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There is a school of thought that in the North East in some cases they took the Puritan ideas a little too far. The idea goes that God chooses who are the "chosen people" and he chooses who are the damned people through no fault of their own, and not by any merit, but by the grace of God. Now, this idea had the opposite affect of its intent, probably.

So, if God does not bless you with good health and good fortune, then you were probably not saved. Wealth and health were signs of moral righteousness. Thus people were pushed through peer pressure to put on a happy face and healthy face with regard to business success and related success. If you did not put forth this effort, your salvation might have been suspect.

So, these Americans became thrifty, workaholics, and the summary of its gospel was in Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac." This gives America its vibrancy, can do attitude, and its unbelievable energy.

The draw back is if you are unfortunate in business or in your profession. The culture tends to see this as moral failure in many cases, although it probably is not as bad as it once was.

In America, the word "loser" is a bad word. So, we are pushed very hard to find a way to "win." This can have a negative effect on our spiritual development, and you find extreme reactions against this in cycles over the generations, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the spiritual movements from the 1960's. Many of these spiritual movements were Americans swinging from one pendulum to the other: hard work and no play, followed by no work and wild spiritualism that soon died and morphed into cynicism.

Think of today some quasi-spiritual movement in America that you know will die out after about 5 or 10 years. I think a lot of the natural foods movement, some environmentalism, and the like are some of the examples. Yeah, at all times these things are important, but it seems that there is a cultural fad element at the time of these things, and soon the culture will move away from it to something else. The true believers will still be there, though, but the wider culture will move on to hard work again followed by some other new quasi-spiritual movement.