As Zelizer (1979) points out, life insurance was in the early nineteenth-century United States seen as morally dubious: a profane intrusion into matters of God's will. Above all, life insurance had uncomfortable similarities to gambling: "the insured were seen as `betting' with their lives against the company" (Zelizer 1979, p. 151). By the end of the nineteenth century, driven in part by a shift in religious views from determinism to a voluntaristic viewpoint, life insurance had won cultural legitimacy, but gambling remained stigmatized and, in most jurisdictions in the US, illegal.