The perverted Buddhism practiced by materialistic young Americans harkens back to the ancient feature or the old religions where one made prayers or gave offerings to get whatever one wanted, material or otherwise, whether for good or for evil.
A friend of mine went to a Buddhist meeting and was told that the essence of Buddhism was that you simply chanted and prayed to the Buddha for “whatever you want,” and examples were given of money, sex, power, a job, material objects or whatever.
It’s hard to believe that the actual Buddha himself would countenance such a coarse and vulgar attachment to the material world. The essence of Buddha’s teaching was to “get out of the wheel” – the wheel meaning the wheel of desire – and to attain a state of satori where you no longer desire, want or need much of anything beyond what is necessary for survival. Only by making such a clean break with earthly matters may one hope to attain enlightenment. As you can see, this American Buddhism is quite a perversion.
The frankly heretical modern Prosperity Gospel of Conservative Republican Evangelicals in America is obviously nothing more than a riff off the ancient “make a prayer or give an offering to your God for whatever it is that you want” – in this case, being America, of course everyone wants money and only money, as this is the only thing of matter or even value in American culture.
A quick look at the statements of Jesus, a man sworn to poverty and contemptuous of the rich, shows the perversion and outright heresy of Prosperity Doctrine.