Today there is a fruitful dispute between secularists and those who argue the compatibility between Christianity, with its religious precepts and intrinsic system of ethical values, and the liberal democracy. The second group is however hopelessly wrong, as much as the first. This endeavor is epistemologically wrong and the argument is pretty simple. The institutions of divine right, such as the Church or family, shall be subject to the single principle or hierarchy of being, that goes beyond the narrow human (...) consciousness and action. From this perspective, these institutions may be called undemocratic or they do not respect the ideology of inalienable human rights, as formulated at the present time. (shrink)

Starting with the Reformation, as a social and religious mass movement, the institution of the “state” became synonymous with authority, and until the Enlightenment, the mundane absolute order deployed varied patterns. Beginning with Calvinism, which legitimized the expansion of state institutions, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a shift to modernization. Puritan authoritarianism, based on “saintly” discipline and on quasi-marginal freedom, developed a new, impersonal and voluntary political doctrine. While one generally associates Anglo-American Puritanism with political freedom, democracy or capitalism, (...) we argue for a very different perspective, namely that the Puritans were both partisans of a medievalist paradigm as well as genuine enemies of democratic, liberal and secular values. Moreover, we emphasize that the Anglo-American radical Puritanism was only tempered by the Enlightenment. The enlightened philosophes were the defense advocates of liberal and pluralist ideas, and came out victorious of the competiton of ideas with their Puritan rivals. (shrink)

For many reasons, it is true that the Protestant Reformation unleashed the forces that lay behind the emergence of capitalism. Such a system was compatible with the emancipation of individuals, their mentalities, due to specific societal reforms and transformations. Therefore, it gave birth, in an unprecedented way, to a “new form of capitalism”. But the main idea I want to stress in this article is that the capitalist ethos was present before the Reformation, many centuries ago, in what is called (...) now the “Christian spirit”. In this direction, I emphasize many theories which disagree with the Weber’s well-known thesis about the relation between capitalism and religion, especially when it comes to generalize a particular result that is both theologically vague and empirically disprovable. (shrink)