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.

Uvalde, Abortion, and You

Robb Elementary School has been shuttered and is scheduled for demolition.

One year ago today, on May 24th, 2022, a gunman armed with a high-yield assault rifle and seven spare ammunition clips entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nobody stopped the gunman (who shall remain nameless here) for 74 minutes, despite the eventual presence of nearly 400 federal, state, and local law enforcement officers on-scene. The shooter killed twenty-one people and injured eighteen, the third-deadliest school shooting, and ninth-deadliest civilian mass shooting, in American history.

This past Monday, May 22nd, 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed LB574, a controversial bill that both establishes a 12-week abortion ban statewide, and bans all gender-affirming medical care for minors. By mashing together two popular conservative bugbears—Nebraska’s legislature is nominally nonpartisan, but dominated by Republicans—this new law gives the state sweeping omnibus authority in how Nebraskans express their sex and sexuality. The “small government party” is literally regulating private citizens’ genital activity.

The correspondence between these two events couldn’t be more jarring. In the year since the Uvalde shooting, state legislatures and Congress have done nothing about America’s overwhelming concentration of private firearms, which now outnumber U.S. citizens and legal residents. These changes, we’re told, take time. Yet at this writing, nineteen states have banned or severely restricted abortion in the eleven months since the Dobbs decision, proving that lawmakers can, indeed, work quickly when they try.

We’re already hearing horror stories emerging about abortion bans’ unanticipated consequences. One high-profile story out of Florida featured a woman forced to carry her fetus to term, knowing it had no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs, and other deadly fetal abnormalities. The baby lived for 94 minutes. A South Carolina Republican legislator publicly regretted the abortion ban he co-sponsored when it almost immediately nearly killed a 19-year-old woman. These are just the stories getting national media traction.

Personally, I formerly opposed abortion, until about 25 years ago. A woman I knew suffered an incomplete miscarriage that created complications which very nearly killed her. Because the treatment for her condition was technically an abortion (although her fetus was already dead), several hospitals bounced her case before one accepted her. That’s when I realized the nuance and complexity of abortion. Last week, I decried LB574 on social media, saying: “this will get people killed.”

A friend responded: “People die by abortion every day.” I don’t know whether my friend means adult women suffer complications daily, or if she counts aborted fetuses as dead humans. Either way, she’s wrong. Pew Research disagrees that complications are common. And even if we believe unborn fetuses are fully human, which I don’t, the underdeveloped fetus cannot have more value than the mother, and her ability to survive and care for her existing children.

Furthermore, our inability to protect elementary school children from Uvalde-style massacres proves that we don’t care about the living. Our legislatures can’t pass even rudimentary precautions like red-flag laws, background checks, and safe storage standards. With no way to prevent weapons hoarding, mass shootings are now literally a daily event. Mass shooters routinely target locations where children congregate, including schools, malls, churches, and concerts. We’ve known this for years, and we’ve done nothing about it.

Claims that we pass anti-abortion legislation to protect children are abject and demonstrable bullshit. The states most likely to pass onerous abortion restrictions are also least likely to have affordable prenatal care. Texas has restrictive abortion laws, and a permitless carry law similar to one recently signed by Nebraska governor Jim Pillen. It also has a high and growing mass shooting rate. Conditions are worse in Texas now than they were before the Uvalde shooting.

Stopping mass shootings don’t require mass roundups of civilian firearms, which no serious lawmaker is proposing anyway. Evidence suggests most mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence; the Uvalde shooter shot his grandmother in the face before moving onto the school. (She survived.) Taking guns away from convicted domestic abusers would protect not only the abusers’ families, but anyone else who may suffer knock-on effects. That suggestion seems both low-friction and supremely modest.

Yet we continue doing nothing. We love every human life while it remains an abstract platonic ideal swimming in the amniotic goo. But the minute it needs a doctor, or a square meal, or protection from an AR-15, our sympathy evaporates. Indeed, we don’t protect fetuses because they’re human; we protect them because they aren’t human, untainted by original sin or human avarice. The minute it becomes human, we’re ready to kill the damn thing.

