The Gate Changed. The Gatekeeping Didn't.
New England's theological architecture produced the original version of every ideological justification the American system still uses. To understand how, you need to understand John Calvin's doctrine of predestination. It created a psychological problem severe enough to restructure an entire civilization's relationship to work and wealth.
Calvin's system held that God predestines every soul to salvation or damnation before birth. This is unconditional. Nothing you do earns it or changes it. The elect receive irresistible grace. The damned do not. You cannot know with certainty which group you belong to. You cannot earn salvation through works, because salvation is predetermined. You cannot lose it through sin, because it is irresistible. But you also cannot confirm it through introspection alone, because the human heart is deceitful.
This created what scholars call salvation anxiety. A persistent, irresolvable uncertainty about the most consequential question a person could face. In Catholicism, the Church offered mechanisms for managing this. Confession, penance, indulgences, monastic retreat. Calvinism stripped all of those away. There was no priest to absolve you, no sacrament to confirm your status, no institution that could mediate between you and an inscrutable God. You were alone with the question.
The Puritans developed a solution that transformed Western civilization. They called it visible sainthood. While ultimate election remains hidden in the mind of God, they argued, genuine election produces observable effects. God's grace, when it enters a person, necessarily produces virtue. Industry, discipline, temperance, frugality. These virtues, exercised in one's worldly calling, necessarily produce material prosperity. Therefore, prosperity could be read as probable evidence of election. Not proof. The Puritans were too theologically sophisticated for that. But evidence. A signal.
The logical chain is the prototype for every subsequent American meritocratic ideology. God predestines the elect....