever he wants from Me or from God the Father.” In an article called You Can Have What You Say, published in his own magazine, Hagin described how following these steps literally unleashes the power of God:

“Often you create your own negative situations yourself with wrong thinking, wrong believing, and wrong speaking. So start believing according to God’s Word. Then begin making positive confessions of faith and victory over your life. … You will never receive anything from God beyond the words you speak. … If you don’t like what you have in life, then begin to change the way you are thinking, believing, and speaking. 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 !”

This focus on getting what you want is why this is often referred to as the prosperity gospel. Word of Faith ministers teach that God wants his people to be rich and that they can bring that about through the name it and claim it process. You will often hear Word of Faith preachers talk about “planting a seed of faith” and repeating over and over again the notion that whatever they give will be returned to them ten-fold or a hundred-fold or even a thousand-fold, so that by giving to the church you make yourself rich. At the very least, it certainly makes the Word of Faith preachers rich and Keith Butler is no exception.

During the 2006 Senatorial election, the Triangle Foundation released a report on Butler that showed just how wealthy Butler has become through his followers. Through more than 80 ministries he has founded around the world, Butler generates an astonishing income. He and his wife live in a $1.3 million mansion in Troy, for which they paid cash. They own several other properties as well, most of them without mortgages on them. Indeed they have owned some 20 properties over the last few years, nearly all of them paid for in cash.

Butler refuses to open the finances of his ministries to the two major watchdog evangelical watchdog groups that were formed in the wake of the Jim and Tammy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals in the 1980s in order to protect the faithful from frauds, Ministry Watch and the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, as do all of the Word of Faith ministries. How do they justify lives with million dollar mansions and private planes while claiming to preach the word of a man who told his followers to sell all that they have and give it to the poor, and who said that it was easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? Here’s how Word of Faith preacher Frederick K.C. Price does it:

“He is trying to get you out of this malaise of thinking that Jesus and his disciples were poor…the Bible says that he has left us an example that we should follow. His steps. That’s the reason why I drive a Rolls Royce. I’m following Jesus’ steps.”

All of this leads to a rather obvious question: if they truly believed that giving money away to do the work of God brings it back to you one hundred fold, shouldn’t they be giving their money away as well? Alas, most Word of Faith preachers tend to count on real estate and investment accounts to manage an increase in their own wealth. This and many other factors have led more mainstream Christian leaders to condemn the movement. Hank Hanegraaf, director of the Christian Research Institute, minces no words when he speaks of the “substance, style and scams” of the Word-Faith movement and declares:

I am convinced that this movement poses one of the greatest contemporary threats to orthodox Christianity from within. Through it, cultic theology is being increasingly accepted as true Christianity.

In the end, though, while Butler’s Word of Faith theology may not fit comfortably within historical Christianity, it certainly seems to fit within the confines of the American ethos. In a society that is virtually obsessed with wealth and astonishingly susceptible to easy promises not only of getting rich but of getting skinny, healthy and confident as well, the Word of Faith movement speaks to our desire to have it all without having to actually do anything. It may not be Christian, but what could be more American than that?