God, Calvin, and Social Welfare - Part Two: Calvinist Settlers

While most mainline Protestant denominations and evangelical churches have jettisoned some of the core tenets of Calvinism, ideas about punishment and retribution brought to our shores by early Calvinist settlers are so rooted in the American cultural experience and social traditions that many people ranging from religious to secular view them as simply "common sense." What Lakoff calls the "Strict Father" model gains it power among conservatives because it dovetails with their ideas of what is a common sense approach to morality, public policy, and crime.

To understand where this "common sense" comes from, and why it is tied to the Strict Father model, requires that we trace the influence of Protestant Calvinism.

Martin Luther founded Protestantism in a schism with the Catholic Church in 1517, but it was John Calvin who literally put it on the map in the city of Geneva, which is now in Switzerland. In the mid 1500s, Calvin forged a theocracy--a society where only the leaders of a specific religion can be the leaders of the secular government.

Calvinists believed that Adam and Eve disobeyed God and tasted the apple from the tree of knowledge at the urging of an evil demon. As a result of this "original sin," the betrayal of God's command, all humans are born in sin. God must punish us for our sins; we must be ashamed of our wrongdoing; and we require the harsh yet loving discipline of our heavenly father to correct our failures.

Calvinists also believe that "God's divine providence [has] selected, elected, and predestined certain people to restore humanity and reconcile it with its Creator" (Zakai, 1992). These "Elect" were originally thought to be the only people going to Heaven. To the Calvinists, material success and wealth was a sign that you were one of the Elect, and thus were favored by God. Who better to shepherd a society populated by God's wayward children? The poor, the weak, the infirm? God was punishing them for their sins.

This theology was spreading at a time when the rise of industrial capitalism tore the fabric of European society, shifting the nature of work and the patterns family life of large numbers of people. There were manyof angry, alienated people who the new elites needed to keep in line to avoid labor unrest and to protect production and profits.

Max Weber, an early sociologist who saw culture as a powerful force that shaped both individuals and society, argued that Calvinism grew in a symbiotic relationship with the rise of industrial capitalism.

As Sara Diamond explains:

Calvinism arose in Europe centuries ago in part as a reaction to Roman Catholicism's heavy emphasis on priestly authority and on salvation through acts of penance. One of the classic works of sociology, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, links the rise of Calvinism to the needs of budding capitalists to judge their own economic success as a sign of their preordained salvation.

The rising popularity of Calvinism coincided with the consolidation of the capitalist economic system. Calvinists justified their accumulation of wealth, even at the expense of others, on the grounds that they were somehow destined to prosper. It is no surprise that such notions still find resonance within the Christian Right which champions capitalism and all its attendant inequalities.

What Calvinism accomplished was to fulfill the psychic needs of both upwardly mobile middle class entrepreneurs and alienated workers. Middle class businessmen (and they were men) could ascribe their economic success to their spiritual superiority. These businessmen and others who were predestined to be the Elect of God could turn to alienated workers, and explain to them that their impoverished economic condition was the result of a spiritual failure ordained by God. Their place in the spiritual (and economic) system was predestined.

This refocused anger away from material demands in the here and now. Because of their evil and weak nature, those that sinned or committed crimes had to be taught how to change their behavior through punishment, shame, and discipline.

Sound familiar? The Republican "Contract with America" and other legislative "reform" measures involving social welfare are implicitly built around early Calvinist ideas.

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Sources

Ammerman, Nancy T. 1991. "North American Protestant Fundamentalism." In Fundamentalisms Observed, The Fundamentalism Project 1, eds., Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Diamond, Sara."Dominion Theology," Z Magazine, February 1995, online archive.
Marsden, George M. 1991. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans.

Moore, R. Laurence. 1986. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, Max. [1905] 2000. The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism and Other Writings. Edited, translated, introduction, and notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books/Putnam.

Zakai, Avihu. 1992. Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ported from Talk to Action
Post comments on this article at www.Talk2Action.org.
God, Calvin, and Social Welfare: A Series
Part One: Coalitions
Part Two: Calvinist Settlers

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Based on the Public Eye article "Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration"

Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates

The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates

God, Calvin, and Social Welfare - Part One: Coalitions

Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism.

Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply "common sense."

What is "common sense" for one group, however, is foolish belief for another. According to author George Lakoff, a linguist who studies the linkage between rhetoric and ideas, there is a tremendous gulf between what conservatives and liberals think of as common sense, especially when it comes to issues of moral values.

In his book Moral Politics, which has gained attention in both media and public debates, Lakoff argues that conservatives base their moral views of social policy on a "Strict Father" model, while liberals base their views on a "Nurturant Parent" model.

According to Axel R. Schaefer, there are three main ideological tendencies in U.S. social reform:

  •  Liberal/Progressive: based on changing systems and institutions to change individual behavior on a collective basis over time.

  •  Calvinist/Free Market: based on changing individual social behavior through punishment.

  •  Evangelical/Revivalist: based on born again conversion to change individual behavior, but still linked to some Calvinist ideas of punishment.

