From the Dallas Morning News: Is the work ethic worn out? (HT: Presbyweb) The article leads off by saying:
If you don't like the work ethic, blame the Protestants.
As the theory goes, Protestant ministers greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution, preaching hard work as a path to salvation, thus priming the masses to toil away in hopeless jobs. This, in turn, put money in the pockets of greedy bosses. Calvinist notions of "salvation through hard work" turned the church into the ultimate capitalist tool.
But you can't blame the church anymore. As we celebrate another Labor Day, Americans may be working harder than ever – but almost nobody, it seems, preaches about the work ethic these days.
The author Mary A. Jacobs loosely draws on the work of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, written in the early twentieth century. I don’t know much about Mary Jacobs, but I am willing to bet she got this thesis from talking to seminary professors at mainline seminaries. Why? Because this thesis was discounted decades ago in the social sciences and historians. The only place I still see it taught is in seminary classes at mainline institutions. It dovetails well with the template of capitalism (free markets; the amassing and employment of large amounts of resources for major economic initiatives; property rights) as an evil corruption of Western society.
In fact, we now know that it should more appropriately be called the Roman Catholic Ethic, or even the Christian Ethic, and the Spirit of Capitalism. As Rodney Stark has eloquently shown in Victory of Reason, the roots of capitalism extend at least as far back as the ninth century in Italy and south-central Europe. By the twelfth century, most of the values and institutions that would give rise to modern capitalism were already in place. These values spread to other European regions, most notably to England and its neighbors across the English Channel and the North Sea. The rise of despotic powers in Spain and France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ended the rise of the capitalist ethos in southern Europe and corrupted the church to the point that it gave rise to the Reformation. The Reformation’s epicenter also coincided with the location where proto-capitalism outside of Italy was strongest. Thus, the rise of capitalism and classic liberalism was merely the extension of developments that dated back centuries within Roman Catholicism. Far from being a corruption of Christianity by Calvinists, modern capitalism was an extension of historic Christian thinking.
While I take issue with the way Jacobs frames the issue, her article does highlight the abysmal state affairs in Christianity when it comes to integrating economic and theological aspects of life.
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