Calvin’s Influence in America

“The kind of people he produced made the American experience possible”

A quarter of a century ago, Reformation Sunday made a spectacular showing in the life of America’s churches each year. Lutherans gathered by the thousands at afternoon rallies to listen to powerful sermons on “justification by faith alone” and “the menace of clericalism.” They heard Martin Luther described as God’s servant who had taken his stand on God’s Word and delivered the churches from ecclesiastical tyranny. Whatever their synod, Luther was their hero; they loved him and were part of his family. When they joined in the mass singing of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” it was an unforgettable experience.

While Lutherans were celebrating the nailing of Luther’s ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church door, other American Protestants were getting together to observe Reformation Sunday in their own way. It might be a pageant, or a symposium, or a rendition of Mendelssohn’s “Reformation Symphony,” or a preaching service. Some sermons tended to eulogize Luther not as a church hero but as a symbol of courage, of independent thinking, of emancipation. Others emphasized the “great truths” of the Reformation: the priesthood of all believers, the rediscovery of the Bible, the recovery of a sense of vocation, and the liberation of the human spirit.

Today Reformation Sunday plays a less significant role in the life of our churches, for reasons that I will leave to others to explain. I address myself at America’s bicentennial period to this question: Did the Reformation play some role in the formation of the American republic? Is there indeed a line of thought running from Martin Luther to Thomas Jefferson?

I venture the opinion that if a line runs from Luther to Jefferson, it is of thin silk. Not that the vital role of Lutheranism in early America can be denied! During the Revolutionary War, for example, Lutheran pastors in Pennsylvania and Virginia pointed to Luther’s stand against both church and state to inspire the colonials who were struggling to cast off the tax burdens imposed by the mother country. The American impact of Lutheranism, it should be added, was made largely through the churches.

The real contribution of the Reformation to America came through John Calvin. Whether for better or for worse, Calvinism made its impression both inside and outside the churches. It affected the whole life of our nation to such an extent that the German historian Leopold von Ranke remarked, “John Calvin was the virtual founder of America.” Just as the teachings that the English Reformers brought back from Geneva after 1558 produced Oliver Cromwell and parliamentary democracy, so those same teachings stamped the American character. For convenience I will distinguish three primary spheres of Calvin’s influence: (1) moral, (2) industrial, and (3) political.

At the outset it should be said that Calvin himself could not know the direction his teachings would take. We can search his Institutes of the Christian Religion in vain for an outline of the American Constitution. Yet it was not so much what Calvin taught as the kind of people he produced that made the American experience possible.

1. In England the moral result of Calvin’s teaching was Puritanism. The first Puritans actually sat at the feet of the Swiss master, where they produced that Geneva Bible, whose marginal notes so infuriated Elizabeth. As the exiles returned to London they brought with them a stern disapproval of the gaiety of the royal court, the voluptuousness of the stage, the worldliness of the clergy, and the lack of restraint on Sunday amusements. They took issue with the worship practices Elizabeth had established in the church: crucifix, vestments, robes, liturgy, pomp. They opposed the hierarchy with its ecclesiastical grades, its wealthy holdings, and its supreme governor (the queen herself). They were disturbed by increased vagrancy and idleness in society, by politicians disguised as priests, by British piracy on the high seas.

The Puritan influence spread quickly, so that within fifty years, according to the historian John Richard Green, “England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible.” Another historian, Pattison, wrote, “It may be doubted if all history can furnish another instance of such a victory of moral force.” Macaulay called the Puritans “the most remarkable body of men the world has ever produced.”

No one became a Puritan for the fun of it. It meant taking Jesus Christ seriously. It meant jeopardizing one’s business interests, giving up amusements, becoming suspect in fashionable circles, endangering one’s family, risking personal ridicule, banishment, prison, and death. And these were the people who came to America and whose descendants played such important parts in the struggle for independence!

The popular outlook, whether in Britain or in America, was salted by John Calvin. Men thought his thoughts after him. They discerned clearly the eternal distinction between right and wrong, and out of that distinction they forged what has come to be known as “the Puritan conscience.” Today, of course, the Puritan conscience is under heavy attack; “Puritanical” has become a pejorative word. There were those ghastly mistakes—Servetus and the Salem witches. But in 1776 it was the Puritan sense of moral indignation as much as anything that caused the thirteen colonies to revolt.

