[choollaBard]

I was debating which forum to put this into and decided to put it here. The reason is that, in a different thread, part of a discussion involved our societal "DNA" or "soul" in America.

Even though WASP can be used as a derogatory term, Protestantism, particularly Puritan, is part of American DNA as well. Not necessarily for the gospel part, but what it imparted on early American society.

So, with that in mind, I figured this would be a good article for this forum.

Long read, but very well written and thought provoking.

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued “productive industry” without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called “the first of [America’s] political institutions, . . . imparting morality” to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the “Protestant ethic” and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America’s economic success. Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009