Word: samuelsson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...