[ElevenLathe]

(IANA scholar, but I play one on the internet.)

No, Weber is not the current state-of-the-art, but you can see how was a bit suspicious (given the evidence that Weber was working with) that the Reformation and the first meaningful economic growth possibly ever (the "Great Divergence") in history seem to have started at approximately the same time and in the same places (England, parts of the Holy Roman Empire, Holland).

We now have scholarship based on earlier evidence (it turns out that availability of the printing press massively increased the surviving sources we have about "early modern" Europe versus the earlier manuscript-driven ages, so our sources have a distinct bias toward the post-Gutenberg world -- and the printing press itself is probably a major node in the web of causes and effects that drive this transition!) and AIUI the best current guess is that the Black Death is what initially kickstarted economic growth (the "Little Divergence"), possibly by effectively ending serfdom in those places as agricultural labor become much dearer than before the plague. The Reformation, under this view of things, is more of a consequence of economic growth -- the ranks of increasingly numerous rich-and-influential commoners and burghers asserting their place in a social order defined by the Roman church -- rather than a cause of it.