Last week was the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, the Protestant Reformer who shaped modern Western society in countless ways.
Calvin’s influence is usually traced to his version of Christian piety that emphasized the virtues of work, which, as Max Weber argued, laid the foundation for the development of capitalism.
But as Damon Linker pointed out in the New Republic last week, Calvin also influenced America’s vision as a country of destiny.
Less widely acknowledged, though no less historically significant, is the profound impact of Calvinist assumptions on the formation of American patriotism — and in particular on the country’s sense of itself as an exceptional nation empowered by providence to bring democracy, liberty, and Christian redemption to the world. It is this persistent theological self-confidence (some would say over-confidence) that distinguishes American patriotism from expressions of communal feeling in any other modern nation — and that demonstrates our nation’s unexpected but nonetheless decisive debt to John Calvin.
Calvin believed that all events on earth are directly controlled by God and are a reflection of God’s providence.
Many of the radical Calvinists who resolved to leave England to establish colonies in the newly discovered continent of North America believed themselves to be reenacting the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. Having freely joined in a covenant with God and resolved to build a purified church and holy city in the New World, the Puritans boarded their ships confident that the Lord would guide and protect them on their “errand into the wilderness.”
And thus is launched one of the truly despicable ideas that continues to afflict Americans.
Through the Revolutionary War, the years surrounding the ratification of the federal Constitution, and the early national period, pastors and presidents repeatedly praised the “great design of providence” that had led to the creation of a country dedicated to protecting and preserving political and religious liberty. Call it the consolidation of America’s Calvinist consensus. What were once the rather extreme theological convictions dominating a handful of rustic outposts on the edge of a wholly undeveloped continent were now the unifying and motivating ideology of a rapidly expanding and industrializing nation.
Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy outlook, including his proposal for a League of Nations that would make possible an era of global perpetual peace, grew out of his strong faith America’s providential role in the world. The World War II propaganda campaign frequently appealed to identical convictions. And politicians from both political parties regularly cast the Cold War as a quasi-eschatological conflict between forces of darkness and light — with God clearly standing on America’s side of the battle. Even Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s answer to the “anti-intellectualism” of Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke unapologetically in 1952 about the “awesome mission” that “God has set for us,” which was nothing less than “the leadership of the free world.” In more recent years, the cadences of the Calvinist consensus could be heard in Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical evocations of America as a “city on a hill” and George W. Bush’s frequent assurances that history moves in a “visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.”
American exceptionalism is despicable because it encourages the idea that the United States must stamp out every evil on earth. The result is the authoritarian militarism and “perpetual war” that has become the official ideology of the Republican Party.
When stamping out evil becomes our historical destiny, violations of the law, suspensions of fundamental rights, and every accumulation of power seems justified.
It is inimical to the very idea of America.
