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Capitalism came from the Catholic monasteries starting in the 9th century. The Catholic Church endorses distributivism, which is a type of market capitalism. The notion of reformism, of introducing social policy in capitalism, of creating a "social market economy", was born out of the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church.
However, the world's first functioning capitalist economy was England and it's roots are in the shift from serfdom to capitalist tenant farmers employing labourers that took place in the aftermath of the English Civil War from about 1660 onwards. This is the first, functioning, pre-industrial agrarian capitalist market economy. It happened almost by accident, and it happened because Britain was a very weak war-torn country where the aristocracy had to employ tenant farmers because serfdom had totally broken down in the civil war.
Early American economy has very little to do with modern one. There was no capitalism worship, Evangelical Protestantism didn't exist yet, only the British were considered elite and people that didn't own land weren't considered fit for democracy. Modern American white nationalists only pay lip service to the Founding Fathers, they would be disgusted by the fact that so many of them were Deists and considered most Europeans to be inferior to them.
Martin Luther happened because the Catholic Church was a mess. The Borgias were so bad that Julius II felt the need to bribe the Cardinals to make him Pope. He took out the Borgias and set up bankers, the Medici, to take their place. Florence became the center of Renaissance as a result but it became clear to religious men that the banking attitude of the Medici was not Christ like, so Martin Luther stood up to the Medici's.
Ulrich Zwingli opposed the Swiss mercenary system, the mercenary companies of the Renaissance (be they Swiss or Landsknechts), turned war into big business. And free market fixed it.
The only reason the Renaissance happened is because bankers were in charge and not the established Catholic clergy. Everything that came after Martin Luther and the Medici though improved the conditions of Europe even though they were the ones who disagreed with each other. Their opposing views allowed the western world to escape the Catholic views that kept Europe in the dark times, and eventually turned Central and South America into shitholes.
John Calvin did not support wealth or decadence, but good work ethics. Mercantilism and Capitalism existed in catholic Antwerp hundreds of years before the Reformation. Austrian school of economics was created by the catholic Austrian Empire. The catholic School of Salamanca was the origin of economics as a science in the west, actually, and their views are very much akin to Austrian economics.
The Netherlands was more mercantilist than capitalist, the development of Britain as a major trading capitalist power had fuck all to do with religion, if that was the key factor then Venice or Genoa would've had the first industrial revolution and the first capitalist economy, not England.
Their entire argument rests on the idea that none of these things would have happened had the reformation not occured, which I think is just absurd. I think their arguments are revisionist and rely on ignoring the inertia of society itself. It's very easy to point back in history and say one event was the cause of another, even though the two are seperate and not connected, and I'm highly skeptical of any argument that claims that authoritarianism, capitalism, creationism, disenchantment in the world and fucking SJWism ALL stems from one event in history.
I think any reasonable historian would say that is an unreasonable thing to say that Protestantism exerted so much influence over the development of western civilisation that all of the major ills are direct consequences of it and these authors are simply resorting to revisionism, connecting events through correlation and assuming it means causation.
It should be noted that Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism both got themselves too tightly involved in political economic systems and suffered greatly because of it. One could argue that the Church was having a difficult time dealing with the decay of the feudal system during which the lower aristocracy had already been dispossessed and the top aristocracy was consolidating power toward the absolutism of the 18th century that would eventually be toppled by the fully matured bourgeoisie. Antonio Gramsci even argued that Marx's "Worker's Paradise" could not be realised as long as Christian culture had a hold on the masses. For Gramsci, the number one enemy was the Roman Catholic Church, not capitalism.
Eastern Orthodoxy similarly heavily invested in the social order of the Russian Czar and his autocratic system. It is therefore unsurprising that the communists seemed hell bent on destroying the Orthodox church until WWII where the church displayed a begrudging acceptance of the Communist regime.
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