Secular Calvinism: A Manifesto for the Age of Abundance

In an age overflowing with possibility, poverty becomes less a condition and more a refusal.

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Written By: Bryan Theunissen

“Don’t be poor.”

Three words that operate as mirror, challenge, and moral disturbance. They feel abrasive at first encounter because they cut through the narratives that have shaped the last half-century. But the deeper force of the phrase is the way it highlights something we rarely confront: in an era of unprecedented technological leverage, global access, and informational saturation, poverty has changed its meaning. The old categories no longer describe the world we inhabit.

Secular Calvinism is an attempt to articulate a framework equal to the new conditions of civilisation.

I. Poverty as Verdict

For most of human history, poverty was destiny—an inheritance that could not be escaped. Today it functions differently. When knowledge is free, tools are abundant, and the channels of opportunity remain open to anyone with a device and a minimal threshold of discipline, poverty becomes a statement about spirit as much as circumstance.

The word poor has always carried a double register: material lack and spiritual contraction.

To be poor in 2025 increasingly signals a collapse of direction, energy, autonomy, and imagination. Material hardship still matters—but it is now entangled with a deeper condition of disuse, unused capacity, and abandoned agency.

II. Abundance as Test

The world has shifted into an abundance regime. Capital, information, networks, markets, and creative tools are accessible in ways that would have looked supernatural to every prior century. What once required institutions, patrons, and lifetime apprenticeships is now available on demand.

Abundance is not a cushion.
It is an examination.

It asks only one question:
What will you do with what is already in your hands?

The majority answer, increasingly, is avoidance. When leverage skyrockets, the consequences of inaction become sharper. Abundance exposes the gap between potential and practice. It doesn’t judge; it reveals.

III. Ambition as Virtue

In this environment, ambition becomes a primary virtue. Ambition animates the will, sharpens attention, pushes skill into existence, and aligns daily choices with long-term freedom. It is the antidote to decay.

Ambition is not vanity. It is the discipline required to make use of the tools civilisation now extends to almost everyone. A society that cultivates ambition becomes dynamic, inventive, and resilient. A society that distrusts ambition drifts toward bureaucracy, stagnation, and self-protective decline.

Ambition is the only reliable engine for turning abundance into capability.

IV. Two Moral Operating Systems

We now inhabit a landscape shaped by two incompatible civilisational codes.

A. Late-Stage Redistributionism

(Progressivism’s successor ideology)

• Sees the world as zero-sum.

• Interprets inequality through a static oppressor/oppressed binary.

• Encourages individuals to locate the cause of failure outside themselves.

• Celebrates powerlessness as a form of moral purity.

• Produces cultures of learned helplessness, administrative inflation, and stagnation.

B. Secular Calvinism

• Sees the world as overwhelmingly positive-sum.

• Frames outcomes through capability, discipline, and intelligent use of technological leverage.

• Encourages individuals to convert abundance into mastery.

• Treats agency as a sacred resource.

• Produces cultures of competence, long-term investment, and compounding prosperity.

These frameworks are not competing preferences; they are incompatible software systems for human flourishing. One dissipates energy; the other amplifies it.

V. The Engine of Manufactured Poverty

The victim/oppressor framing actively generates the conditions it claims to cure. It distributes interpretive tools that diminish agency:

• It trains people to prioritise explanations over actions.

• It rewards public displays of fragility.

• It casts aspiration as betrayal.

• It reframes progress as complicity.

• It encourages dependence on mediating authorities—administrators, experts, bureaucratic clergy.

The result is economic paralysis paired with moral confusion: a population taught to demand outcomes from systems they no longer feel responsible for shaping.

Poverty grows in this environment because the cultural immune system has been disabled.

VI. The Civilisational Record

Where radical agency becomes the organising principle—Singapore, Estonia, 20th-century East Asian growth miracles, American immigrant cultures, frontier economies, entrepreneurial clusters—progress compounds. Wealth accumulates across generations. Dignity expands. Institutions stabilise because they are staffed by competent adults.

Where victimhood becomes the organising principle—Soviet experiments, late-stage welfare bureaucracies, progressive cities, elite universities—entropy accelerates. Productive individuals exit. The administrative class swells. Standards decay. Poverty becomes less a condition than a culture.

History speaks clearly:
agency is the single most renewable resource in the human story.

VII. The Tenets of Secular Calvinism

1. Agency is indivisible.
No institution can grant it. It emerges from habit and decision.

2. Capability compounds.
Every skill leveraged into action multiplies future options.

3. Responsibility is emancipatory.
Taking ownership enlarges the world available to you.

4. Ambition dignifies.
It is the mechanism by which individuals rise and societies grow.

5. Complacency corrodes.
Abandoned potential decays into resentment.

6. Attention is destiny.
What you repeatedly focus on becomes your character.

7. Mastery is a civic virtue.
Competent citizens create functional states.

8. Abundance demands participation.
Refusing to engage with available tools is a form of self-impoverishment.

VIII. Minimum Viable Protocol

Secular Calvinism proposes a daily foundation:

• Wake early, act early.

• Protect blocks of deep work.

• Build and ship publicly.

• Refuse the pull of low-grade distraction.

• Strengthen the institutions that deserve you; abandon the ones that do not.

• Carry yourself as a free agent, not a dependent.

These actions are not aesthetic choices. They preserve the bandwidth required to think, build, and remain sovereign in a culture that increasingly encourages passivity.

IX. The Final Thesis

The modern world surrounds us with tools, leverage, information, capital access, and pathways upward that previous centuries could not imagine. Against that backdrop, the most dangerous poverty today is the poverty of self-concept.

Secular Calvinism restores the older intuition that human beings are shaped by effort, courage, standards, and discipline. It offers a counter-culture that treats abundance as responsibility and treats capability as the highest form of respect for oneself and others.

Don’t be poor
means:
Choose expansion over contraction.
Choose creation over spectatorship.
Choose spirit over drift.

In an age overflowing with possibility, poverty becomes less a condition and more a refusal. And refusal is reversible the moment a person decides to engage again with the abundance that surrounds them.

Bryan Theunissen is a South African doctor with a stubborn streak of optimism. Even after years of watching bad policy win, he still insists on pointing to better choices.