THE GENEVAN REFORMATION AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING

Written by David W. Hall Reviewed By John Coffey

For the British, national history has become light entertainment served up by expert storytellers like Simon Schama and David Starkey. For Americans, by contrast, it often remains a deadly serious matter. The American Revolution, in particular, is an ideological battleground. As its leading historian, Gordon Wood, has observed, the Founding Fathers have become America’s Church Fathers, Just as Catholics and Protestants once tried to claim Augustine for rival causes, so the religious right and the secular left now play tug of war with Washington and Adams, Madison and Jefferson. Inevitably, this makes for flawed history, as the past is cut to suit partisan agendas.

Although the religious right has produced a great deal of hagiographical propaganda about the Founders, Christian conservatives have begun to sharpen their act. In his book On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense in the American Founding (2003), the catholic writer Michael Novak makes a reasonable case for the Judeo-Christian character of the Revolution. In the book under review, the Presbyterian David W. Hall takes a less ecumenical approach as he sets out to uncover the Calvinist roots of the Founding. His book makes a serious contribution. It is based on wide reading and is packed with informative detail. In it he traces the development of the Calvinist political tradition from Geneva in the 1520s through to America in the 1780s. Along the way there are valuable commentaries on a series of Calvinist political theologians—including Calvin himself, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Theodore Beza, the Hunguenots, Johannes Althusius, John Knox, George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, John Cotton and John Witherspoon. Anyone interested in the history of the Reformed tradition will learn a great deal from this book.

However, there are significant problems with Hall’s account. First, he tends to treat Calvinist politics as a stable entity, and even lists ‘the five points of political Calvinism’ under the less than memorable mnemonic Darcl—depravity, accountability, republicanism, constitutionalism, and limited government. Early modern Calvinists, however, operated in very diverse political contexts and were influenced by multiple ideological currents. Added to this there was much variation in their political thought. Hall highlights Calvinist resistance theorists and the quasi-republican elements in Reformed thinking, but he has no room for the divine right monarchism of the Calvinist King James I or the ardent royalism of Huguenots in mid-seventeenth century France.

Second, Half overplays the Calvinist influence on the American Revolution. He hears countless ‘echoes’ of Calvinist political thought, but often fails to acknowledge more likely intellectual sources. His book is a useful corrective to the many studies that secularise the Revolution. The fact remains, however, that the mentality of Adams and Jefferson was a world apart from the mindset of Calvin and Knox. Hall gives little sense of the great intellectual changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To take but one, the American revolutionaries were heirs to a radical Whig interpretation of history, which reconceived Protestantism as a religion of civil and religious liberty. This Whig ideology was forged by Protestants like John Milton and John Locke, men who rejected Reformed orthodoxy and who were implacably hostile to the imposition of doctrinal conformity. Their writings involved a significant liberalisation of Protestantism, and were widely read by the American revolutionaries (as Althusius and Rutherford were not).

Hall’s thesis stands in stark contrast to the argument of Mark Noll in America’s God (2002). Hall celebrates the American Revolution in true patriotic style, and hails it as the offspring of the Genevan Reformation. Noll is much more ambivalent about this first American civil war, and suggests that Reformed theology was being watered down by republicanism and Enlightenment common sense philosophy. He points out that evangelical religion was at low ebb in the 1770s and 1780s, and that all the leading Founders were critical of Calvinist orthodoxy. Unlike Hall, Noll does not provide cannon fodder for America’s culture wars, but that may be no bad thing.


John Coffey

University of Leicester