Ender2, Calvin's thought and practice are not racist. Some who later espoused Calvinism may have also been racist, but they did not learn that from Calvin.

Farnaz, while there are many noble Christians that could be associated with the country's founding, John Calvin is particularly noted since this month is his 500th birthday. Also, Calvin's focus on returning to following scripture alone ('Sola Scriptura') was indeed very important in the nation's founding.

Protestants began to see men as subject to a higher authority, rather than merely the whims of an autocratic church bishop. This eventually expanded to civil authorities - no longer could kings rule by might alone, but only in accordance with the written principles of God.

These of course have never been perfectly implemented, but were a startling break from the unchallengeable power of medieval kings. So we are to this day to be a nation governed by a Constitution, not the whims of men. John Calvin's impact continues to the present. Calvin is not to be worshipped, but honor can be rightly shown to his legacy.

But the following about Roger Williams will always be "rooted" in our minds: ( a great question for Jeopardy fans)

"When his (Williams) remains were discovered for reburial, they were under an apple tree. The roots of the tree had grown into the spot where Williams's skull rested and followed the path of his decomposing bones and grew roughly in the shape of his skeleton. Only a small amount of bone was found to be reburied.
The "Williams Root" is now part of the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society, where it is mounted on a board in the basement of the John Brown House Museum." (Apparently there was more than one body a-molding in the grave :)).

Hmmm, apparently Calvin and Williams were not visited by any "pretty, wingie, talking thingies" making them second-rate in the list of religion founders.

Persiflage,

I just quickly reread my last post to you, saw that I'd posted for you the Wikipedia link you had already posted for me!

Sorry. Worse yet, I admit, I barely skimmed it before posting it. Still, it was just a courtesy--I doubt you need a list of sources on Williams.

Btw., I don't know if you saw, but I posted below his most famous letter to the homies of Providence.

Persiflage,

Agreed on Penn, who was later, as you know. Yes, Nixon must have been perplexing to many Quakers, although I know one myself, a liberal, unsurprisingly, who ain't the most ethical among us. "Oh, why should the shattermyth have to be a crumplehope and a dampenglee?" (Thurber). No suitable idol candidates, American or other, have yet emerged, and that sayeth your humble servant, is how it should be.

Always, read Willis Elliot, btw.

"Roger Williams was born in London, England in 1604. After being educated at Charterhouse School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, Williams was ordained as an Anglican priest.

He gradually became an extreme Puritan and in 1631 joined the English colony led by John Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay. Williams objected to the royal charter of Massachusetts because it contained a lie when it claimed that England first discovered the region. Williams argued that the king had no right to grant the land to the settlers and that it should be purchased from the Native Americans. Although John Winthrop accepted the truth of this argument, he feared that if the king heard about what Williams was saying he might take back control of the colony and bring an end to this Puritan republic. Winthrop therefore decided to banish Williams from the colony.

Williams and his followers moved to Rhode Island where they purchased land from the Narragansett Indians at Providence. Williams established a democratic society and a haven of religious toleration and admitted Jews and Quakers into the colony. Anne Hutchinson, who had been banished by John Winthrop from the Massachusetts colony, also joined Williams on Rhode Island.

Williams, who was president of the Rode Island colony until 1658, wrote several books including Key to the Language of America (1643), The Bloody Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), Christenings Make Not Christians (1645) and George Fox Digged Out of his Burrows (1676). Roger Williams died in 1683."

Source: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAwilliamsR.htm
----------------------------------
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Williams_(theologian)

Calvinism and it's associted myth of Anglo/Teutonic superiority contributed more than any other mindset that allowed the twin "sins" of Manifest Destiny and Slavery that still haunt us to this day. I don't believe in "sin" but I do believe in Karma and the karma this nation has built up destoying millions of African lives and murdering 95% of the Native American population will probably guarantee our downfall as a nation. Us 'liberals' give lip service to the horrors of our past deeds, but don't really look at what it would take to overcome the karma. This nation could kiss the arse of every Native American and Black person in this nation for the next hundred years and not make up for our past transgressions.

Likewise, Calvinism, racism and unbridled greed still have us keeping humans in abject poverty or like in Iraq, dead by the millions, all over the world to support our empire and first place position in the world economy.

We've learned nothing. Religions that support and even encourage this insane behavior will be the end of us. Calvinism is the worst thing about us, not the best.

Farnaz,

Agreed regarding your observations re. Roger Williams. Perhaps he would now be classified as an American Baptist with the same tempered liberal thoughts as our own Willis Elliot! His liberalism and obvious spirit of equanimity was pretty extraordinary for his times.