Republicans have forged a broad coalition of two of the three tendencies that involves moderately conservative Protestants who nonetheless hold some traditional Calvinist ideas:

Calvinist/Free Market advocates ranging from multinational executives to economic conservatives to libertarian ideologues; and

Evangelical/Revivalist conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists with a core mission of converting people to their particular brand of Christianity.

This is a coalition with many fracture points and disagreements.

The Calvinist/Free Market sector is already a coalition based on shared ideas about individual responsibility and successes in Free Market or Laissez Faire capitalism- sometimes called neoliberalism to trace it back to an earlier use of the term "liberal" by philosophers who opposed stringent government regulation of the economy. This is where the neoconservatives fit into the picture as sort of secular Calvinists.

Libertarians are against government economic regulations and believe in a Free Market, but libertarians generally also oppose government regulation of social matters such as gay marriage and abortion. These and other social issues, however, are central to the conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists in the Republican coalition.

This can get complicated. For example the evangelical idea that it is personal conversion and salvation that will make for a more perfect society, not government programs and policies, sometimes ends up supporting (in a complementary and parallel way) the goal of libertarians and economic conservatives to reduce the size of government.

As the Bush Administration has shifted government social welfare toward "Faith-Based" programs, it has diverted government funding into privatized religious organizations (which raises serious separation of Church and State issues), but the amount of funding applied to "Faith Based" projects is small compared to the large budget cuts in previously government-funded government-run social welfare programs.

Libertarians approve of the overall budget cuts, but would prefer cutting out the government funding of "Faith Based" projects.

It's all about compromise. Coalitions unite around shared agendas, while temporarily setting aside disagreements. So if several groups share a particular worldview, that helps bind the coalition together.

Although the Christian Right is coming from a very specific religious perspective, its theology and political ideas are rooted in a common cultural context with other components of the coalition being held together by the Bush administration. To appreciate how this has happened, we need to look at the version of Calvinism brought to our shores by early settlers.

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Sources:
Berlet, Chip and Matthew N. Lyons. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford.

Frank, Thomas. 2004. What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Lakoff, George. [1996] 2002. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Schaefer, Axel R. 1999. "Evangelicalism, Social Reform and the US Welfare State, 1970-1996," pp. 249-273, in David K. Adams and Cornelius A. van Minnem, eds., Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs, and Social Change. New York: New York University Press. (I have used slightly different language to describe the sectors identified by Schaefer).

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Ported from Talk to Action
Post comments on this article at www.Talk2Action.org.

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God, Calvin, and Social Welfare: A Series
Part One: Coalitions

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Based on the Public Eye article "Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration"
Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates
The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates

Bush & the Apocalyptic Coalition

Tens of millions of Americans have been reading the Left Behind fiction series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The stories are set in the turmoil after "real" Christians have been Raptured by God who pulls them away from earth in the End Times while those who have been "left behind" face the Tribulations. This includes those Christians who didn't make the A team who ascended.

Hugh Urban explains there is a symbiosis between the worldview of the neoconservatives who have engineered the Bush Administration's foreign policy, and the plotline of the Left Behind series.

In an online essay titled "Bush, the Neocons and Evangelical Christian Fiction: America, `Left Behind,'" Urban observes that:

"...the Neocon's aggressive foreign policy, centered around the Middle East, and the Christian evangelical story of the immanent return of Christ in the Holy Land-- struck me as weirdly similar and disturbingly parallel. The former openly advocates a "New American Century" and a "benevolent hegemony" of the globe by U.S. power, inaugurated by the invasion of Iraq, while the latter predicts a New Millennium of divine rule ushered in by apocalyptic war, first in Babylon and then in Jerusalem."

The Christian Right is composed of many different conservative tendencies and theological viewpoints, but a significant number have adopted this particular version of the apocalyptic End Times script, which is called premillennial dispensationalism. Some of them even belong to Protestant denominations that are not premillennial, and don't believe in the Rapture. Pop culture trumps theology.

The focus on the Middle East has led some premillennialist Christians to become Christian Zionists. They uncritically support every policy and action by the Israeli government so that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem remains in the control of Jews who the Christian premillennialists believe will displace Islamic shrines and rebuild Solomon's Temple--which they see as a prerequisite for the return of Jesus Christ. This has also resulted in increasing antipathy towards Muslims and Islam, who some weave into the biblical script as agents of Satan who assist the Antichrist in the End Times.

Neoconservatives have a secular approach to the Middle East that lines up along similar lines, with some advocating the idea of Samuel Huntington that there is a "clash of civilizations" pitting the good Judeo-Christian West against the evil Islamic East. In this worldview, the American brand of "Free Market" capitalism is a prerequisite for democracy; and the United States has an obligation to export both--using tanks and missiles if necessary.

In his book An Angel Directs the Storm, Michael Northcott argues that the neoconservative:

"conception of political economy is as apocalyptic as more openly religious forms of millennialism precisely because it sets up an ideology of human redemption which its advocates believe they are charged to follow regardless of the destruction and violence it may entail."

