Conservatism’s Inevitable Conversion to Catholicism 06/16/2021 at 3:03 PM Posted by Kevin Edward White
By Jessica Kramer, Crisis, June 16, 2021
If Catholicism, in the end, managed to elude the political hatred it engenders, I have almost no doubt that this same spirit of the age which seems so opposed to it would become supportive and that it would suddenly achieve extensive conquests. Alexis de Tocqueville
Almost two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that Americans would either totally abandon Christianity or convert to Catholicism, writing, “our descendants will tend increasingly to divide into only two parts, some leaving Christianity entirely and the others embracing the Church of Rome.”
How Religion Influenced Modern Economics
April 23, 2021
“One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism,” German sociologist Max Weber wrote in his landmark 1905 book,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “of rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was born from the spirit of Christian asceticism.”
Weber attributed the free-market success so prevalent amongst Protestant societies to its origins in Calvinist predestinarian theology: believers could never know for sure whether they had been saved, but material success portended well for their prospects of eternal salvation, so they might as well earn and save money.