Of all the Anabaptists, I have a great admiration for Quakers e.g. William Penn - and who espouse a truly egalitarian view, with a metaphysically realistic view of God as Spirit, at least IMO. Pennsylvania has an extraordinary history in many ways. And the Mennonites build very fine Early American furniture, of which I have a house full.

The Shakers were quite an extraorinary group as well, but since sex was proscribed for ALL converts including married folk, they died a gradual but licentious-free death - to the point of extinction. As you may know, their original furniture is worth it's weight in gold......

PS. It's hard to believe that Richard Nixon claimed Quaker roots!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Williams_(theologian)

Persiflage,

What impresses me about Williams is his stance against religious violence, forcible conversion, his call for a radical separation of church and state. Williams had not formalized his religion. We say now that he was an Anabaptist. Was he perfect from a twenty-first-century liberal perspective? Far from it.

There are no Christian idols among the illustrious forebears.

'Not if we deny government health insurance to nicotine addicts and their families (second hand smoke).'

While I have no objection to building in penalties and smoking dis-incentives to a national healthcare plan, or even as an addendum in private insurance policies, this will not be easy or immediate.

I've seen what smoking does up close and personal....and every day going forward since my own mother died of lung cancer.

However, these provisos must include all US citizens - good luck implementing these rules in the VA system, as an example of a particularly hard nut to crack.....and exactly where heavy smoking among both patients and employees is readily found.

We are legislating against smoking incrementally e.g. no smoking rules in public places now extant in many states - even in the Deep South!

There is still much further to go - and much higher cigarette taxes yet to come. This is one habit that makes religious faith seem innocuous by comparison.

Persiflage noted: "Universal medical care will be a very hard nut to crack for Obama........."

Not if we deny government health insurance to nicotine addicts and their families (second hand smoke).

While the Anabaptists and their modern progeny e.g. Amish, Mennonite, Hutterite, Quaker, etc. are to be admired for their spirit of independence, work ethic, and most of all, their fundamental principle of 'ahimsa' (harmlessness) toward their fellow man as typfied by their long traditional status as 'conscientious objectors', they remain socially isolated and so few in number today that it's hard to see them as significantly influencial as part of the American landscape today.

Having been indirectly acquainted with several of these groups in Pennsylvania, their relative avoidance of mainstream American culture is notable and traditional.

On the other hand, while the Amish remain very isolated and 'primitive' by choice, the Mennonites and Church of the Brethren are quite active in residential home construction and fine furntiure manufacture - Early American (like the extinct Shakers) is their preferred furniture style. The Hutterites of the western states are incredible and successful agriculturalists - otherwise, these groups remain staunchly 'ingroup' socially speaking. A willingness to engage in a practical and even sophisticated level of modern technology is the key to the success of these groups.

One poster expresses fear that the 'Protestant work ethic' attrituted to John Calvin is rapidly being replaced by the socialism of Karl Marx.

While everyone benefits from the fruits of capitalism in various ways, we find that the rich and privilaged few not only benefit the most in the obvious material sense, but also receive the most in the way of generous government tax exceptions and 'handouts'. See how the monies of the current government bailout are being levied, as a clear example. And they want more .... who's greedy now?

No less a capitalist than Warren Buffett has declared that his secretary pays more relative tax - because of his limited captital gains taxes and other tax protections. Meanwhile, rest assured that American workers would work - if they had work. They put in more man hours than any other industrialized nation. And for many others, the Roosevelt inspired 'socialist' buffers of social security and medicare keep untold numbers of citizens afloat.

Universal medical care will be a very hard nut to crack for Obama, in part because of the incredible opposition from the many monied forces that don't want the existing money machine tampered with....that includes mainstream middle class taxpayers of course.

It's hard to see how religion is going to offer a solution to our current fiscal and economic quandry. I've also known many and various Reformed types - the paradigm of modern day Calvinism.

It's hard to imagine a more socially conservative, materially oriented, and pretentiously superior bunch. On the other hand, it's much harder to find a real socialist - self-serving libertarians are much easier to locate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabaptist

Counterww,

To remind everyone that there is hardly anything left to religion after you remove the myths, embellishments and pretty, wingie, talking thingies and demons of the demented!!!

The only crisis I can think of on this forum

CCNL is that you continue the same old drivel,
over and over again.

Every thing you say is the same when it comes to religion. Everything.

What is your point to be here?

Hmmm,

"Williams even refused to pray with his wife because he did not consider her fully regenerate. "

Now that is "knee-deep in flip"!!!

And as punishment, he ended up as a root :))

"When his (Williams) remains were discovered for reburial, they were under an apple tree. The roots of the tree had grown into the spot where Williams's skull rested and followed the path of his decomposing bones and grew roughly in the shape of his skeleton. Only a small amount of bone was found to be reburied.