Apocalyptic violence is justified from a religious perspective by the Christian Right and from a secular perspective by the neoconservatives. Both want to "take dominion" over the earth.

This is the apocalyptic coalition crafted by the Bush Administration.

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Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates

The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates
Chip's Blog

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Ported from Talk to Action
Post comments on this article at www.Talk2Action.org.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Extremist!

On the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, I received a phone call from a member of the Presbyterian youth group I was in, telling me that some of the members of our congregation planned to march in nearby Newark, New Jersey to commemorate the life and death of this man. We had read and been inspired by King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in our youth group, and some of us tentatively began to ease ourselves into a suburban (and very sanitized) version of the Civil Rights Movement.

When I blithely told my parents not to worry about my going to Newark, since the Black Panther Party had guaranteed the safety of all marchers Black or White, they hit the roof.

"If you go on that march," I was warned, "don't bother coming home." They thought of King as an "extremist."

In 1968 King was considered an "extremist" by many, at least in my mostly White bedroom community in northern New Jersey. The Black Panthers were considered "terrorists" who probably murdered White teenagers before serving breakfast. Newark was seen as a city of race riots, and thus apparently not an appropriate place for religious observance or commemoration.

My best friend Curt checked with his parents, and they offered me a place to stay until cooler heads in the congregation could intervene. We went on the march, and returned home. As in the story of old (although with a much shorter interval and after a few phone calls), my parents welcomed me home as the prodigal son. I tolerated them as the provincial parents. That's what being a teenager is about.

My son is now older than I was that day in 1968, and attending the UC Davis Law School in California. "The law school's building is named after Dr. King in recognition of his efforts to achieve social and political justice for the poor and disadvantaged," explained Dean Rex Perschbacher, in a recent letter to students concerning the day on which most Americans celebrate King's birthday.

Every day as the students arrive for classes at King Hall, they walk past a "life-size terra cotta sculpture" of King "mid-stride, wearing a clerical robe depicting carved illustrations of the civil rights movement," according to the school's website.Cite

In a letter to Dean Perschbacher, several student groups worry that in recent promotional materials and on the website, the law school has "hidden or downplayed the Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall School of Law name". They are unhappy with this circumstance, especially since the name "reflects the spirit and community of the law school and the students who choose to enroll" there.

I find both irony and hope in the serendipitous turn of events that finds my son at a law school named for someone who so profoundly changed my life; a civil rights leader who had no hesitation to break the letter of the law through non-violent civil disobedience in pursuit of the spirit of social and economic justice.

These days, King is still called an "extremist" by some. Whole pages on the Internet are devoted to attacks and smears. King's biographical entry on the free online publicly-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia has been repeatedly vandalized, as it was this morning, forcing editors to monitor the page constantly throughout this day of remembrance.

In his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" King at first bristled at being labeled an "extremist" by a group of fellow clergymen upset with his activism.

King wrote that he thought this over for a while, and then realized that in their respective days, the Biblical Amos, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson had all been thought of as extremists by mainstream society. King responded, "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice--or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?"

Two issues are raised by King's clever reversal of the attack on him as an "extremist". First is that the term "extremist" has only relative meaning in terms of how far outside the "mainstream" norms of society a particular idea or act is located by some observer who claims a "centrist" position. Second, King suggests it is important to determine whether any non-normative idea or action defends or extends justice, equality, or democracy--or whether it defends or extends unfair power or privilege.

Ultimately, the concept of "extremism," and the use of the term as a label, is of little value in studying or challenging prejudice and ethnoviolence. As professor Jerome Himmelstein argues, the term "extremism" is at best a characterization that "tells us nothing substantive about the people it labels", and at worst the term "paints a false picture."

Often, analysts use the term "extremism" in a way that implies that ideas and actions are always linked. This is not the case. We need to separate ideology from methodology. King's ideas may have been outside the mainstream for his day, but he promoted non-violence; and while civil disobedience often involves a minor criminal act, it is not the same as an act of terrorism. Given the way the term "extremist" is sometimes used, it can serve as a justification for state action that is repressive and undermines Constitutional guarantees. Under the Patriot Act and other repressive federal laws passed since the attacks on 9/11, if King was alive today, he would probably be under surveillance as a potential "terrorist", just as he was spied on during the 1960s.

Before my son returned to law school after winter break, I dug around and found the black cloth armband I wore that day in 1968 when I marched in Newark to commemorate the passing of King. We spoke of these matters, and I asked my son to think about the issues on this day when we remember the man, but all too often forget the full range of his message. That's what being a parent is about--even when your children are now adults.

And the message of King deserves to be repeated and carried down through generations: if we are to have community rather than chaos, we all must challenge racism, economic injustice, and war.

That's what this day is about.

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Read the text of King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

Read the text of famous speeches by King, and listen to audio excerpts here.

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Portions of this essay first appeared in 2004 in my article, "Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style: Facing Complex Questions and Challenges," Journal of Hate Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, Institute for Action against Hate, Gonzaga University Law School.

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Ported from Talk to Action
Post comments on this article at www.Talk2Action.org.

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Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates

The Public Eye: Website of Political Research Associates
Chip's Blog