Damon Linker on Calvin and American Exceptionalism

by E.D. Kain on July 10, 2009

Pretty interesting analysis of Calvin’s theology and the evolution of capitalism, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism.  (h/t Conor)

E.D. Kain is a blogger and freelance writer. Currently he serves as Editor-in-Chief of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and writes a tech blog at Forbes. Visit his politics blog here. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The National Review, The Washington Examiner, and the now-defunct True/Slant. You can also contact him via email.

{ 1 comment }

1 rob July 10, 2009 at 10:17 am

While I’m not exactly a scholar of American religious history, I think there’s a lot of slight of hand in Linker’s piece — he skips far too easily from Calvin (expressing a particular view about the relationship between God and history) to a series of paragraphs filled with fairly generic quotes by American Christians (ranging from the Puritan-specific “picked out for the work” of founding New England “by the provident hand of the most high” to the contemporary “visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty.”)

Someone more knowledgeable than I can correct me if I am wrong, but I would say that [a] these sentiments are quite typical of American Christians in general [b] that the relationship between Calvin and these sentiments is tenuous, owing much more to the historical exigencies of the Puritan situation than to anything specific in Calvin’s writings (note that Linker’s discussion of Calvin himself adds up to little more than a “Calvin thought God was working his purposes through historical events”, which is not, as far as I know, considered to be one of the more controversial points of Calvinism in relationship to other major strands of Christian theology) and [c] that Calvinism, though influential in America through the Puritans, has never been anything more than a minority strain of Christianity.

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