The "Williams Root" is now part of the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society, where it is mounted on a board in the basement of the John Brown House Museum." (Apparently there was more than one body a-molding in the grave :)).

Hmmm, apparently Calvin and Williams were not visited by "pretty, wingie, talking thingies" making them second-rate in the list of religion founders.

On Roger Williams:

By no means did or do I mean to imply that Roger Williams believed all religions were "created equal." Quite the contrary. He was as certain as a Christian could be that his was the "true" path. That is far from the point. What counts is his conviction that where religion is concerned, conscience is primary. This did not require him to discount proselytizing, and, indeed he hoped for the conversion of the Native Americans, but not through force.

What counts, too, along these lines, and it counts a great deal, is his conviction that "state" and "church" must not be joined together.

Was he a twenty-first-century liberal thinker? The very fact that he was in the "New World" suggests not. But, then, that is not the point.

That is also why I put Samson Occom on the list I posted below.

Actually, given what Williams DID, as opposed to what he "believed," even as it changed throughout the years, I don't think, that within the frame of this discussion, there is a "flip side."

"presented the scholar from Geneva as harsh and intolerant."

Anyone with a set of standards of behavior is considered harsh and intolerant by today's standards. As far as Calvin goes, a culture of hard work and delayed gratification is something I attribute to Calvin that is being lost. I am reminded of the carving on a lintel of a very old Swiss Chalet, "Work and Pray". It is sentiments like this that allowed the residents of a small, landlocked mountainous region of tumultuous Europe to become prosperous.

It is so unlike today's world in which an empowered, free electorate demand so many benefits from the state, treating the government as the source of an endless purse that is selling our children into penury.

Here is my problem with the analysis: Calvin has supplanted Christ.

You seem all too willing to regard Calvin's view as more authoritative than even the scriptures. You seem to identify yourself first as a Calvinist followed by a Republican then a Christian.

Your world seems to be: Life according to Calvin.

Thank God, really, it is just your world.

AGAPN9,

Where can I read more of the "modern scholarship" about what you have written about Calvin? I have not heard about his family background in this detail before.

I hope that Calvin will not be equated with Doug Phillips, for I have great misgivings with Phillips' views of history, theology and sociology (i.e., race). I am eager for your resource recommendations.

The "flip side" of Roger Williams:(from Answers.com)

1. "Like his contemporaries, Williams believed that Christ's second coming was imminent and that, in the time remaining, it was a Christian's duty to help gather the most perfect church possible. Williams's search for the spiritually pure congregation eventually led him to a conviction that the world was so deeply sinful that it would not be redeemed until Christ's return. "

2. "Williams taught that civil authorities could not punish transgressions against the first four commandments of the decalogue, that an oath of loyalty is a religious act, and that the English had no proper title to American land because the English king was in league with antichrist."

3. "Williams even refused to pray with his wife because he did not consider her fully regenerate. "

4. "Believing all present societies, Indian and Puritan, to be unredeemable, Williams thought that men's propensity for evil needed tight control. Consequently he helped pass strict laws for Providence. At the same time, he also believed that, since all men are naturally evil, they have the same natural rights and should share land equally."

5. and finally some trivia: "When his (Williams) remains were discovered for reburial, they were under an apple tree. The roots of the tree had grown into the spot where Williams's skull rested and followed the path of his decomposing bones and grew roughly in the shape of his skeleton. Only a small amount of bone was found to be reburied. The "Williams Root" is now part of the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society, where it is mounted on a board in the basement of the John Brown House Museum." (Apparently there was more than one body a-molding in the grave :)).

Personally, if I had to remember a particular Christian on July 4th, I would choose Samson Occom, Harriet Tubman, MLK, possibly Jonathan Edwards, or Roger Williams. (I would have included Frederick Douglass on my list, but in the end, he dispensed with Christianity altogether.) Below is Roger Williams' most famous letter.
----------------------------
Letter to the Town of Providence (Jan. 1655)

That I should ever speak or write a tittle that tends to such an infinite liberty of conscience is a mistake, which I have ever disclaimed and abhorred. To prevent such mistakes, I shall at present only propose this case: There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes that Papists, Protestants, Jews, and Turks may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm that all the liberty of conscience that ever I pleaded for turns upon these two hinges: that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ships prayers or worship, nor be compelled [restrained] from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.

