1. "Deuteronomistic Logic" There's this arc in the Bible. Near the beginning of the Old Testament (say, Deuteronomy), there's a lot of "God will reward you in

1. "Deuteronomistic Logic" There's this arc in the Bible. Near the beginning of the Old Testament (say, Deuteronomy), there's a lot of "God will reward you in this life for righteousness" (heaven wasn't even invented yet) and "look how many cattle and wives he has; surely he is righteous; don't you want to be like him?" It's only later that this starts to change. You see this change a little in Job, where a righteous man is punished by God. And then it kicks into overdrive with Jesus, who is a reformer. So it's not like the "Prosperity Gospel" messages aren't there -- they are, in the Old Testament. But they miss all the subsequent reform. 2. "The English Civil War" One weird thing about all this is that the Calvinists (who I think of as aligned with Cromwell) went north; they became Puritans and went to New England. Their descendants also ended up, later, in the Pacific Northwest. They became abolitionists and such. And the English who went to Virginia and the Carolinas, and who practiced slavery, were more aligned with the royalists. The plantation was like an exaggerated bizarro version of the English "country home". Which then makes it strange that a lot of this Calvinist, Cromwellite stuff eventually ended up "on the right" in American society, with the "planters".