So much for the genealogical link between Puritanism and permissiveness:

"Calvin...condemned indiscriminate alms-giving...and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise undesirable."

"[T]he greatest of evils is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own ‘idle, irregular and wicked courses’, that the truest charity is not to enervate them by relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be unnecessary." Svend Ranulf cites V.F. Calverton, a radical left writer writing in the 1920s that socialism in America was hostile to Protestant middle-class values and was entirely led by members of the areligious upper bourgeoisie. Elsewhere, he adds it was really European ideas in opposition to indigenous American values: