In his book The Protestant Work Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05, translated into English in
1930), Max Weber first posited the thesis that the Protestant work ethic
has opened the door to prosperity through capitalism for the nations
that exhibit it: northern Europe; the U.K.; the United States, and
presumably Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. What about other
nations not known for this religious element?
It
can work for them.
In
an article titled "The 'Protestant Work Ethic' Really Does Fight Poverty"
in Christianity Today, written by Lincoln Lau, director of
International Care Ministries, and Bruce Wydick, professor of economics at the
University of San Francisco, they summarize a study in this way:
Three
years ago, IPA asked ICM to run its normal four-month Transform program in 80
randomly selected communities, incorporating its spiritual values program along
with its secular health and livelihood program. Another 80
communities were to run only secular components (health and livelihood) in a
government center. A third group of 80 communities ran only
spiritual aspects of the program. And a fourth group of 80
communities – a control group – received no intervention at all. ICM
was comfortable running this study since it has a backlog of thousands of
Filipino pastors who would like to run a Transform program, but it only has
resources to run the program in 300 communities at a time.
Six
months after the conclusion of the Transform program, IPA surveyed all 6,276
families. Those who received Protestant evangelical training
experienced increases in household income by 9.2 percent when compared to those
in the experiment who did not receive the religious training. The
values lessons also appear to have improved hygiene and "grit," or
persistence through life's difficulties. Researchers believe that
the increased income is caused by the participants working harder and working
in higher-income activities.
Let's
apply these positive results to this nation in a short
historical overview.
Lost
in the shuffle in the left-right divide nowadays is the historical fact that
religious Protestants founded this country in the seventeenth
century. How religious were they? They refused to allow anyone
to serve in local governments who would not forswear
the "papacy" and allegiance to Rome. Record after
record proves it.
Were
they religious bigots? Maybe by our modern standards, but all the
provinces, which morphed into states, were always nervous about attacks
from France and its Indian allies, for they wreaked havoc in New England from
Canada often enough. They were genuinely afraid of spies when the
French Huguenots settled among them. They were also nervous about
a Spanish invasion. Thus, King William of England (his queen
was Mary) sent a shipload of gunpowder to Virginia because he was about
to declare war on France (King William's War or the Nine Years
War from 1688 to 1697 in North America). The Council and House
of Burgesses had to scramble to built storage for it. To honor the
monarchs, they founded William and Mary College in 1693. The Quakers
up in Pennsylvania got the same message from the king; they said they were
concerned, though it did not touch them directly. Yet they
too made their government official affirm that they put the monarchs in the
primary place and recanted any "popery."
It
is best to take each generation in its historical context; then we can avoid
chronological snobbery.
These
people's descendants of the more intellectual variety fought the War of
Independence and wrote up the Constitution. But make no mistake:
they never lost the Protestant ethos and ethic. Some may have gone
in a more non-religious direction (e.g., Jefferson and Franklin),
but even those two maintained a basic belief in God from a Protestant
point of view. Many others who signed the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution were serious and devout
Protestant Christians (and one Catholic signed the Declaration).
It
is my private theory that one factor in the founders' framing a small and
laconic and razor-thin Constitution is that by religious instinct and
training and the air they breathed, they did not like a system many laws
because it smacked of medieval Christendom, and some knew about Islamic
sharia. Have we left their legal austerity far behind in our
massive federal law today? Yes. The gigantic
federal bureaucracy violates the spirit of this country. Gradually
we are losing this country and our liberties.
Not
long after the Constitution was ratified in 1788 and the Bill of Rights
was, at the very end of 1791, in the next
generation, Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in 1794, when Washington was
president, and died in 1877, when Grant was president. Andrew Carnegie
was born in 1835 (in Scotland), when Jackson was president,
and died in 1919, when Wilson was president. J.P. Morgan
was born in 1837, when Jackson was still president, and died in 1913
during the Wilson presidency. John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839,
when Van Buren was president, and died in 1937, when FDR was
transforming this country – just to name those few. In their life
spans, America went from hugging the eastern coast to conquering a nation
all the way to the Pacific Ocean. America opened up prosperity
that the world had never seen before in just over a hundred years.
None
of this accounts for the small yeoman farmers who moved westward (many of your
ancestors were part of this Manifest Destiny). The common man could
make it without being part of the old European
aristocracy. He could own land in his own right. My
second great grandfather, William Ryland, settled
in Ohio from Pennsylvania in 1815, and in the 1830s, he was part of local
county government. His father, John Ryland, fought
in the Revolutionary War as a wagon master. America solved her
problems locally, without undue dependence on the nation's capital.
Independence. Pioneer
spirit. All born from their reading of Scripture.
It
could be pointed out that Catholics and Jews were part of this story, and
that is true. They were. Let's celebrate
it. It could be pointed out that slaves were part of the story,
too. That's true. They were. However, the vast
majority of Americans from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were
Protestants and did not own slaves. The Protestant storyline
dominates all others.
Why
is this important? Lau and Wydick state that other religions did not
do as well in the experiment in the Philippines.
What
is this Protestant message boiled down? Hard work in secular
employment is a call from God. Serve others in your
work. That's the practical outworking of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Let's
not forget about the men and women of yesteryear who put together the framework
of this country from a religious point of view. Let's fight a
certain side of the political spectrum – the left – that seeks to secularize
America. Let's refuse the left-wing bigotry that manifests its
ugly head against the Protestant males (and females) who lived the work
ethic and the spirit of capitalism for the past 400 years.
