Born Again Ideology

The New Protestant Ethic

"One hundred years after the publication of Max Weber's classic text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the fateful relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been renewed in American political discourse. Except this time it is no longer the original convergence theorized by Weber between the spirit of Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism whereby Christianity was destined to be ultimately secondary to the unfolding historical project of capitalism, but the opposite. In a contemporary political climate marked by the resurgence seemingly everywhere of faith-based politics, capitalism and its historical correlate -- modernism -- have actually folded back on themselves, quickly reversing modernist codes of economic secularism and political pluralism, in the interests of being reanimated with the evangelical spirit of religious fundamentalism. What Weber foresaw as a primal compact between Calvinism and acquisitive capitalism -- this migration, first in Europe and then in Puritan America, of Puritan attitudes towards personal salvation based on giving witness by habits of frugality, hard work, and discipline into the essentially acquisitive spirit of capitalism -- has been renewed in new key. On the centennial of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the political universe is suddenly dominated by the spirit of what might be called the New Protestant Ethic as the ideological reflex of the age of networked capitalism and empire politics."