The History of Women and their Sexual Choices

Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

This may shock and astound some people, but in the 19th Century, people actually had sex. This has been redacted from most pop histories, which present the era as either a bastion of restraint, or a desert of sexual repression. But just know that, if you think that, you believe a fable that later people sold you. Before the Gilded Age, people frequently had sex, and then as now, they didn’t want to get pregnant.

It’s hard to avoid the phrase “then as now” when reviewing this biography of Madame Restell, old New York’s most famous abortionist. This partly reflects pop historian Jennifer Wright’s intentions, as she deliberately compares the Tammany Hall era with our own. But it also bespeaks how much of history’s seedier side later historians bowdlerized. Wright doesn’t just restore Madame Restell to American history, she shows readers how much of history we’ve had withheld from us.

First, her name wasn’t Madame Restell. Ann Lohman, née Sommers, née Trow, reinvented herself as a sophisticated French physician, when she was actually a working-class immigrant from northern England. Like millions, she entered America through Ellis Island, looking for work, only to find an America overcrowded with similar immigrants. Despite being a skilled laborer, she couldn’t readily find work. She did find, however, that Manhattanites often had sex recklessly, and wanted to purge the evidence.

Some women in 1830s New York went into sex work because it paid well. Others took factory or domestic service jobs, but found bosses who saw their employees as essentially their personal harem. And some already simply had as many children as they could afford to raise. Again, the phrase “then as now” seems germane. Ann Sommers apparently apprenticed herself to a Manhattan compounding pharmacist, and soon started selling contraceptives. That word “apparently” looms large.

Jennifer Wright has written multiple pop histories about important people (mostly women) or events in American history. This is apparently her first book to spotlight just one individual. She works heavily from primary sources, which mostly means newspapers, from the heyday of American newspaper publishing. And that, in turn, means wringing the most salient facts from lurid 19th-Century scandal rags. During Madame Restell’s time, journalists weren’t overly burdened with professional ethics or commitment to accuracy.

Jennifer Wright

Wright therefore must frequently extract the details of Madame Restell’s life from what her detractors didn’t say. (Restell herself apparently didn’t keep a diary, and therefore isn’t her own primary source.) Many of Restell’s accusers claim her wanton abortion practices were potentially deadly to women, for instance, yet they consistently failed to find one dead woman from Restell’s roster. This apparently means that, unlike many of her peers, Restell had no blood on her hands.

We know, from reliable testimony, that Madame Restell performed surgical abortions. No record exists, however, of where she learned the skills, much less how she learned them with such accuracy that she left few dead or maimed patients, something her peers couldn’t say likewise. We also don’t know where Restell learned her other skills. In addition to selling pharmaceutical contraceptives and performing abortions, she apparently also served as a midwife, adoption agent, and marriage counselor.

Restell gained notoriety, both for her effectiveness, and her personal boldness. Wright finds evidence of Restell’s notoriety in newspapers as far afield as Texas and Wisconsin. Apparently her reputation stretched nationwide during an era when news was limited to the speed of print. Restell was so effective, reliable, and safe—during a time when credentialled doctors were frequently quacks—that she became certifiably rich, plowing her money back into ventures like banking and land development.

This isn’t just one notorious woman’s biography. Madame Restell arose from a specific historical era, and Wright recreates that era for us. Restell’s business arose against a background of conflicting forces: urban industrialization caused gender roles to change rapidly. The women’s movement commenced, but because first-wave feminists were largely Quakers, they had little interest in sexual liberation. The slave economy, followed by the Civil War, created ripples that weren’t always obvious until many years later.

Wright’s biography recreates Restell’s life and times, including times that, in schoolbook American history, has often been shamelessly sanitized. Wright restores the era’s nuance, when social upheaval made abortion something women both despised and needed. But like the best literature, Wright’s history is equally about us, and how today’s social upheaval resembles the Tammany Hall era. She encourages us to learn from Madame Restell, and warns us what might happen if we fail to learn.

The Business of Finding Enemies

Accused subway vigilante Daniel Penny
being escorted by police after his
arraignment last week in New York

Nearly three weeks after Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny fatally choked homeless man Jordan Neely, nobody doubts who did the killing, or when. Bystanders captured the killing on cellphone video, and Penny admitted delivering the fatal chokehold to police. The only meaningful question is how to interpret what happened. Penny’s arraignment, and expected trial, turn on questions of when it’s acceptable for civilians to use terminal force.

