Calvin and Jobs: Why the Right Hates (but Still Needs) Social Welfare

[ashling]

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21526-calvin-and-jobs-why-the-right-hates-but-still-needs-social-welfare



Calvinism's embrace of wealth as a sign of divine election lives on in the red state/blue state religious and social welfare divides.

"A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this."
-R.H Tawney - Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

Under the aegis of the Catholic church, the poor existed for centuries within a universe where aristocrats were, at least in theory, morally obliged to see to their welfare. It was a world in which usury, excessive interest and commercial undertaking was held in check by church dogma. In today's economic milieu, however, that system of patriarchal obligations has long since given way to glorified rapaciousness and self-interest. The beneficent God of old church doctrine has been given his pink slip and surrendered his cosmic office to the petty barons of Wall Street and the Koch brothers. How has this happened? In three words: the Protestant Reformation; in two more: John Calvin.

Calvin was a 16th-century French-born theologian who, on the heels of Martin Luther's momentous changes in the Catholic faith, conceived what has come to be known as the Protestant work ethic. While the Protestant work ethic occupies at least part of the conventional wisdom, fewer appreciate John Calvin's role in its formulation, and fewer still its influence as the root of the right wing's brutal and nihilistic contempt for social welfare and the less fortunate in the present day. When Sen. Rand Paul cautions against the extension of unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless as potentially destructive to their character, it is merely an echo of a Calvinist doctrine that reverberates back through time, one that demonizes the poor even as it elevates wealth as proof of God's grace.

As proof that this animus toward the poor is hardly new, R.H. Tawney, in his classic work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, reminds us of one Samuel Hartlib, who, in 1650, inveighed against the increase in the population of beggars, stating: "The law of God saith, 'he that will not work, let him not eat.' This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if ... none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for it."
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