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gjm comments on Open thread, Sept. 1-7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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"Deserve" has two meanings. Strong: It would be unjust for me not to have X. Weak: It would not be unjust for me to have X. Some people clearly strongly-deserve to be rich (e.g., Norman Borlaug). Some clearly don't even weakly-deserve to be rich (e.g., a very successful thief). It's plausible that many (most?) rich people fall in the middle.
The literal religious "prosperity gospel", and its various secular parallels, tell rich people they strongly-deserve to be rich: God has made them so and God's judgement is impeccable, or The Market has made them so and is the only meaningful way to answer the question of where the money should go, or whatever. One can feel queasy about this while also saying that most rich people weakly-deserve their wealth and needn't feel guilty about it.
That's not how it works in Calvinism.
Essentially, Calvin believed in predestination (at birth each human is predestined to go to Heaven or Hell and he can't change that) and believed in signs of predestination -- while you can never be certain, you can make, in LW terms, high credence estimates whether a particular person is going to Hell or Heaven. These signs revolved around pious behavior and the interesting thing is that working hard was a virtue, but spending money on unnecessary consumption was a sin. Basically, being a scrooge and accumulating money was a sign of piousness -- evidence used to update the estimate of that person going to Heaven.
I don't think contemporary prosperity-gospel preachers are thinking (or speaking or writing) in those terms.