Calvinism is/was a school of doctrine, in Protestant Christianity, that held that there were
two groups of people, the Elect, who would go to heaven, and the Reprobate, who
would go to hell. The actual beliefs are a little more complicated than that--it involves
conclusions from God’s purported omniscience, and if He knows who is going to hell
then why would He bother wasting any Grace on them, and so really, only the Elect end
up mattering and if you think about it Jesus really would have only bothered dying to save
the Elect--but in terms of practical results it ended up not MUCH more complicated than
“there are two groups of people, the Good Ones and the Bad Ones.”
The effects of this philosophy have made it a very good contender for the worst and most
damaging philosophy in all of human history.
If we’re talking about it just in terms of “cultures and people and morality systems that
would have been influenced by the teachings of the theologian John Calvin” then that
gives us, well, all of European Colonialism and all that follows from it. But I think we can
use “calvinism” not historically, but diagnostically, as a label for tendencies in Human
Morality to sort people into “the ones who matter, who are the moral superiors, who do
good things, and who can be wronged” and “the ones who don’t matter, who are morally
inferior, who do only evil, and against whom anything is justified.” This is a distinction
that morality systems seem to want to make a LOT.
One suspects there may be a reason for that.
But the important thing is that calvinism, in this sense, is the keystone of every current
right wing worldview. Let me show you a few examples.
two groups of people, the Elect, who would go to heaven, and the Reprobate, who
would go to hell. The actual beliefs are a little more complicated than that--it involves
conclusions from God’s purported omniscience, and if He knows who is going to hell
then why would He bother wasting any Grace on them, and so really, only the Elect end
up mattering and if you think about it Jesus really would have only bothered dying to save
the Elect--but in terms of practical results it ended up not MUCH more complicated than
“there are two groups of people, the Good Ones and the Bad Ones.”
The effects of this philosophy have made it a very good contender for the worst and most
damaging philosophy in all of human history.
If we’re talking about it just in terms of “cultures and people and morality systems that
would have been influenced by the teachings of the theologian John Calvin” then that
gives us, well, all of European Colonialism and all that follows from it. But I think we can
use “calvinism” not historically, but diagnostically, as a label for tendencies in Human
Morality to sort people into “the ones who matter, who are the moral superiors, who do
good things, and who can be wronged” and “the ones who don’t matter, who are morally
inferior, who do only evil, and against whom anything is justified.” This is a distinction
that morality systems seem to want to make a LOT.
One suspects there may be a reason for that.
But the important thing is that calvinism, in this sense, is the keystone of every current
right wing worldview. Let me show you a few examples.
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