CLASS NOTES - Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism

Jones tends to assume an economic determinism which sees ideology as simply the result of economic structure. So he points out that "The Church's hostility toward usury had simply reflected the conditions of life in an economically static society."(p. 9)

While this claim is perhaps true, it is not entirely complete. The following amplification is by Herbert Butterfield:

...capitalism and the spirit of capitalism were highly advanced in Italy and the Netherlands before the Reformation, and the famous Fugger family in Germany was Catholic. Luther, joining in the hostility that had already arisen against it, said that the greatest misfortune of the German nation was the traffic in usury, and he blamed the pope for having sanctioned the evil. Calvin, coming at a later date, recognized the changed condition of the world and attacked the Aristotelian view that money is 'barren,' but he was a little troubled lest this should assist the capitalists and encourage usury. He would have liked to drive the latter out of the world, but since this was impossible, he said that one must give way to the general utility. He sought to prevent the evil which explained the antipathy of agricultural societies to usury - namely, the practices which took advantage of the misfortunes of the poor - and to him Venice and Antwerp were an exposure of the mammonism of the Catholics. In fact, the traditional medieval policy was pursued in Geneva in Calvin's day; and, after his time, the prejudice against usury continued in that city, where, indeed, business life proceeded as formerly, without receiving any great impetus from the religious movement, and in 1568 the influences of the Calvinist parties prevented the formation of a bank. In Amsterdam the biggest capitalists belonged to families that were working on a large scale before the Reformation and it was the poor who became the most fanatical Calvinists. It was preached that everything beyond a reasonable subsistence should be set aside for the poor, and disciplinary action was taken against bankers - the old prejudices continuing until the middle of the seventeenth century. So long as a religious revival retains it character, it is not in its nature to encourage mammonism... John Wesley, when he drew up his first printed rules for Methodists in the eighteenth century, condemned usury on biblical grounds and had to be made to see that this was demanding the impossible, so that he retreated and prescribed only a moderate rate. He sketched out the view that the very virtues of Christians might lead to prosperity and thence to a decline of religion. But it is only very late in the day that Puritanism is in any sense the ally of mammonism.
-- Dictionary of the History of Ideas, I 396b-397a