Nobody disagrees that Jordan Neely behaved in a belligerent, intrusive way on that Manhattan subway platform on May 1st. After all, we have bystander video. Analysts disagree heartily, however, whether Daniel Penny responded proportionately. These same questions emerged last month after the wounding of Ralph Yarl, shot for ringing the wrong doorbell: does one civilian’s subjective feeling of threat justify fatal, or near-fatal, responses? Is fear a sufficient justification?

These questions matter. Following routine disasters, first responders face questions of exactly how to interpret ordinary civilians. As Rebecca Solnit writes, following Hurricane Katrina, police and National Guard reinforcement had to hastily interpret people’s intentions. Did fleeing New Orleanians constitute peaceful refugees, or an incipiently violent mob? Were individuals recovering survival supplies, or looting? Answers to these questions often determined who got shot.

Much American political rhetoric today involves how we interpret enemies, real or potential. Are transgender citizens simply ordinary people striving to live their truth, as their advocates claim, or incipient sexual predators, as opponents like Ron DeSantis claim? What about undocumented immigrants seeking asylum status: are they criminals needing punishment, 6or refugees needing help? Chances are, your answers to these questions coincides with your political party affiliation.

My personal response flashes back to elementary school. I remember hearing from authority figures early that my mere perception that somebody else intended to hit me, wasn’t sufficient justification for me to hit them first. Even after experiences with repeat bullies, I couldn’t claim self-defense until something violent actually happened. No, the principal admonished, not even if this bully hit me previously. Past outcomes weren’t predictors of future behavior.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in his
favorite pose: angrily lecturing the crowd

Admittedly, this resulted in awkward encounters, where literal bullies with demonstrated track records received essentially free rein to shout, threaten, and harass me. I remember the feeling of powerlessness this rendered. On multiple occasions, bullies loomed over me, threatened and shouted at me, even encircled and shoved me— and every time, adults repeated, I was responsible to de-escalate the situation, even at the cost of my own dignity.

So yes, I can imagine how powerless subway riders might’ve felt when Jordan Neely acted belligerently.

The obverse of this situation, though, is paradoxical: the few times I ignored adult advice and resisted my bullies, I didn’t feel more empowered. Answering force with force didn’t break the cycle. Instead, it reinforced a violent, helpless worldview, where vigilance often shaded into paranoia. Once I began identifying and preparing against enemies, I inevitably started seeing enemies everywhere. Like after Hurricane Katrina, my enemies were often racially coded.

Cyclical paranoia and preemptive violence might make sense to children, whose limited experience means they usually can’t see the longer view. Unfortunately, in today’s America, this shallow depth of field has become mandatory among many adults. Ron DeSantis has identified enemies among schoolteachers, drag performers, Black teens in hoodies, and the kitchen sink. Florida may be a cartoonish exaggeration, but it’s a microcosm of America today.

Conventional American politics has devolved into an exercise in identifying enemies. Republicans display this pronounced tendency more visibly, certainly. Enemy-baiting has become their brand. But Democrats occasionally bump into that paranoid tendency; remember the outcry about hip-hop in the 1990s, or sex in video games in the 2000s. Like me in elementary school, Democrats try to appease the opposition by acting tough, but descend into paranoia.

Because I, too, descended into vigilant paranoia, I have great sympathy with politicians like DeSantis, who identify enemies around every corner. It isn’t mere political posturing; once you start preparing for enemies, it becomes an all-encompassing worldview. Fortunately, adults and other authority figures around me saw it happening, and broke the cycle. Because that paranoia was really starting to take a psychological toll.

Tragically, today’s political sphere has no authority figures prepared to break the cycle; today’s authority figures are the cycle. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Donald Trump desperately need a grown-up to intervene, but voters have granted them grown-up authority. Thus the paranoid feedback loop continues until citizens stop it. Voters need to step up and stop this paranoia, because if they don’t, the next stage is revolution.

