Seen in this light, certain aspects of early Calvinist America are understandable. For example, Puritanism’s development under oppression, even in secrecy, may have made Puritan culture self-protective when, in the cold and marginal Eden where Puritans had found themselves, there was really no one to trouble them much. As dissenters, they knew what they wanted in a social order. They were governed by elected councils. Their clergy were learned, and their churches were autonomous, governed by their own congregations. They codified and, crucially, made public humane laws that owed vastly more to Moses than to British common law. When they were still fresh off the boat, they founded a college in a town they called Cambridge, then another in New Haven. That they thought to do this and had the institutional experience and the intellectual resources to do it gives us a good sense of who they were.
So, an influential early settlement in the future United States was in effect an offshoot of the political, religious, and intellectual history of Europe. Two things are striking about this fact. The first is that we know nothing about the history of Europe, and the second is that we know nothing about our own history. The through line, for my purposes here, that links early America with early-modern Europe is Calvin and also Calvinism. I distinguish between them because Calvin left a large and very substantive body of work from which his views of things can reasonably be deduced. He left a Reformed tradition whose influence is so pervasive in our culture that it is invisible to us, and which is, and has been, reformed, transformed, and diluted, always claiming to be rejecting Calvinism, as if this is by nature rigidly opposed to change and reform rather than being the preeminent theological influence behind them. This rhetorical habit of treating something called Calvinism as a rigid pietism to be rejected in a spirit of liberality and reason has also encouraged some branches of the tradition to claim to adhere to a rigidity that is, they believe, the true Calvinism. Surely it is helpful to remember that Calvin was a French Renaissance humanist whose theology was singularly important to the English Renaissance. Calvin’s image as an influence in American culture is, in the popular mind and the minds of historians as well, of a man without period or national culture, an untethered figure who epitomizes all that is narrow and irksome in religion. And we are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good. In any case, it was mainly the work of people who were cultural Calvinists to stigmatize Calvinism to the degree that his actual thought is by now very little known.