JOHN CALVIN and the AMERICAN CALVINISTS, 1830–1910 R. Bryan Bademan One of the Central Narrativ

CHAPTER TEN “THE REPUBLICAN REFORMER”: JOHN CALVIN AND THE AMERICAN CALVINISTS, 1830–1910 R. Bryan Bademan One of the central narrative strands in the traditional historiography of American religion is the nineteenth-century Americanization and decline of Calvinism.1 Once holding a near unrivaled sway in American pulpits and among American theologians and indeed providing the main theological framework for the American people—the late William R. Hutchison recently estimated that circa 1800 some 85% of Americans were broadly Calvinistic in their “religious origins”—Calvinism faced diffi cult days in the fi rst century and a half of American national life.2 The assessment of the English historian James Anthony Froude in an 1871 lecture on the subject seems particularly applicable to the Ameri- can context: “After being accepted for two centuries in all Protestant countries as the fi nal account of the relations between man and his Maker, [Calvinism] has come to be regarded by liberal thinkers as a system of belief incredible in itself, dishonoring to its object, and as intolerable as it has been itself intolerant.”3 Indeed, in its Congregational 1 I am grateful to Sara Coro for excellent research assistance and to John B. Roney and Peter J. Wallace for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay. 2 “Religious origins” refers to one’s religious background rather than church membership or religious affi liation. See Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT, 2003), pp. 20–21. Egbert Watson Smith made a similar point a hundred years ago: “At the time of the Revolution, the estimated population of our country was 3,000,000. Of this number 900,000 were of Scotch or Scotch-Irish origin, 600,000 were Puritan English, while over 400,000 were of Dutch, German Reformed, and Huguenot descent. That is to say, two thirds of our Revolutionary forefathers were trained in the school of Calvin.” Smith, The Creed of Presbyterians (New York, 1901), pp. 119–120. Hutchison notes, too, the comment by Winthrop S. Hudson, that American society had been imprinted with “the stamp of Geneva” (Hudson, American Protestantism [Chicago, 1961], pp. 18–29), and the comments of the French Calvinist Andre Siegfried, that “America is not only Protestant in her religious and social development, but essentially Calvinistic” (America Comes of Age: A French Analysis [New York, 1927], p. 33). 3 James Anthony Froude, Calvinism: An Address Delivered at St. Andrew’s, March 17, 1871 (New York, 1871), p. 4. On the topic of Calvinism’s decline, see especially Daniel 268 r. bryan bademan form stemming from Jonathan Edwards, a tradition that nineteenth- century American churchmen labeled the “New England Theology,” the Calvinist legacy all but died.4 But while scores of scholars have attended to the waning of Calvin- ism as a theological tradition in America, we know much less about the evolving reputation of its namesake, John Calvin: the reformer, the pastor, the civic leader, the husband, the friend.5 In this story, the ebbing of Calvinism remains an important frame of reference, but other factors, some decidedly non-theological, weighed in and shaped the public perception of the reformer. Nowhere was this new reputation more apparent than among Calvin’s American heirs. Indeed, as the theological system of Calvinism lost its resonance among Ameri- cans broadly, Calvinists worked to construct a renovated “republican” Calvin, securing for him a new lease on the American imagination as an early architect of modern political liberty and thus of one of the Walker Howe, ‘The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972), 306–327. See also John T. McNeill’s The History and Character of Calvinism (London, 1954), which depicts the nineteenth century as “the fragmentation of Calvinism” (353). 4 See Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT, 1987); Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002), chs. 13, 14, and 15 (“The Americanization of Calvinism”); E. Brooks Holifi eld, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2003), ch. 17 (“Calvinism Revised”); Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (New York, 1932); The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, MI, 2006); and B. B. Warfi eld, ‘Edwards and the New England Theology,’ in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 5, ed. James Hastings (New York, 1912). Winthrop Hudson argued that “the theology which had shaped American institutions and informed American culture during the nineteenth century was Calvinism as modifi ed by revivalism and expressed systematically in the New England Theology.” Hudson, The Great Tradition of the American Churches (Gloucester, MA, 1970), p. 253. 5 But see Thomas J. Davis, ‘Images of Intolerance: John Calvin in Nineteenth-Cen- tury History Textbooks,’ Church History 65 (1996), 234–248. See also Karin Y. Maag, ‘Hero or Villain? Interpretations of John Calvin and His Legacy,’ Calvin Theological Journal 41 (2006), 222–237, which primarily deals with continuing hostility to Calvin in the 20th- and 21st-century popular and scholarly imagination; and Marilynne Robinson, ‘The Polemic Against Calvin: The Origins and Consequences of Historical Reputa- tion,’ in Calvin and the Church: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth Colloquium of the Calvin Studies Society, ed. David Foxgrover (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), pp. 96–122..

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