After 1960, well-funded campaigns advanced individualism and reduced support for community-based progressive programs, including Great Society programs. The term “meritocracy” spread quickly, adopted by progressives and conservatives alike. Conservatives asserted that unions, poverty, and public institutions manifested unwillingness to “work hard.” They argued that democracy depended on “free enterprise,” which they imagined could solve all problems. Economic and cultural turbulence energized organizations such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Ronald Reagan, George Gilder, Milton Friedman, and others flourished selling individualism. Their accusations of self-made failure shamed anyone who struggled against social or cultural circumstances, racial or gender inequalities, the results of globalization, or inadequate access to education and other opportunities. Presidents Reagan and Clinton both rejected the welfare state and demanded “personal responsibility,” an updated term for self-making. A constant refrain that taxes punish success also drew on the myth and painted the recipients of progressive programs as freeloaders.

Wrestling with the eternal mystery of human agency, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Euro-Americans built cultures in which the idea of self-making could begin to take hold. Along the way they developed new mindsets about self-fashioning, ambition, the value of work, materialist consumption, and whether individuals or communities were the proper beneficiaries of people’s improvement. The eighteenth-century’s prominent cultural movements—the Enlightenment’s intellectual developments and the First Great Awakening’s religious revivals—were both context for and products of the growing legitimacy of human agency. In very different ways, their participants and storytellers engaged in transitions that made it possible to imagine self-making. Cotton Mather and other religious leaders struggled with witch trials, epidemics, and spiritual challenges, including how to respond to the Great Awakening’s popular enthusiasms. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin explored science and politics, invented useful devices and civic institutions. Uncertainties about human agency continued, but there was no doubt about the responsibility for self-improvement to serve God and community.

Mid-nineteenth-century American stories of self-making increasingly oriented toward material ambition rather than service. Values evolved within cultural venues as diverse as advice literature, temperance advocacy, business guidance, and phrenology. Expanding expectations for “self-reliance,” for example, promoted beliefs that alcoholism and status were entirely matters of personal choice and moved mainstream Americans toward accepting self-made success and failure. After the Civil War, more stories offered some version of self-making—always judging, prodding, urging, and rewarding. But no consensus had yet emerged on what it meant, what qualified someone as self-made, or how to measure a “self-made” man’s worth. Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1872 compilation of traditional biographies praised service and disdained wealth, James D. McCabe, Jr.’s 1871 anthology embraced wealth as a measure of worth. Despite her fame, his volume sold vastly better. His often repeated “We are emphatically a nation of self-made men” glorified a materialist American exceptionalism and a social and economic system that demeaned many while it praised a few.

In the seventeenth century the Renaissance and Reformation inspired worldly ambitions and self-fashioning among Europeans. New opportunities, such as commercialization and exploration, along with new pressures such as mounting poverty and vagrancy in England, threatened communities and traditions. English adventurers sought their fortunes in Virginia and New England, but their loyalties to traditional duties to God and community varied widely. The lives, worries, and circumstances of Captain John Smith, explorer and self-promoter, and Robert Keayne, a prosperous Boston merchant, illustrate emerging ways of thinking about self-made fates among these colonists. Both pursued their worldly ambitions through incessant work, and they participated in an early stage of shaping the criteria by which Americans would judge successes and failures. They also expressed strong beliefs about fostering communities and working for them while they pursued their own ambitions. At the same time, and like their peers, they guarded the boundaries of inclusion in those communities, defining narrowly who could belong, who merited respect, and whose exploitation and destruction they felt was justified.

The myth of self-made success triumphed in the new millennium, incentivizing claims that are impervious to reality. Prominent examples include George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Kylie Jenner, who began their lives in great financial and social wealth, yet they all believe they were self-made. Bush and Trump endorsed policies that lowered taxes for elites but cut programs that served everyone else, arguing that taxes punish success and social support programs foster irresponsibility. The myth eased reducing constraints on financial exploits, making possible both great fortunes and economic crises, such as the Great Recession that began in 2007 and led to taxpayers’ bailouts of private institutions. The megahit reality TV show Shark Tank displayed the myth on steroids, starring “self-made” entrepreneurs. In contrast, the despair of struggling people accused of self-made failure and willful irresponsibility has been deadly. Such accusations can be profitable, as J.D. Vance’s career has shown. This myth-made culture ignores the communities and institutions that make wealth generation possible. It frees tycoons to acquire and donate large fortunes, garnering acclaim as philanthropists.

Religious groups outside of the Christian tradition have slowly been incorporated into American civil religion. The chapter discusses four major world religions and their inclusion in the religious landscape of the United States: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The chapter also explores some new religious movements with distinctly American origins, Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientism.