¹ Walzer, Michael, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), does not specifically discuss the Synod of Dort, but portrays beautifully the grim zeal of the early Calvinists. ‘It was in many ways an age of fear’, he writes of their era (p. 88).Google Scholar

² Quoted in Gaberel, J., Histoire de l'église de Genève (Geneva, 1862), III, 195Google Scholar. The circumstances of d‘Alembert’s visit are described in Palmer, R. R., The Age of Democratic Revolution (Princeton, 1959), I, 116–19Google Scholar; and Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment (New York, 1966), I, 336–7.Google Scholar

³ Since the word ‘class’ is such an ambiguous one, perhaps I should point out that I am employing the word in this essay to describe what sociologists call a ‘reference group’, that is, a group sharing and mutually reinforcing a subculture. Religious attitudes can be an important component of the subculture of a social class. Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929), remains a pioneering study of the connection between religion and social class.Google Scholar

⁴ A learned church historian comments on this transformation, ’Seldom has a reversal of fortune been so complete. Within fifty years Calvinism in England fell from a position of immense authority to obscurity and insignificance'. Cragg, G. R., From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1950), p. 30.Google Scholar

⁵ There are exceptions to this indictment of the Latitudinarians, as there are to most generalizations: the energetic and saintly Thomas Bray (1656–1730), founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, is one.

⁶ Daniel Williams (16437–1716), a moderate Presbyterian, took issue with an attempt to revive the pre-war Calvinist theology of Tobias Crisp (1600–43). Williams stigmatized his late antagonist's position as ‘Antinomianism’.

⁷ Bolam, C. Gordon et al. ,, The English Presbyterians (Boston, 1968), pp. 25–7, has some observations on how the internal organization of Presbyterianism made it especially susceptible to the influence of upper-middle-class laymen with liberal theological views.Google Scholar

⁸ Robbins, Both Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Thompson, Edward, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), suggest that the potential for social radicalism still lurked beneath the respectable quiet of eighteenth-century Dissent.Google Scholar

⁹ McGiffert, Arthur Cushman, Protestant Thought Before Kant (New York, 1911), p. 252.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Belsham, Thomas, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, M.A., including … a General View of the Progress of the Unitarian Doctrine in England and America (London, 1812; second edition, 1820)Google Scholar. The quotation is from p. 402.

¹³ Quoted in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, ed. Hofstadter, R. and Smith, W. (Chicago, 1961), I, 64.Google Scholar

¹² Recent scholarship indicates that the date of 1662, often thought to mark the beginning of the declension of Massachusetts Calvinism, is too early. See Morgan, Edmund, Visible Saints (New York, 1963), pp. 113–72Google Scholar; and Pope, Robert, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton, 1969).Google Scholar

¹³ Describing Massachusetts in 1730,wrote, Perry Miller, ‘It was a parched land, crying for deliverance from the hold of ideas that had served their purpose and died’. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 484–5.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Other forms of Calvmist theology were long expounded from centers elsewhere in the United States, such as New Haven and Princeton.

¹⁵ Infralapsarianism taught that election was made after the Fall; supralapsarians maintained the harsher doctrine that God had intended the Fall and had His elect already chosen when it took place.

¹⁶ Lee, Eliza Buckminster, Memoirs of the Rev. Joseph Buckminster, D.D., and of his son, Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster (Boston, 1849).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Two fine accounts are Wilbur, Earl Morse, History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)Google Scholar and Wright, Conrad, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1955).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Priestley, oseph, An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind (London, 1774)Google Scholar. The Priestley–Price debate clarifies several of the issues dividing Priestley from more moderate Unitarians; see Priestley, Joseph and Price, Richard, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778). Price's philosophy and theology were endorsed by New England Arians as definitive statements of their own position.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The Progress of Liberal Christianity in New England (Boston, 1827), p. 8.Google Scholar

²⁰ See Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). I thank Harvard University Press for permission to reuse several sentences from the book in this article.Google Scholar

²¹ For another perspective on this development, see the late Haroutunian's, JosephPiety Versus Moralism: the Passing of the New England Theology (New York, 1932). This penetrating study, which has come into its own only in recent years, is reprinted as a Harper Torchbook with an introduction by Sydney Ahlstrom (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

²² Conrad Wright's study of church pew-proprietors of the towns in eastern Massachusetts indicates that wealthy and prominent citizens were most likely to affiliate with Liberal Congregationalist parishes, less likely to affiliate with orthodox Congregational ones, and least likely to affiliate with Baptist, Universalist, or Methodist churches. Wright did not attempt to ascertain the class position of Episcopalians, many of whom had fled during the Revolution. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, pp. 259–63.Google Scholar

²³ Faust, C. H., ‘The Decline of Puritanism’, Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Clark, Harry H. (Durham, N.C., 1953), p. 22.Google Scholar

²⁴ Some other American commercial centers experienced a religious evolution parallel to Boston's. For example, Arminian views penetrated the southern intellectual blockade at Charleston, South Carolina. There the Calvinist ‘Independent Church’ (founded in the 1680s by Huguenots, Scots-Irish, and Congregationalists from New England), which ministered to a mercantile and highly respectable clientele, gradually liberalized its theology. In 1817 the congregation finally split, the Unitarians among them organizing a ‘Second Independent Church’, and inviting a Harvard-trained clergyman from the north to settle.

