Bad Calvinism in Modern American Politics

John Calvin (etching by Konrad Myer)

Back during my teaching days, one classroom discussion circled the myriad influences that molded colonial and early post-Revolutionary America. One student threw out a name I personally wouldn’t have considered: John Calvin. But the student made a persuasive case that, through the New England Puritans, Calvinism has become a dominant force in American politics. Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” statement comes from Jesus Christ, certainly, but it also comes from Puritan John Winthrop.

Last time, I concluded my invective against falsely “pro-life” politics by noting that hard-right American politicians love every human life while it remains an unrealized potential. Ask many conservatives, and the Evangelical pastors who support them, why they oppose abortion, and they’ll praise the undeveloped fetus as potentially the next Einstein, Beethoven, or Jane Addams. While human life remains abstract, it remains a receptacle of our society’s hopes and aspirations, simply waiting to be filled.

However, once that life actually becomes human, with visceral needs and wants, those same politicians begin scheming ways to destroy it. The minute an abstract fetus needs food, or prenatal medical care, or—heaven forfend—defense against civilians hoarding military-grade firearms, hard-right political support dries up. I compared this to “original sin.” However, thinking back, I suspect my student foresaw this situation. The barrier problem isn’t original sin; it’s Calvin’s theology of Total Human Depravity.

Before I get carried away, this isn’t a literal Calvinist problem. Calvinist churches, like Baptists and Presbyterians, have landed on both sides of pressing issues. Nor is the problem conventionally partisan, as these problems persist, and even get worse, regardless of which party controls our government. Rather, sloppy thinking and half-informed opinions muddy everything they touch, if they can find a halfway-serviceable moral justification. Bad-faith actors have sullied science or art as badly as religion.

For a useful analogy, let’s start with homelessness. Consider briefly how people react if you give a panhandler a buck. “They’ll just spend it on booze or drugs.” In American political mythology, homelessness doesn’t arise from our economic system, or an individual’s momentary circumstances. We deem homelessness a reflection of the homeless person’s moral core. The indigent are “bad people,” suffering the consequences of their choices, and anything to alleviate their suffering reinforces their sin.

The same analogy of “consequences” arises whenever we consider providing even the slightest assistance to pregnant persons. If they need prenatal medicine, or nutritional assistance, or affordable childcare, our political and business leaders recite shopworn moral language about rights and responsibility. Pregnant persons and their families have a moral responsibility to look after themselves, and if they can’t, they’re bad people, and any provided assistance simply reinforces their bad choices, confirming them in material sin.

But if that same pregnant person admits their inability to support a child, and opts to terminate the pregnancy, that’s also interpreted moralistically. If you choose to have sex, official legislative reasoning goes, you’ve perforce chosen to give birth. Even if you cannot support the child, or you’re fleeing a violent relationship, or the fetus has terminal abnormalities and cannot survive, birth is nevertheless a moral imperative which you cannot shirk without compounding your sins.

Either way, the Calvinist precept of Total Human Depravity (stripped of its Christian ethic) defines you. The secular Calvinist interprets every adverse circumstance as an outcome of individual sin, never a product of economic systems, or damaged families, or just bad luck. Secular Calvinists believe the universe is wholly just and morally complete, and therefore every bad circumstance is a moral judgment upon the individual. Helping the poor only makes them likely to sin again.

I’m using pregnancy and abortion as my touchstones, because of the current political fad of harshly restrictive abortion bans. But the problem exceeds one hot-button issue. America remains the only developed nation which hasn’t ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, because America refuses to consider food a natural human right. Food! Since the Reagan administration, America has refused to protect children from starvation because doing so would reinforce parents’ sinful ways.

America refuses to protect healthy pregnancies, or end unhealthy ones, because either choice protects “sinners” from “consequences.” Likewise, we won’t feed the starving or house the homeless because they haven’t “earned it,” and therefore are sinners. America has Earth’s largest prison population because we believe, despite all evidence, that extreme punishments will stop people from sinning. And so on. Our lingering bipartisan consensus only makes sense if our politicians uniformly believe in Total Human Depravity.