The book reflects the general longing of the Soviet humanitarian disciplines of that time to connect the evolution of religious beliefs with the Marxist doctrine of the development of industrial forces, and to interpret it in the terms of “basis” and “superstructure”. The author put a special attention at the issue of the social nature of such type of Protestantism, as Calvinism. The aim of the book was to show a certain ideological structure over the economic basis typical for the epoch of the early capitalism.

 Those times, the ideology was mostly manifested itself in the forms of religion. So, the author accented his position, separating it from the points of view of German historians ‒ his elder contemporaries, such as M. Weber, and W. Sombart, ‒ who worked out the theory of dependence the economic forms from religious reasons. In his book, Kapeliush tried to overturn their “ultra-idealistic approach upside down”, and to show the “real core” of the problem.

 Developing the ideas of Engels in his work “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”, Kapeliush wrote that the Lutheran Reformation “stopped at the half way and turn right, it started to serve interests of the absolute monarchy, and Calvinism became a banner of Republicans and a transcription of bourgeois interests of the time, reflecting the economic decay of Germany and striking growth and flourishing of Holland and England”. On his opinion, the history of the most advanced countries of that period proves that Calvinism was closely connected with the epoch of the early capitalism, and served as its “social and political basement”, its “slogan”, corresponding completely to the spirit of the bourgeois revolution. The author noted that the ideology of Calvinism depended on the development of economic, and was transformed according to it. "Turning upside down" the theory of laic ascetics formulated by Weber, Kapeliush found an explanation for the ascetic trends in the economics of the initial accumulation of capital and growing production. At that, he wrote that it would be wrong to underestimate certain back effect of religious ideology at the economic basis, because Marxism did not reject that fact.