Catastrophically Confused Calvinism

With the echo of John Calvin’s voice yet reverberating from the walls of St. Pierre’s Cathedral in Geneva, Switzerland, it is easy to imagine puzzled expressions on the faces of his parishioners as they struggled internally to come to grips with what they were hearing from the pulpit. Calvin never failed to stir controversy; his pen never dipped a second time into the inkwell before issues were raised and battle lines were drawn in the theological sand. His ideas about God and Scripture were critiqued and debated among theologians, engaged by historians and sociologists, and preached by clergy well into the twenty-first century. But with all that scholarly discourse, Calvin’s world-changing influence on Western civilization, arguably the real story, seems to go largely unnoticed and unrealized. Yet it shaped the colonies of the new world; framed thinking as the founding fathers authored the Constitution of the United States; affected society’s views about slavery, leading into the American Civil War; and today has pulled the strings from behind the curtain of culture, making science, the arts, academia, the media, entertainment, religion, and the rule of governments all over the world dance like so many marionettes in a children’s puppet show.Calvin’s distinctive theological ideas seemed to have a unique propensity to evoke cultural and linguistic absolutes, often leading to extremes in their applications, perhaps in ways that Calvin himself never intended. These distorted extremes created a sort of cultural rainbow overarching societal skies in Europe, spreading to the United States, and through America’s influence, now extending around the world. Yet few bother to look up to take notice of the sociological colors above them, let alone respond to them. Exploring the veracity then of these dramatic claims and how they so powerfully influence thinking today, this book traces an anthropological lineage of John Calvin’s unique view of theology to see how it has been culturally sown into the societal fabric of Europe and the United States, demonstrating how it has assimilated religion, the economy, politics, government, education, and the arts and sciences.We’ll uncover Calvin’s influence in evangelical Christianity, which is often seen as conflicted, judgmental, condescending, and overbearing by certain secularized segments of society who ironically spawn their critiques of evangelicalism through the same lens of religious Calvinistic extremism they espouse to despise. We’ll demonstrate how they have only rebranded and masked secularism as nonreligious.