GOP wants govt. to work with churches but NOT to help the poor and sick?

Three Rules of Calvinism.

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ALTHOUGH CALVINISM WAS central to the faith of the Pilgrim Fathers, and its tenets remain embedded in more than one form of modern Protestant Christianity, few Americans consciously believe in Calvinist doctrines in a religious sense. Yet a great many, of all religions and none, who may know nothing at all about Calvinism as such, nevertheless act in accordance with its principles. How it came about that an almost forgotten religion has left such a powerful non-religious residue is a question that has been much studied and debated. What is beyond debate is the enduring authority of Calvinist values. However often overlaid by transient moods, however often proclaimed dead and buried, they remain vigorously strong just below the surface of American life, invisibly shaping everyday choices and fundamental attitudes.
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The Calvinist rules are simple, and binding. Rule Number One is for high-earning winners. Rule Number Two is for the great mass of working stiffs of varying affluence or poverty but all losers in their own eyes. Rule Number Three is for the non-Calvinists among the losers, most of them poor, who refuse to accept Rule Number Two.
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Rule Number One states that earned wealth is no impediment to virtue. That this rule contradicts the reported remarks of Jesus has been ignored. Likewise, the underlying Calvinist doctrine, which states that wealth is actually a sign of divine favor for the predestined, has long been forgotten. Yet this rule induces Americans to view the desire to become rich as most praiseworthy, and success in doing so as a moral achievement as well, for earned wealth is seen as the result of both sacrificial exertion in earning money, and self-denying restraint in spending it. Far from being viewed as self-seeking materialists, those who accumulate wealth are respected in rough proportion to the amount, so long as it is the fruit of their own individual efforts. As for the super-winners who earn the most fabulous amounts, they are greatly admired, more so than all other Americans, including the most famous war heroes.
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Rule Number Two: failure is not the result of misfortune or injustice, but of divine disfavor. Just as the ability to become very rich is next to sanctity, an inability to do so is next to sin, indeed almost sinful in itself.
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Many Americans who may be affluent but who cannot earn whatever amount of money they consider adequate and proper, are oppressed by a powerful sense of guilt. In a country that so greatly respects and admires high-earning winners, losers find it hard to preserve their self-esteem. A great many merely lead lives of quiet desperation, searching for distractions, eager to immerse themselves in whatever will take their minds off their failure, from vehement religion to televised sports. Others remedy despair with addiction to drink, to drugs, and above all to food -- the only fully legal, hence most widespread, addiction. Rule Number Two has powerful political consequences. It explains why the United States has never had a significant socialist party: losers blame themselves rather than the system, hating themselves instead of resenting the winners. It explains why no major presidential candidate has even tried to challenge the sharp inequalities of turbo-capitalism.
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The result is that in a country that is literally of the winners, by the winners, for the winners, the losers have no political expression of their own. Nobody denies it to them--it is the losers themselves who want so much to identify with winners that they deny their votes to any candidate who tries to represent their interests. So, many losers vote for one or another of the winners' candidates; others prefer not to vote at all, not only because of lethargy or ignorance, as the winners always say, but because they have nobody to vote for. In recent national elections, almost half of all the eligible voters of the United States did not bother to cast their votes.
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There are plenty of non-Calvinists among the losers, and mostly they are actually poor rather than just under-achievers by their own estimate. For them there is Rule Number Three: those who do not accept Rule Number Two, who are not paralyzed by guilt, and who are too uneducated to express their resentment in legally approved venues, are destined to end up behind bars. Rule Number Three is implemented very effectively in strict laws that prohibit many things which are allowed or tolerated in other countries, in strict law enforcement, and in long prison sentences including an abundance of 40, 50, or 60-year terms as well as mandatory life sentences without parole. Only the sadly impoverished and chaotic Russian Federation has as great a proportion of its citizens in prison as the affluent and well-governed United States. There were over 1.8 million Americans in prison at last count.
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