The idea that material success signals virtue, while poverty signals personal failure is an old American one. For sure there is a thread running directly from Pilgrims to modern politics. An old moral thread that took root early in America. A thread from the early Protestant culture that the Founding Fathers softened, shifted, and later returned in newer forms.
But the Puritan thread is not the whol story, nor a straight line one. For sure, early colonial traditions influences later American culture, but the harsher modern version came much later. The Founding Fathers softened it. Later revivalist, evangelical, and fundamentalist movements harden it into a sharper moral story about wealth, poverty, and personal decisions.
From about 1620 to 1750, especially in New England, the colonies carried strong religious habits that often linked outward condition to inward worth. Prosperity was Godly, hardship was failure, sin, or disorder.
From about 1750 to 1800, the revolutionary centered around a broader mix of Enlightenment rationalism and growing pluralism. The new republic aimed to build a political framework wide enough to hold religious difference.
Later in the 1800’s, evangelical revivalism pushed faith back into public life in a more emotional and morally binary way. Through movements like the Social Gospel, they pushed Christianity into government and toward charity, reform, and justice. The modern result is a political divide. Some still read success as virtue and hardship as personal failure.
Historians and great thinkers understand what the Founding Fathers were trying to do. Justice Alito, reflecting on the extraordinary achievement and balance of the Founding moment, said,
“It is just about impossible to imagine anything like that happening today, but that’s what happened in Philadelphia in 1787.”
That quote comes from a very conservative Supreme Court Justice and is a testament to a moral thread the founders were striving for. A quote that frames the time as a tolerant and pluristic founding.
