Religion: Protestantism & Capitalism

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,” said Jesus, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Yet it is a widely argued thesis that Protestantism is a pillar of the profit system, and that piety and “treasures upon earth” can live comfortably together.

German Economist Max Weber broached the theory in 1905 with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Calvinism and the Protestant sects, he maintained, lacking the absolution of sins provided by the Roman Catholic Church, depend upon outward and visible signs of salvation: diligence, sobriety and God’s reward—success. Thrift, he argued, was also a peculiarly Protestant virtue, and the combination of these qualities naturally produced capital. Weber quoted Methodism’s founder, John Wesley: “Religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches.” British Economist Richard H. Tawney further developed Weber’s ideas in his well-known Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Worshipping Mammon. . . Just published is a book that calls them all out of tune. Protestantism and capitalism are not interdependent, writes Swedish Economic Historian Kurt Samuelsson in Religion and Economic Action (Basic Books; $3.75).

It is true, says Samuelsson that many U.S. industrialists and financiers in the 19th and early 20th centuries were Calvinists or Protestant sectarians, and it is “striking” how many of the clergymen in industrial centers were eulogizers of laisses-faire capitalism. But, he writes, “it was not the worship of God that led to the worship of Mammon. It was rather that it was necessary to demonstrate that devotion to wealth was not necessarily an impediment to true piety—and the need to assert it was all the greater because so many of the Puritan fathers had so intensely feared the harmfulness of riches.” When old-style “robber barons” wrote about their faith, they usually picked from a variety of philosophies “whatever contributed to the defense of their own conduct, riches and power.”

On the other hand, the great Protestant teachers were wary of wealth and worldliness. Diligence and thrift they enjoined, writes Samuelsson,but so did Roman Catholics in the same mercantile age. And thrift did not make capitalism; it was enterprise that founded the great fortunes and industries. Even Horatio Alger, Samuelsson points out, always had his pious little lads get into the big money by “a gigantic inheritance, left to his hero by some previously unknown relative, or a gift from a multimillionaire who felt the virtuous boy to be worthy of a reward. Thrift and diligence were adequate instruments for winning the favour of rich relatives or bosses or millionaires’ daughters, but not for achieving wealth singlehanded.”

…And Invoking God. It is a mistake, says Samuelsson, to infer from Protestant and Puritan support for old-style capitalism that the religion helped forge the economy, or that capitalism would have developed differently in another spiritual climate: “In all religious faiths, the servants of God have invoked Him as a guarantee of the righteousness and prosperity of their own social class, their own nation, their own race—in short, their own interests. But we cannot assert that Christianity was therefore the cause of all the oppression of one social class by another that has been committed in God’s name, or of all the wars in which the weapons have been blessed by Christian priests, or of all the aggressions perpetrated by representatives of the white races upon other peoples in the alleged service of God and the Holy Trinity.”