According to Weber, the Protestant work ethic evolved from the desire of individuals to engage in Christian asceticism--to work in a calling, not in the monastic life as Martin Luther advocated, but in the real world of economics (Weber, 1958, pp. 180-181). Thus capitalism was a byproduct of Protestantism. Modern capitalism, however, has emerged free of its religious origin.
According to Weber's theory, a certain percentage of society is preordained to be destitute. As Jesus noted in several places in the New Testament: " . . . for ye have the poor always with you" (Matt 26:11, Mark 14:7, John 12:8). The disposition of this segment of the population has long been governed by the values implicit in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Fortunate members of society are called on to attend to the needs of their less fortunate neighbors. A tradition in ancient Jewish society was for the prosperous members of the farming community to refrain from harvesting the corners of their fields or from gleaning their harvests so that a portion could be left for the poor and the stranger (Lev 19:9-10). According to Mohan (1988), the greatest impetus to the development of social welfare comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition: "One can easily distinguish the evolution--from alms to taxes, charity to public welfare, and compassion to justice--of the welfare state as an historical response to growing human problems" (p. 37).
In the United States, the concept of the public responsibility for the poor was imported by English colonists. From the time of the Tudor period in sixteenth-century England, the government took on the burden of caring for those people who were unable to care for themselves, particularly when their first lines of defense, market conditions or family, were inoperable: " . . . the development of government responsibility for the poor and indigent took place over a period of seventy years, from 1531 to 1601 during the reign o...