The, God, And God Bless The United States Of America Essay

“God bless you, and God bless the United States of America” – Ronald Regan (Goldenthal 2015). Is our modern capitalist society where wealth is earned and maintained by private individuals originated from religion, specifically Christianity? Max Weber believed that religion played a central role in the western world’s economic development (Ritzer & Guppy 2014). In the article “God Bless America: How Christ became Central to Capitalism and US politics”, Goldenthal (2015) discussed the idea of how God or the idea of Christianization became the religion of the United States of America. The United States has not always used Christian terms to support their ideas of politics and capitalism. In this article, Princeton University professor, Kruse has stated that corporate America invented Christian American (Goldenthal 2015). It traces back to the Great Depression that happened in 1929 when the stock markets crashed; coalitions of businessmen and religious leaders used God’s name in order to regain confidence and mobility in the markets (Goldenthal 2015). With America’s current state of society, I will contrast the ways Karl Marx and Weber would view the capitalistic society differently through concepts such as rationalization and false consciousness. I argue that the ideas of Protestantism (Christianity faith) and Calvinism (the doctrine of predestination) emerged into capitalistic ideas, through American corporations and government using the forces of religion as a distortion to…