"Enlarge My Territory" or "5 Bedrooms And 3 Baths Plz"

Do the teachings of church's in America have anything to do with the housing crisis?

I don't know. But I have a hunch. A suspicion. And I'm going to spin it out for you here in the next couple of paragraphs. Keep in mind these are the opinions and observations of a completely unprofessional, mostly uninformed, and thoroughly unresearched individual, and should be taken with a grain, if not a wheelbarrow, of salt.

Almost everyone(and by everyone, I mean NPR, and yahoo news) agrees Sub-prime mortgages, and the rising number of defaults on them, are the largest factor in the free fall of home values. These mortgages are given to people who meet one or all of the following criteria:

sketchy credit
can't produce much proof of income
can't make any down payment

Now these loans are being defaulted on for a variety of reasons. Some that I'm aware of through various news sources(NPR and Yahoo, the most trusted names in news):

1. Shady loan officers who mislead naive people into loans with payments that "suddenly" skyrocket(most of these victims will definitely read the fine print next time eh?).

2. Over-exuberant investors throwing piles of money at anybody with a contracting license to build homes that were, or so they thought, "guaranteed" to sell for 3 times as much as it cost to build them. Often these "investors" were borrowing the money they "invested", so when the house didn't sell, it's "kind of" a big problem.

3. Forest trolls.

Ok, Forest Trolls aren't to blame. I guess we should leave them out of this, even though they are really secretive and I'm sure they are up to "something".

I asked the question if the Church in America was to blame didn't I?

Remember the "Prayer of Jabez" craze? That thing was HUGE when I was in high school. The local Christian bookstore had "Prayer of Jabez" books, keychains, erasers, mints, bookmarks, EVERYTHING. People LOVED that prayer. I wondered why, so I read it

1 Chronicles 4:9-10:
And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, "Oh that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!" So God granted him what he requested.

I've enlarged the part that jumped out at me as the reason it was so popular.

Have we as Christians come to believe that we "deserve" a nice big house? That it's God's plan for us to be as wealthy as we can "dream" ourselves being? Could that be the reason so many people were so easily deceived into making foolish financial decisions? I don't know. But I wonder.

"Sure we are barely making ends meet with the apartment we rent now, but we are following the steps of Joel Osteen's new book Your Best Life Now, and we just signed up for that Primerica/Avon/Pampered Chef/Shacklee business plan, so we should be able to afford this new mortgage in no time! God has our back! He will lead us into His(our) plan!"