Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses Chapter Summary

Many different countries and cultures have stereotypes and ideas about countries and cultures different than theirs. It is recorded that, historically, Spaniards said that Calvinism in the Netherlands,which they denounced as heresy, fostered capitalism. In 1517 Martin Luther wrote the Ninety-Five Theses, a document attacking the Catholic church for selling indulgences. This action sent a shockwave throughout Europe, and eventually the term Protestant was coined for Luther, his followers, and others like him who ‘protested’ the Catholic church. By about 1557 Protestantism was present in half of Europe. Two hundred years later, in 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. Smith was from Protestant Scotland and his book was the first

Banks and investors started putting money towards increasing industrialization, and eventually capitalists took control over the manufacturing of goods. In 1920 sociologist Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this book he argued, as the Spaniards had argued earlier, that the modern form of capitalism developed first in Western civilizations because of certain Protestant sects, like Calvinism. He believed that the capitalist ideals of hard work and business success were encouraged by some Protestant groups as a way to tell if someone was “predestined” or chosen by God to be saved, and that as these religions spread through the West, so did capitalism. According to Weber, Protestantism was the driving factor in the emergence of Capitalism; however many still ask the question: How critical was the Protestant reformation for the emergence of modern capitalism and industrialization? The answer is that Protestantism was critical, but it was not the most important factor in the emergence of modern capitalism and industrialization. Protestant beliefs about money, its relationship to industrialization, and the fact that non-Protestant countries also had industrialization