That's not the point. The point is that The Market is popular among a large section of white Protestant America. Most Americans believe that hard work is rewarded, and that vice is punished. Antipathy to the state and its "handouts" is embedded deep in American common sense.
[WS:] I think it is exactly the point. The Protestant views in question were also widely spread in Europe, but they did not dominate the world views of the lower classes there - socialism did. So one must look beyond the contents of religious ideas or ideologies to explain their popularity.
Max Weber does that by the concept of "elective affinity" - ideas are adopted in a self-serving fashion by economically and politically powerful groups, and then trickled down with their money and political influence. That is how he explains the spread of Protestantism in Western Europe - the nascent bourgeoisie found more affinity with Protestant doctrine of wealth as a sign of personal salvation than with the Catholic doctrine of "merit making" i.e. sharing that wealth with the church to obtain salvation. Protestantism spread because it legitimized the bourgeois wealth - it did not create bourgeoisie and its values.
The difference between Europe and US is social structure not ideology. European peasant and working classes were historically communitarian in their orientation (see for example Robert Brenner "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe" in _Past and present_, 97:1982.), which had elective affinity to Catholicism, and later mutualism and socialism. Migration to the US destroyed that communitarianism (with a few exceptions like the Amish) and leaving the immigrant masse in the hands of Protestant and evangelical preachers (Hofstadter makes that point at length in his _Anti-intellectualism in the American life_). So the end result is that the destruction of peasant communitarianism in the "new World" resulted in the wholesale adoption of the dominant class values, which at that time happen to be WASP. (Thomas and Znaniecki make a similar point about polish peasants in America; Theda Skocpol in _Protecting Soldiers and Mothers_ makes a somewhat different structural argument - social divisions cutting across class line in the US which did not allow the crystallization and institutionalization of a coherent labor movement the way it was possible in Europe).
So the valorization of the individual in America was not created by Protestantism, but merely legitimated by it, and on the top if without much competition. What created it was the destruction of communitarianism first by emigration to the New World, and later by the government drive to populate the West with white settlers - which again uprooted many East coast communities, instilled "pioneer" spirit of individualism, and created an illusion, alive to this day, that one does need to solve any social problems, just move to a different location to avoid them.
Wojtek