Reformed and antimodern

Some classic works on the origins of modernity gave pride of place to Calvinism. Max Weber famously made it the fount of capitalist economics; Robert K. Merton, that of experimental science; Michael Walzer, of political radicalism. In his new history of Reformed churches, D. G. Hart will have none of it. Rather than shaping modern life, he argues, Calvinism developed in reaction to it—sometimes in the negative sense of the word.

Calvinists have not been power brokers with a plan; instead, they have been ordinary folk who, their predestinating deity notwithstanding, found their way to an authentic ecclesiastical tradition by “accidental” and “unlikely ways.” The tradition has managed to spread from “marginal cities in central Europe” to all parts of the globe, but only by considerable trial and one persis­tent error—the aspiration to be part of the political or social establishment, to take charge of society, to be the culture formers that Merton and Weber espied. To that temptation only a very few have been immune, and they have remained so by adhering to strictly defined forms of doctrine, liturgy, and, above all, polity. That, in sum, is the author’s point of view.

The narrative unfolds in three phases. In phase 1, from Zurich and Geneva in the 1520s through the end of the 17th century, the fortunes of Reformed Protestantism are closely tied to the good graces of civil magistrates. Where these magistrates are hostile—as in Poland, France, and the Palatinate—a budding Calvinist network is crushed or harshly constricted. Where that network en­hances political identity, autonomy, or stability, it gains better headway. Thus weak but aspiring polities—Switzer­land, Scotland, the Netherlands, and various “nooks and crannies” of the Holy Roman Empire—become the long-term strongholds of the Calvinist cause.