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Abstract
This article examines the importance of Calvinism in producing the public/political “mind-set” of the United States, and how, after the Second World War, the export of this mind-set was as significant as the export of democracy, rock-’n’-roll, jeans, and Coca-Cola. It discusses the historical legacy and evolution of Calvinism from a civil religion to a religion of civility, and how the form and manner of Calvinist thinking—more specifically its ethic and aesthetic—has persisted in a secular manner so that much that Calvin would have found damnable is now intrinsic to the “religion of civility.” It then concludes that the central principles and practices of this religion of civility have had success within nations already “Christianized” but, perhaps understandably, not outside of that sphere.
Notes
This article is based on a paper presented at ISSEI’s 14th International Conference, “Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future,” The Catholic University of Portugal, Porto, 4–8 August, 2014.
1. Cuddihy, No Offense, xii.
2. In this essay I am not interested in making a mono-causal argument; rather, I am identifying a persistent feature of the public character of the United States.
3. Cited in Kingdon and Linden, Calvin and Calvinism, 7.
4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vol. 1); and “Although the Puritan rigor that prevailed at the birth of the English colonies of America has already become much weaker, you still find extraordinary traces of it in the habits and in the laws” (vol. 2).
5. Bottum, An Anxious Age, 10.
6. Winthrop, City upon a Hill. Cf. Docksey, “The City on the Hill”; and Linker, “Calvin and American Exceptionalism.”
7. See Holt, ed., Adaptations of Calvinism, 1.
8. Cuddihy, No Offense, 4.
9. Bradd, “Calvinism and North America,” 50.
10. Neal, History of the Puritans, vol. 1, 75.
11. Cf. Walzer, The Revolution; and Wolin, Politics and Vision, chap. 6.
12. Cf. Benedict, Christ’s Churches.
13. To take just a few examples: Gardner, Constitutional Documents; Pearl, London; Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty, and Liberty and Reformation. Marxists such as Hill reinterpreted the revolution as a “bourgeois revolution.” Though in 1985 Morrill wrote in “Sir William Brereton” that “Historians have begun to recover the Puritan Revolution.” See Coffey, Introduction to John Goodwin, 1–12.
14. Benedict, Christ’s Churches, 52.
15. For a useful discussion of the relationship between the Jesuits and French crown leading up to the revolution, see Nelson, The Jesuits.
16. Bottum, An Anxious Age, “Preface,” and 15.
17. Kant, Critique of Judgment, part 1 (any edition), para. 20.
18. Calvin, Institutes, 104. Amongst the many insightful studies on Calvin and the visual arts, see Vanhaelen, The Wake of Iconoclasm; Dyrness, Reformed Theology; and Finney, ed., Seeing Beyond the Word.
19. Cuddihy, No Offense, 192, 195–202. The phrase “decorum of imperfection” comes from an article by Charles Mignon on the New England puritan poet Edward Taylor (1645–1729).
20. Fuchs, “Calvinist Ethics,” 146.
21. Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, 99–100. Certainly Kuyper does not exculpate Calvin from his role as author of the prosecution of Servetus. Rather, he argues that Calvin was unable to free himself from the Medieval machinery that he, like all reformers, had inherited, and which had been thoroughly normalized throughout Christendom.
22. Ibid., 101. Here I think is the key divide between the free republics of Catholic Italy, with their martial virtues, and the Calvinist communities.
23. Calvin, Institutes, 1174.
24. Calvin, Institutes, 1173.
25. Calvin, Letters, vol. 3, 31.
26. Calvin, Institutes, 965.
27. Cf. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 148–50.
28. Cf. ibid., 163.
29. Calvin’s Institutes, 958–59. Cf. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 153.
30. Calvin, Institutes, 2.1487.
31. Irrespective of the designations such as Pilgrims, Puritans, Separatists, Non-Separatists etc., the first migrants to the new colonies can be gathered under the umbrella term of Calvinists. Thus Holifield writes in Theology in America that “Long before their arrival, European Catholics and English Anglicans had conducted a Christian mission to the New World, but it was the coming of the English Calvinists to New England that produced the first substantial corpus of theological writings” (25).
32. Cf. Cristi, Political Religion, 50.
33. See Winship, Godly Republicanism, chap. 9.
34. Cf. Engels, in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific: “Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest bourgeoisie of his time” (18).
35. Cuddihy, No Offense, 210. On the Calvinist role in the atomizing process of community, compare McIntyre, Short History of Ethics, chap. 9, and After Virtue, 121. The general thrust of the argument is repeated by Gregory in The Unintended Reformation.
36. Cuddihy, No Offense, 8.
37. Certainly, the Bill of Rights also has its forbear in the Magna Carta. Puritanism is itself but part of a much larger socio-theological heritage.
38. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chap. 9.
39. Cuddihy, No Offense, chap. 7.
40. Ibid., 165.
41. Indeed, one effect of the American Revolution was that slavery and the slave trade persisted in the United States long after its abolition in the United Kingdom.
42. Cf. Cusset, French Theory. In his conclusion, Cuddihy cites Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s definition of difference as “perennial postponement,” from her Preface to Derrida’s Grammatology, as exactly the kind of ethics of the interim he sees as defining American society (No Offense, 210).
43. Ironically, the greatest vehicle of the youth revolt was music. Covey sums up his argument about the almost entirely negative impact of Calvinism on music in America thus: “Calvinism was lethal to music, secular and sacred, in direct proportion to its other influences” (“Puritanism and Music,” 388). That is very true: what Calvinism contributed was the political space in which the musical creations coming from other religious and community traditions could flourish and intersect.
44. Cf. Cuddihy, No Offense, 210. Marx, of course, had noted in the Communist Manifesto that bourgeois society made “all that is solid melt to air,” but it was equally the case that all the great critics of the contemporary norms of bourgeois society (Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche) were themselves—just like the students who embraced them in the post-World War 2 period—not only bourgeois but also thinkers who sought to destroy traditional community more intensely than any liberal: Marx finding in private property and the division of labour itself the source of alienation; Darwin in effect arguing that tradition was nothing more than a mode of adaptation and thus unworthy of special veneration; Nietzsche seeing Christianity as a wrong turn to be torn out root and branch; and Freud dissolving all social roles and society, including, the family to a bundle of drives.
45. This is not to suggest that Protestant peoples were more promiscuous: the ideal of chastity within Catholic countries may have been important in monastic orders though a reading of Boccaccio, Capellanus or Erasmus suggests that the monastics were as liable to honour the ideal in the breech as in their sexual purity. In spite of the teachings of the Church, the Catholic world as such was not renunciative.
46. The Daily Mail, May 31, 2014 reported the story of the Christian baker in Colorado who violated civil rights law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same sex couple http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2644136/Panel-Baker-make-cakes-gay-weddings.html.
47. Cuddihy, No Offense, 4–5.
48. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 8.
49. The “conservatives” see themselves as living in a world subject to “political correctness,” a world intent on destroying the absolutes they think more venerable (which to their critics are but vestiges of privilege) than what is deemed by their opponents as worthy of respect.
50. Ironically (again), one of the main groups who feel their oppression is tacitly condoned in the “liberal” West are Christians. To take a typical article of the “genre,” see Filger, “The Christian Arab Question.”