²⁵ The great Perry Miller called attention to ‘the representative quality’ (his italics) of Massachusetts intellectual history. He found the development of the New England mind from its Calvinist beginnings through the early part of the nineteenth century to constitute the closest a historian could hope to find to a ‘laboratory’ for the study of ‘the relation of thought or ideas to community experience’ (From Colony to Province, p. x.).Google Scholar

²⁶ The bottom socioeconomic classes in the European population, such as landless peasants, figure remarkably little in the history of Calvinism. The conventional explanation for this is that Calvinism was a religion for the literate, and these people were uneducated. They were sometimes attracted to Anabaptism and other sects of extreme left-wing Protestantism, but more often followed the liturgical faiths.

²⁷ See, in addition to The Unitarian Conscience cited above, Heimert's, Alan provocative study, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1966)Google Scholar. The social conservatism of theological humanism has been detected in other times and places as well. See, for example, Adams, Robert [Robert Krapp], Liberal Anglicanism (Ridgefield, Conn., 1944)Google Scholar; and Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, 1956; first published in German in 1922), p. 133.Google Scholar

²⁸ See note 3 above.

¹⁹ For example, see Bailyn, Bernard, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 39–44.Google Scholar

³⁰ Simpson, Alan, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago, 1955), esp. p. 21Google Scholar, calls attention to the psychic dimension of Calvinism; the subject is also broached in Barbu, Zevelei, Problems of Historical Psychology (New York, 1960), pp. 180–6Google Scholar; and, in a different way, in Feinstein, Howard M., ‘The Prepared Heart: A Comparative Study of Puritan Theology and Psychoanalysis’, American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 166–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Social moods have continued to fluctuate, of course: the terrible traumas of the twentieth century produced a theological response among Protestant intellectuals that became known as neo-orthodoxy.

³² Most historians seem convinced that the cultural contrast here mentioned existed; whether the actual operation of the southern economic system was significantly less capitalistic than that of the north is a different, though related, question.

³³ Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Talcott (New York, 1930; first published in German in 1904).Google Scholar

³⁴ Kurt Samuelsson is quite justified in emphasizing this point in his Religion and Economic Action, trans. French, E. G. (New York, 1961Google Scholar; first published in Swedish in 1957), pp. 83–7, though his overall attempt to demolish Weber falls considerably short of its goal. (See Morgan's, Edmund review in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 20 [1963], 135–40.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ A persuasive restatement and reformulation of the Weber thesis is offered in Little, David, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

³⁶ There were other components in Weber's ‘spirit of capitalism’ too: a concern for longterm as opposed to short-term economic advantage, the liberation of economic activity from traditional or political restraints, and a compulsive preoccupation with financial success. The ‘spirit of capitalism’, it should be stressed, was an outgrowth of the ‘Protestant ethic’, but was not identical with it.

³⁷ Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1964), pp. 133–4. He takes the term from a seventeenth-century writer named Slingsby Bethel.Google Scholar

³⁸ The Protestant Ethic, pp. 174Google Scholar and 279–80; Sociology of Religion, p. 96.Google Scholar

³⁹ Calvinist ideas about child-rearing are described in Fleming, Sanford, Children and Puritanism (New Haven, 1933)Google Scholar; and, with more sophistication, in Morgan, Edmund, The Puritan Family (2nd ed.; Boston, 1956).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Christian Examiner, 7 (1829), 234.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Examples of rewarding interaction between theories developed in the social sciences and the study of American Calvinism include Erikson, Kai, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Bushman, Richard, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; and Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

⁴² The life of Jonathan Edwards has attracted particular attention: e.g., Bushman, Richard, ‘Jonathan Edwards as a Great Man: Identity, Conversion, and Leadership in the Great Awakening’, Soundings, 52 (1969), 15–46; and Philip J. Greven, Jr., ‘The Child and the Convert: Reflections on Jonathan Edwards and the Psychology of Religious Experience in Eighteenth-Century America’, unpublished paper delivered at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston, Mass., December 28, 1970.Google Scholar

⁴³ For additional suggestions concerning family histories and the current state of knowledge regarding them, see Nye, Ivan and MacDougall, Evelyn, ‘Do Families Have Subcultures?’ Sociology and Social Research, 44 (1960), 311–16Google Scholar; and Saveth, Edward N., ‘The Problem of American Family History’, American Quarterly, 21 (1969), 311–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ The scholarly literature to which I am indebted for ideas on Calvinism and its relationship to society is large, and much of it is justly famous (e.g. the writings of Ernst Troeltsch and R. H. Tawney). To have tried to cite all of this literature would have transformed my piece from an interpretative essay into a bibliographical and historiographical one. There are, however, in addition to the works mentioned in previous notes, some articles to which I should like to call the reader's attention: Bains, E., ‘Die Wirtschaftsethik der Calvinistischen Kirche der Niederlande’, Niederlandsch Archief voor kergenschiedenis, n.s., 24 (1931), 81–150Google Scholar; Sayous, A., ‘Calvinisme et capitalisme: L'expdrience genevoise’, Annates d'histoire iconomique et sociale, 7 (1935), 225–44Google Scholar; Clive, John and Bailyn, Bernard, ‘England's Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 11 (1954), 200–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ahlstrom, S. E., ‘Scottish Philosophy and American Theology’, Church History, 24 (1955), 262–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyer, D. B., ‘The Dissolution of Calvinism’, in Paths of American Thought, ed. Schlesinger, A. M. Jr., and White, Morton (Boston, 1963), pp. 71–85Google Scholar; Morgan, E. S., ‘The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 24 (1967), 3–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Loubser, J. J., ‘Calvinism, Equality, and Inclusion: The Case of Afrikaner Calvinism’, in The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, ed. Eisenstadt, S. N. (New York, 1968), pp. 367–83.Google Scholar