The prosperity gospel message is decidedly not in favor of the little guy. Hagee preaches that his congregation must tithe to him before paying the rent (otherwise you're stealing God's money), and that the tithe -- i.e., "sowing a seed" -- will result in a financial harvest of its own. "In tithing," Copeland writes in his book, The Laws of Prosperity, "you are laying the foundation for financial success and abundance... If your back is against the wall financially now, don't wait to begin tithing. You cannot afford to wait! The tithe belongs to God in the first place."

But the prosperity movement is not just driven by the pressure to tithe; its underlying system of belief is informed by the deeply irrational Word of Faith movement. To explain that, I'll offer a little sneak preview from my book, God's Profits, available this month:

The main tenets of Word of Faith are revelation knowledge, through which the believer derives knowledge directly from God, rather than from the senses; identification, through which the believer is inhabited by God and is another incarnation of Jesus; positive confession, or the power of the believer to call things into existence; the right of believers to divine health; and the right of believers to divine wealth. The believer, a "little god," is anointed and therefore can reject reason in favor of revelation, a "higher knowledge that contradicts the senses." It is through revelation knowledge that the Word of Faith movement has created its alternate universe in which rational thought is rejected and where the media, intellectual thought, science, and any type of critical thinking are scorned. Drawing on the Pentecostal tradition of casting out devils, pursuits associated with the Enlightenment are denounced as the work of Satan.

So in this world, debating the finer points of Huckabee's five-point economic plan won't much matter.

This post is excerpted from The FundamentaList, Sarah Posner's weekly countdown of the top news from the religious right at The American Prospect Online.