The Shallow State

Rufus Sewell (left) and Keri Russell as Hal and Kate Wyler, in The Diplomat

Previews for Netflix’s The Diplomat are edited in a rapid hip-hop style, implying a series anchored on explosions and sex, like a Tom Clancy thriller. Both of these are in relatively short supply. Instead, we get a series anchored on the machinations of the unelected bureaucrats whose presence always lingers beneath normal politics. These are the members of the “deep state” we’ve been coached to fear in recent years.

Kate Wyler, a longtime member of America’s professional diplomatic corps, has packed her bags for Afghanistan. She’s spent her career identifying and exploiting weaknesses in other nations’ political organizations; this skill has rewarded her richly, while also serving American interests. So she’s baffled when, on the eve of the departure, President Rayburn calls her into his office. The President has an alternate offer: the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom.

Start with how showrunner Debora Cahn casts Keri “Felicity” Russell as Kate Wyler. Early in her career, Russell was so thoroughly pigeonholed by her beauty that an over-hasty haircut nearly derailed her first starring role. But she’s now forty-seven, an age when Hollywood puts most women out to pasture. Cahn casts Rufus Sewell, an equally famously attractive showcase, as Kate’s husband Hal, but he’s a man. His greys are “distinguished.”

The show’s characters comment that the U.K. ambassadorship isn’t usually considered a serious diplomatic posting. Embassies in America’s NATO allies are usually plum appointments for prestigious political donors—a fact considered shocking when George H.W. Bush dispensed ambassadorships that way in 1989, but banal now. Skilled diplomats historically run things in America’s friendly embassies, but wealthy, semi-retired palm greasers get the prestigious chair.

Except things have changed. Business executives face steeply reduced pressures to retire at a certain age; Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Sussman continue running their corporations well into their seventies and eighties. A two- or three-year hitch in some plush London mansion, shaking hands with King Charles, hardly seems like an appropriate career capstone anymore. Especially when, as now, international tensions remain permanently peaked.

This series contains numerous pointed references to current events. Kate Wyler is appointed ambassador by a rough-hewn but semi-progressive American President who’s terrified of being perceived as old. President Rayburn wants Kate to stage-manage America's relationship with Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, whose folksy, off-the-cuff manner makes him popular with British voters. However, events hint that both Rayburn and Trowbridge are craftier than they appear.

David Gyasi as U.K Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison, with Keri Russell, in The Diplomat

Everything described occurs under the constant shadow of war. President Rayburn picks Kate for the British ambassadorship because somebody’s just hit a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing forty-one sailors. The British public is braying for blood, and PM Trowbridge’s off-the-cuff comments only make that more likely. Except that professional diplomats like Kate know the evidence doesn’t add up. The obvious suspects are, in this case, hardly obvious.

It’s impossible to overlook the direct real-world parallels. Streaming TV, with its relatively short lead times, can comment in ways that legacy scripted media can’t. While the next presidential election promises to feature two very old and broadly unpopular White men, the British public has watched three consecutive Tory PMs disintegrate rapidly, and possibly a fourth. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war drags interminably, and Putin has been indicted for war crimes.

PM Trowbridge is played by Rory Kinnear, who last appeared on Netflix in the Black Mirror premier episode. If you missed that, he played a Prime Minister who, to appease a terrorist, is compelled to fuck a pig on live national television. Though Trowbridge is a darker, angrier figure than PM Callow, surely showrunner Cahn recognized this parallel. Because Trowbridge specifically, and elected officials generally, come across as crazed pig-fuckers.

Again, online trailers spotlight explosions and sex. But after the opening scenes of episode one, the explosions are largely limited to verbal sparring and personal conflicts. This is a series about the backroom log-rolling sessions that voters never see, but which make politics happen. The characters quarrel, swap favors, and submarine one another regularly. Elected officials like Trowbridge and Rayburn are there to be managed, not to call the shots.

But if this is the feared “deep state,” it really isn’t that deep. Far from a finely tuned engine of political know-how, this show features a complex nexus of wounded egos and resentment. Other than a brief on-screen appearance by an Iranian ambassador, this entire show features American and British characters, nominally allies, who constantly play one-upmanship games and personal horse trades. The deep state is, apparently, really quite shallow.