2. A second sphere of Calvin’s influence in America has been heavily emphasized by the sociologists. They describe the creation of a “Protestant work ethic,” which, they say, declared that God prospered the energetic and thrifty ones while hell was filled with idlers and wastrels.

Max Weber, the German social scientist, had no use for either Calvinism or Puritanism. He claimed that Calvin’s teaching on vocation (that God has assigned various callings to us human beings to counteract our “boiling restlessness”) actually played into the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners (said Weber) froze Calvin’s callings into permanent job classifications and invoked the Protestant work ethic to get more production out of their hired hands. Thus many of the abuses of modern capitalism can, in his view, be laid at Calvin’s door. The true son of Calvin in America, Weber felt, was not Jonathan Edwards but rather Benjamin Franklin, the man who declared that time is money.

Ernst Troeltsch expressed Weber’s position this way:

The Protestant ethic of the calling, with its Calvinistic assimilation of the capitalist system, with its severity and its control of the labor rendered as a sign of the assurance of election, made service in one’s calling (that is, the systematic exercise of one’s energies) into a service both necessary in itself and appointed by God, in which profit is regarded as the sign of the divine approval. This conception of the calling laid the foundation of a world of specialized labor, which taught men to work for work’s sake, and in so doing it produced our present-day bourgeois way of life [The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Allen and Unwin, 1931, Volume II].

Weber’s views have been strongly resisted, particularly by historians, and Calvin has survived the anti-capitalistic rage of the scholars and politicians. But until a few years ago it was a fact that the world’s most prosperous and heavily industrialized areas were those that had been touched by the Calvinistic wing of the Reformation. (Most of Canada’s millionaires even today live in Toronto rather than Montreal.)

3. Finally, we need to consider the Reformation’s contribution to political theory. What part did it play in the development of a free democratic American society? If we speak of the Puritans, we can say that Calvinism’s contribution was outstanding. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Samuel Hopkins, and others all fostered the concept of civil liberty. In the eighteenth century the colonial will to resist was strengthened not only by the agitation of Christian laymen such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock but also by the preaching of White-field, Tennent, Witherspoon, Jonas Clarke, and other evangelists and clergymen.

As we know, the Americans at the head of government—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others—drew their ideas not so much from church teachings as from the writings of European essayists, particularly Montaigne, Montesquieu, and John Locke. And where did John Locke derive his understanding of the natural equality of men, which is reproduced in our Declaration of Independence? According to his own statement he found it in the Scriptures. Locke was a Puritan by upbringing; his father had been a Cromwellian. Perhaps the best description of the source of American equality has been given by John Richard Green: “The meanest peasant, once called of God, felt within him a strength stronger than the might of kings. In that mighty elevation of the masses embodied in the Calvinistic doctrines of election and grace, lay the germs of the modern principles of human equality” (History of the English People, vol. 3).

Not all the sixteenth-century Reformers were sincere friends of political liberty. Yet we cannot help noticing that as the influence of Calvinism tapers off in the Western world, the number of surviving democracies is diminishing. Is it too much to suggest that we need a Calvin for our times, what Thomas Gray in “Elegy Written in a County Churchyard” called “some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood”? Williston Walker wrote of the Geneva Reformer:

His was the only system that the Reformation produced that could organize itself powerfully in the face of government hostility. It trained strong men, confident in their election to be fellow workers with God in the accomplishment of his will, courageous to do battle, insistent on character, and confident that God has given in the Scriptures the guide of all right human conduct and proper worship. This was Calvin’s work [Great Men of the Christian Church, University of Chicago, 1908].

In Book Four of his Institutes Calvin himself wrote, “We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against him, let us not pay the least regard to it.” That one sentence did as much, perhaps, to fan the flame of freedom as any other utterance of the time. Like Luther’s “Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders!” it encouraged men and women all over Europe to die for what they most surely believed, and helped to emancipate the human spirit from centuries of bondage.

Two centuries later such words set the spiritual tone for the composing of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Heroic language has a way of leaping from mountain peak to mountain peak, and 1776 was a time for heroes. So it is appropriate, another two hundred years later, that we honor along with our founding fathers the hero of Wittenberg and the Bible teacher of Geneva. Of Calvin we may say that he was a stern, intolerant, and in many ways unattractive person; yet he cannot be faulted for what others did; and he certainly built better than he knew. In America, some of us, at least, are grateful.

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