The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Re: Submission to Rulers

Increasingly there is a cartoonish rendering of Protestant political thought that associates Protestantism with a liberal historical trajectory, and Roman Catholicism—or at least “liturgy”—with conservatism. The truth is far more complicated. In the Early Republic, Calvinism, not Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism, appeared to Jefferson to be the religious persuasion most at odds with liberalism.[1]
Since his election in 1800, Jefferson believed that Calvinists represented a return to European conservatism. The prospect of Calvinists—Congregationalists in New England, Presbyterians in the Middle Atlantic and South, and a smattering of evangelical Anglicans—exercising civil, political, or social influence in federal politics horrified the Deistic Virginian. His later embrace of Unitarianism in fact allowed him to continue his loathing of historic Christian teaching like the Trinity that he found so essential to Calvinism. Both Deists and Unitarians found the divinity of Christ and associated doctrines–the Virgin birth and the Incarnation–revolting. Jefferson’s fear of the Calvinists was not without reason.
The orthodox scions of New England Puritanism, far from being individualists or liberals, remained traditional conservative into the nineteenth century. Timothy Dwight IV, son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, president of Yale College, and a staunchly conservative Calvinist, saw Jefferson’s election as the advent of French revolutionary Jacobinism in the North American republic. …
Dwight bewailed the advent of Jeffersonian politics and opined that the United States …
Jefferson scoffed at Calvinist intransigence. He hated Calvin for many reasons, but he held an especially impassioned loathing for the French Reformer’s throaty trinitarianism and the doctrine of election. Calvin, in Jefferson’s reading of history, represented the clearest intellectual successor to the medieval Christian order he despised. He compared what he called the “simple” doctrines of Jesus—his phrase for Unitarianism—with “the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin.” Jefferson objected to the mysticism and anti-rationalism of Calvinism. He believed that Calvin was an enemy to reason.
Jefferson despised the Calvinist obsession with the incomprehensible nature of the divine. He called Athanasius and Calvin “impious dogmatists” and “false shepherds.” Athanasius’ and Calvin’s “blasphemies” drove “thinking men into infidelity, who have too hastily rejected the supposed author himself, with the horrors so falsely imputed to him.”
If the doctrines of Jesus had been preached “always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.” Jefferson rejoiced “that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving.” That genuine doctrine was Unitarianism, and Jefferson trusted
“that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian. But much I fear, that when this great truth shall be re-established, its votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and confessions of faith, the engines which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus, and made of Christendom a mere Aceldama; that they will give up morals for mysteries, and Jesus for Plato. How much wiser are the Quakers, who, agreeing in the fundamental doctrines of the gospel, schismatize about no mysteries, and, keeping within the pale of common sense, suffer no speculative differences of opinion, any more than of feature, to impair the love of their brethren. Be this the wisdom of Unitarians, this the holy mantle which shall cover within its charitable circumference all who believe in one God, and who love their neighbor.”
Calvinism, Jefferson feared, heralded the reclamation of the medieval imagination that he believed benighted the world for one thousand years.[3]
Jefferson need not have worried about Virginia. The changes made to the Westminster Confession in 1789 took the last serious teeth out of Calvinist political theology, and most serious Protestants in the Commonwealth saw disestablishment as prudential, if not good. New Englanders and the occasional Carolinian remained more circumspect.
Ultimately, however, all forms of western Christianity struggled to define their relationship to liberalism. There were and are Calvinist conservatives and Calvinist liberals, Anglican conservatives and Anglican liberals, as well as Roman Catholic conservatives and Roman Catholic liberals.
But in a time such as our own when Protestantism is seen as being inherently liberal and Catholicism as the only refuge for Christians who see catastrophic problems with the classical liberal order, it is worth remembering this history. History is far more complicated than we realize, and we might avoid contrived and ultimately ahistorical insinuations about other faith traditions by taking the time to read them in charity and sobriety.

Footnotes
Jefferson, of course, was hardly the only Enlightenment philosopher to feel this way: Recall that Rousseau, tired of the conservative Calvinistic Geneva traveled to progressive Paris to interact with enlightenment luminaries, which in the 1770s consisted mostly of heterodox or apostate Roman Catholics. ↑
Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson Vol. 1, 225 ↑
Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Waterhouse, 19 July 1822 in Paul Leicester Ford Ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson Vol. 10., 221 ↑”