Calvinism And Religion

This, states R. H. Tawney, along with the economic ideas of Calvinism in its later phases, converted religion from the keystone which holds together the social edifice into one department within it, and made the idea of a rule of right to be replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of policy and the criterion of conduct. The aim of the author was to prove the above statements by a historical study of Religion and the rise of Capitalism. To do this, the author undertakes a complete study of several factors: the economic theories propounded by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages; of the ruminations by the left wing of the Reformers against usury and extortionate prices; of the appeal of hard headed Tudors to traditional religious

Their chief religious doctrine was that, “good works are not a way of attaining salvation, since man is already predestined, but they are an indispensable proof that salvation has been attained.” 6 This logically led to the belief that prosperity and wealth are signs of God’s blessing, and that they are an assurance of eternal salvation. Thus emerged the “economic virtues” (avarice, thrift, intense competition, and the accumulation of wealth) which soon, with the later progression of puritanical rationalization, became confounded with the traditional moral virtues of thrift and industriousness, and finally helped capitalism enormously in displacing these virtues altogether from daily business practices. Today the vice of greed engulfs both Wall Street and our

No wonder Dickens railed against such ungodly behavior in most of his soul-searching novels, particularly creating the character of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, for all to see the misguided inhumanity in such a system and in its adherents. Its final products are the misadvised day traders on Wall Street. As a matter of fact there is a one-hour program on the most watched financial channel (CNBC), which begins with the four panelists, one after the other, each proclaiming unabashedly, “I AM MONEY,” I am money, I am money, I am money! No wonder it is impossible at Christmas time to find a Christmas Greeting card in any corporate retail store that has Jesus or Mary and Joseph or a crèche or simply a cross or an angel on it, not because it won’t sell (ninety percent of the West’s population claim to be Christian), but because along with irreverent capitalism and widespread secularism, virtue and religion have become