The Poor Man of Assisi Speaks to the Prosperous Pew: Franciscan Simplicity and the Wealth Gospel in American Anglican Life
There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that settles over a thoughtful worshiper who, on one Sunday, sings the Canticle of the Sun in a liturgy shaped by Franciscan spirituality, and on the next hears a sermon suggesting that material abundance is the surest sign of God's approval. The two visions of the Christian life are not merely different in emphasis. They are, in important respects, theologically incompatible — and the tension between them is becoming harder to ignore in corners of American Anglican life.
The prosperity gospel — the teaching that faithful Christians can expect health, wealth, and worldly success as direct rewards for their devotion — has long been associated with Pentecostal and charismatic strands of American Protestantism. Yet its assumptions have quietly migrated into broader evangelical culture, and some observers within the Anglican Church in North America and affiliated bodies have noted its rhetorical fingerprints appearing in congregational life, stewardship campaigns, and even pastoral counseling. Against this backdrop, the figure of St. Francis of Assisi stands not merely as a charming medieval saint beloved for his affection toward birds, but as a genuinely subversive witness whose life constitutes a direct theological challenge to the prosperity framework.
The Radical Economics of the Poverello
Francis Bernardone was, by birth and early inclination, precisely the kind of man a prosperity preacher might hold up as evidence of divine blessing. Born in 1181 or 1182 to a prosperous cloth merchant in Umbria, he enjoyed the privileges of wealth, wore fine garments, and cultivated the social graces of a young man destined for comfortable bourgeois success. His conversion, famously catalyzed by encounters with lepers and a crumbling chapel outside Assisi, moved in exactly the opposite direction from prosperity theology's promised trajectory.
Francis did not merely give generously from his surplus. He divested himself entirely, stripping off his fine clothes in the public square before the Bishop of Assisi in an act of theatrical and irreversible renunciation. He embraced what he called Lady Poverty not as a temporary spiritual discipline but as a permanent vocation, and he encoded that embrace in the Rule he wrote for the order that gathered around him. The Franciscan vow of poverty was — and remains — a theological statement: that the human person's deepest identity and security are grounded not in material possession but in radical dependence upon God and solidarity with the poor.
This is not asceticism for its own sake. Francis did not regard the body or the material world as evil — his Canticle of the Creatures positively overflows with gratitude for Brother Sun and Sister Water, for the earth and its abundance. His poverty was, rather, a refusal to allow material goods to occupy the place in human hearts that belongs to God alone. It was a structural critique of the way wealth distorts relationship, corrupts community, and insulates the comfortable from the suffering of their neighbors.
Where Prosperity Preaching Diverges
The prosperity gospel, in its various American iterations, inverts this logic almost entirely. In its stronger forms, it reads financial blessing as a covenant promise, poverty as a potential symptom of insufficient faith, and wealth accumulation as an act of Christian witness. Even in its softer, more culturally respectable versions — the kind that might appear in an Anglican context as an emphasis on God's desire for his people to thrive — it tends to frame material wellbeing as spiritually normative and financial struggle as something to be overcome through faith and positive confession.
The theological problems here are substantial, and they have been catalogued by scholars across the ecumenical spectrum. The prosperity framework sits uneasily with the Beatitudes, with the parable of the rich young ruler, with St. Paul's account of his own contentment in both abundance and need, and with the consistent testimony of the Christian martyrological tradition that faithfulness frequently costs rather than rewards. For communities rooted in the Anglican tradition, with its commitment to the whole counsel of Scripture read through patristic and creedal lenses, this selective hermeneutic should raise serious questions.
For communities that have also drawn from the Franciscan stream — through the Society of Saint Francis, the Third Order, or simply through the incorporation of Franciscan prayer and spirituality into congregational worship — the dissonance is even more acute.
The Anglican Franciscan Inheritance
Anglicanism has a longer and more substantive relationship with Franciscan spirituality than is sometimes recognized. The Society of Saint Francis, with friars and sisters present in the United States, maintains a living expression of the Franciscan vows within an Anglican context. The Third Order of the Society of Saint Francis (TSSF) extends that Franciscan charism to laypeople and clergy who remain in ordinary life but commit to a rule of prayer, study, and service marked by simplicity. The Franciscan influence on Anglican hymnody, liturgy, and creation theology is woven throughout the tradition.
This inheritance carries an implicit obligation. Communities that invoke Francis in their worship and spiritual formation cannot do so decoratively, as though his poverty were merely picturesque. To pray with Francis is to be addressed by Francis — and what he addresses is precisely the question of how we hold our material lives in relation to God and neighbor.
Toward a Renewed Simplicity
What might a renewed commitment to Franciscan simplicity look like for American Anglican congregations navigating a consumer-saturated culture? It need not, and perhaps should not, take the form of a new legalism about income or possessions. The Third Order rule wisely speaks of simplicity of life as a disposition and a direction rather than a fixed economic threshold. The question is not whether one earns a salary or owns a home, but whether one's relationship to wealth is ordered by gratitude, generosity, and solidarity rather than by anxiety, accumulation, and the quiet assumption that God's favor can be measured in a 401(k).
Congregations might begin by recovering honest theological conversation about money — the kind that the prosperity framework tends to foreclose by making wealth a spiritual virtue and financial struggle a private shame. They might revisit their stewardship language, asking whether it forms givers in the logic of abundance and grace or subtly promises returns on spiritual investment. They might listen more attentively to the voices of members who are not prospering economically, and ask what their experience reveals about the community's theology.
Above all, they might sit with the image of Francis in that Assisi square, naked before the bishop, having given back everything his father gave him, free in a way that no amount of material security had ever made him. That image is not a program. It is a provocation — and for communities serious about authentic Christian witness in twenty-first-century America, it may be exactly the provocation that is needed.
The prosperity gospel promises that faith will make you rich. The Franciscan tradition counters that it will make you free. In the long history of Christian reflection on wealth and the soul, the second claim has proven considerably more durable.
