For all the purported ignorance of the American public on matters religious, most people would probably be able to answer a question or two about Calvinism—most likely as a wince or sad shake of the head. Like it or not, Calvinism has become a symbol of all that is puritanical, judgmental, and rigid about Protestant belief and behavior. What other system of thought would doom the un-elect to eternal punishment by the mere power of syllogism?
The contributors to this indispensable volume of essays, marking the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin's birth in 1509, wade directly into this fray. Originating in a series of panels at an international conference organized by the Association Calvin and the American Society of Church History, John Calvin's American Legacy neither defends nor deflates the “Genevan saint”; the far more important aim is to understand his influence in American culture.
This is not an easy task. Not only does anti-Calvinism, as Davis writes, have deep roots in American thought and letters, Calvinism itself has burrowed deep within the national psyche, making any simple judgment all but impossible. It is small wonder that in her book of essays, The Death of Adam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), author Marilynne Robinson entitled the chapter on Calvin “Marguerite de Navarre” so that readers would not just dismiss it and move on. But the problem is not only cultural; it is historiographical too. In the last several decades, the reigning narrative of American Protestantism has shifted from one of slowly decaying Calvinism to the vigorous success of Arminians, especially Methodists and the “upstart sects” far from the borders of New England. The new understanding is long overdue and appropriate, and has brought into focus a far more diverse cast of characters than the white Protestant theologians normally featured—but it also leaves many open questions: Was American Calvinism simply the opposite of everything Methodism stood for? What happened to Calvin's legacy in the rough and tumble of the emerging religious market? Does Calvinism still have any explanatory power in American society today?
Anyone looking for answers to these kinds of questions will find almost nothing recent or serious to work with. Even a highly regarded book like Debby Applegate's Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America (New York: Doubleday, 2006), paints his father Lyman as a dour and depressed determinist, even though, as Douglas Sweeney's essay shows convincingly, early nineteenth-century Calvinism was intellectually lively and far from depressing.
This book goes a very long way to break open some much-needed middle ground between Calvin's detractors and defenders. The essays are, to begin with, clear and immensely helpful. They fall into three main areas of concern: the first section deals with Calvinism and society; the second with Calvin and American theology; and the third with Calvin and American letters, both fiction and nonfiction. Many of the contributions are fresh, including Mark Valeri's essay on the Puritans' subtle embrace of market culture, an argument developed more fully in his recent book. The essays also span an ambitious range of subjects, from the metaphysical musings of the “usual suspects”—Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Hodge—to Mohegan minister Samson Occom and author John Updike.
The book's main challenge in defining Calvin's legacy is finding a common way to talk about Calvinism, but this is in itself a complicated issue. Clearly the New England Puritans have to be central figures, but as David Hall points out, they never used either of those words to refer to themselves. Not until the 1820s and 1830s, at the height of the Congregationalist and Unitarian battle for New England's churches, did the term “Calvinism” even come into play. David Little goes a step further, arguing that the Puritans themselves harbored contradictions in their understanding of Calvin's own deeply nuanced political philosophy; there is no straight line between Geneva and New England. Moreover, Steven Crocco, writing about twentieth-century American theologians, finds Calvin everywhere as a shorthand reference, but rarely dealt with in a sustained or serious way. Rather than the dominant force in American culture, Calvin seems to be an elusive figure leaving a complicated trail.
The final section on American letters looks for Calvinism outside the usual settings. Thus, we have Samson Occom, a Native American theologian with a deep and often ironic understanding of Puritan providentialism; Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, says Peter Thuesen, dealt with her family's intellectual legacy in a manner every bit as serious as Max Weber's; Mark Twain, working through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will while writing comedic novels; and John Updike, whose heroes wrestle with problems of freedom and limitations in terms far more nuanced and instructive than the current “deciders” in American political culture would allow.
Thomas Davis supplies the missing voice in this volume in an all-too-brief but beautifully wrought discussion of Marilynne Robinson, whose recent novels Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004) and Home (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008) reflect deep reading of Calvin's Institutes. “Nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It's all grace,” one character in Home consoles another. As the title itself suggests, Robinson wants to talk about Calvinism in human terms, as part and parcel of a Midwestern family's real-life pain and disappointment. And as Davis points out, the title names another truth: whether or not it can be captured or defined by scholars, Calvinism is deeply “at home in the American consciousness,” and fully deserves another round of new and mature reflection.
