> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> We're talking about revolutions after 1750,
> > which Jefferson certainly had more influence on (both in the US and in
> > France) than Calvin and Aquinas combined.
> >
>
> Are you sure? I'm no scholar of the American Revolution
Nor am I, for the record. I am open to persuasion.
> (for some reason,
> I've always found the episode irredeemably boring), but I am aware that it
> was commonly called "the Presbyterian Revolt" in Great Britain.
>
>
Well, it isn't surprising that British would characterize it that way, but
that also doesn't make it an accurate assessment of the processes at work.
Certainly there were more Christians than deists like Jefferson or (still less) Paine, so it stands to reason that most revolutionaries were Christians, and many of them would be Presbyterians and Congregationalists -- I would guess more of the latter than the former, but don't know for sure, but in either case deeply Calvinist. And certainly they had no truck with the Church of England. But of course there were also revolutionary Anglicans. I guess I would say that the nature of this situation makes it all the more remarkable that so little Calvinism shows up in documents like the Declaration or the Constitution. Which suggests to me that, however much Calvinist Christians were active in the revolution, and would have had to find a way to understand their participation as consistent with their religious values, those values were brought in line with other revolutionary values, rather than the other way around.
I know it's a sort of commonplace in certain circles that Madison (and other Federalists) had sort of absorbed certain Congregationalist Calvinist ideas, particularly a commitment to the idea of "total depravity" -- that human beings are hopelessly enslaved to sin. And so this then is understood to explain his concern about "faction." But I admit I don't understand why one has to believe that humans are irredeemably sinful to think that one should be worried about how to deal with conflict within a polity. It's hard to characterize Locke as Calvinist, but he thinks atheists are not to be trusted as members of a society, since their oaths are not divinely sanctioned and so worthless.
And of course, this only speaks to the US, not, for example, France, where I know even less but where I am even less inclined to think that it was driven in any sense by Calvinist values or ideas.