Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

As previously mentioned, the Puritans saw hard work as a foundational way to glorify God. Since wealth is a natural outcome of hard work, striving for wealth itself became not only OK but expected. Plus if God rewarded his chosen with eternal life, wouldn’t he also reward them in earthly endeavors? The richer you got, the more evidence he loved you back. These religious beliefs created an economic engine that propelled New England to dominate Atlantic trade. But, as Cotton Mather put it in the 1690s, “religion begot prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.”26 In this way, in addition to being a mistake, American capitalism was also inevitable. Those driven by greed instead of piety began perverting these Puritan ideals to justify their own acquisitiveness, and that engine the Puritans had created became too powerful to control.