The Protestant Deformation in America

What we call “secularism” is profoundly shaped by faith traditions.

I’ve clumsily referenced Max Weber’s thinking about Protestantism’s relationship to capitalism several times here at Wisdom of Crowds, and I have several times been warned by readers about how much Weber got wrong in his famous treatise. Now, as I get deeper and deeper into my project of reading the Bible (in its King James translation, naturally) from Genesis to Revelation, I’m being tempted back into Weber’s perilous waters. But not having to do with capitalism, exactly, and more to do with America writ large.

What’s tickling me is chapter 9 of Romans, specifically verses 14-23, where Paul lays out in stark terms what the doctrine of predestination entails.

Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.

For he saith to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, “Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.” Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, “Why hast thou made me thus?” Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.

Bolded emphasis mine.

I’m not well read enough to even begin to unpack how these passages have been interpreted after Martin Luther focused on them. But Paul’s understanding of God — not exhaustive or the last word! — doesn’t admit much space for free will. It’s conceivable that individuals still have some amount of bounded free will as creations, but in the bigger picture, we are all just “vessels” of God, and our destiny is already decided — all part of some inscrutable grand plan.

What Weber brings to all this is a theory of how this uncompromising doctrine, sharpened to a razor’s edge by John Calvin, ends up secularizing — how a doctrine that on its surface strongly limits free will and agency gets transformed into a supremely individualistic ethic that arguably is at the core of modernity.

Weber has been criticized for both mischaracterizing Calvinism, and research has shown that his linkage between specifically a Calvinist idea of predestination and an ethic of thriftiness and hard work is at best overdetermined. Even if all those criticisms hold, Weber’s broad outline of how religious convictions seep into and shape the entire framework of how a society conceives of reality itself is worth holding on to.

One of the first essays we published at The American Interest back in 2005 was titled “The Protestant Deformation,” written by James Kurth. Jim had written the first version of this essay in 1998 in Orbis, and wanted to update the thesis for us. At the time of the essay’s publication, a lot of ink was being spilled on how America’s terrifying Evangelical Christians, with their commitment to Biblical inerrancy and literalism, were helping usher in a theocracy under the rule of the true-believing George W. Bush. And how this was most pronounced in the realm of foreign policy.¹

Jim was having none of that glib nonsense. Instead, he set out to show how while Protestantism was at the root of all sorts of Americana, the panicked conspiracies around Evangelical theocracy had nothing to do with it.

I commend Jim’s essay to you in it’s entirety. It’s in some ways dated, as it is of its place and time. But some passages — especially those not strictly tied to foreign policy — still leap off the page:

In the three centuries after the Reformation, the Protestant rejection of hierarchy and community in regard to salvation spread to other domains of life as well. Some Protestant churches came to reject hierarchy and community in church governance and other collective undertakings. This was especially the case in the new United States, where the conjunction of the open frontier and the disestablishment of state churches enabled the flourishing of new, unstructured and unconstraining denominations.

By the beginning of the 19th century, the Protestant rejection of hierarchy and community had also spread to important arenas of temporal or secular life. Again, this was especially the case in the United States. In the economic arena, the elimination of hierarchy (monopoly or oligopoly) and community (guilds or trade restrictions) meant the establishment of the free market. In the political arena, the elimination of hierarchy (monarchy or aristocracy) and community (traditions and customs) meant the establishment of liberal democracy.

However, the free market could not be so free, nor liberal democracy so liberal, that they became anarchic. Although economic and political life could no longer be ordered by hierarchy and community, by tradition and custom, they had to be ordered by something. That something came to reflect the Protestant emphasis on written words and arose in the form of written covenants between individual Protestant believers. In the economic arena, this was the written contract; in the political arena, it was the written constitution.

What reading the Bible, and re-reading Jim’s essay, has reminded me is just how incomprehensible America really is without an understanding and acceptance of the depths at which Protestant Christianity shapes America to this day.

Writing here on a Tuesday night, a week before Christmas, and right after an epic holiday rager that that we threw last night along with Aspen’s Philosophy & Society center, I don’t have anything more specific to offer apart from this newfound appreciation. But I’m pretty sure there’ll be much more to come in this vein in the New Year.

1. If you weren’t politically aware at the time, go back and look into the kind of stuff that obsessed columnists at the time. I shit thee not, it was every bit as intense as the RussiaGate obsession that gripped us during Trump’s first term.