I further add that I never denied that, notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of this ship ought to command the ship's course, yea, and also command that justice, peace, and sobriety be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers. If any of the seamen refuse to perform their services, or passengers to pay their freight; if any refuse to help in person or purse, toward the common charges or defense; if any refuse to obey the common laws and orders of the ship concerning their common peace or preservation; if any shall mutiny or rise up against their commanders and officers; if any should preach or write that there should be no commanders or officers because all are equal in Christ, therefore no master or officers, no laws nor orders, nor corrections nor punishments—I say I never denied that in such cases, the commander may judge, resist, compel, and punish such transgressors according to their deserts and merits. This if seriously and honestly minded may, if it so please the Father of Lights, let in some light to such as willingly shut not their eyes.

I remain studious of your common peace and liberty.

Roger Williams

Thank you, AGAPN9. Excellent commentary and a much-needed truth check.

It's not surprising that Doug Phillips would worship John Calvin - he actually thinks, and would like to act, in much the same way as John Calvin really was! Doug's brand of patriarchal "Christianity" advocates making the US into a theocratic state, in which rebellious family members or unbelievers can be put to death by stoning or other "Biblical" methods.

He's built up quite the profitable empire over the last few years through promoting it at homeschool conventions and the like. Unfortunately for him, any discerning person can see that a good part of his philosophy hinges on "reforming" history and twisting Scripture and the truth.

We see in our link here that John Calvin actually favored a more 'painless' beheading for his opponent Servetus - who had by then been declared a heretic. Is this to Calvin's credit? One must decide for oneself.

However, righteousness prevailed, and the luckless Servetus was burned at the stake -the typical punishment for a conspicuously public offender of religious orthodoxy.

See a brief history of the Catholic Church and their policy on heresy - up to and including modern times.

http://www.enotes.com/topics/john-calvin

http://www.christianityandhumanrights.com/_heretics.html

Neither the Catholics nor the Protestants have ever been short of homicidal narcissists that typically took out the opposition by burning or beheading - as alternatives, drawing and quartering and flaying the hapless victim alive were particularly gruesome methods that only a real sadist could enjoy inflicting.

All were excellent ways to send a message or simply take out revenge on an opponent e.g. religious heretic. Between Calvin and Luther, one was about as bad as the other.

Back in the day, hanging was reserved for anonymous poverty-stricken fools that needed to be quickly dispatched.

Ah, the prominent theologians and religious founders that have famously gone down in history. Very spiritual people, one and all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin

Here, here, AGAPN9. Great points. We Christians hold up our heroes at great risk. Reality-history is often very inconvenient.

Neither Luther nor Calvin were, by standards today, advocates of true religious freedom. They simply reformed the Catholic church into a revised, slightly more benign version. But they were both defenders of their new institutions using the point of a sword adn torture against those who disagreed within their realms. This includes torturing and putting to death real christians who lived biblical principles by today's standards.

From my perspective, what Luther and Zwingli started, Calvin added to (Protestantism). But none of them completed a real reformation into what we know today as Protestantism in the American setting. That was left to the Anabaptists, perscuted by Catholics as well as by Luther and Calvin. The Biblical principles that Anabaptists lived and died for are the real foundation of American religious freedom. Remember, each new American colony/state had an official established religion. Even the darn Puritans were no advocates of religious freedom. Yikes.

In this context, after the Anabaptist's theological and practical foundation, true religious freedom in America received a great boost from Roger Williams and William Penn. Two real heroes of American religous freedom. Thanks, Rog and Bill, from an Anabaptist.

Not that Rog, Bill and Anabaptists were flawless. They simply pushed the ball WAY beyond what Luther and Calvin started. Let's give em the credit. And recognize the shortcomings that are often glossed over by worshippers in the traditions of Luther and Calvin.

AGAPN9,

My compliments on your analyses of the real John Calvin.

In a more general view:

Calvin, Luther, Joe Smith, Henry VIII, Wesley, Roger Williams, the Great “Babs” et al, founders of Christian-based religions or combination religions also suffered from the belief in/hallucinations of "pretty wingie thingie" aka angel visits and "prophecies" for profits analogous to the myths of Catholicism (resurrections, apparitions, ascensions and immaculate conceptions).

Current crises:

Adulterous preachers, "propheteering/ profiteering" evangelicals and atonement theology, all-male hierarchies and strange banking and funding.

Doug you may be a very good lawyer but as a historian you leave a bit to be desired.

John Calvin had studied to be a catholic priest but was never ordained. He was never a ardent catholic. His family got caught in the quarrel between the bishop and the cannons.

Calvin's father was threatened with excommunication because he had failed to surrender the full amount due the bishopric. The father's old age was most likely the cause not dishonesty.

Charles Calvin's brother angry over his father's situation became enraged and rejected the church's teaching on the eucharist publicly and church burial was refused him.

Calvin became a leader of the reformation movement and after a long battle with the catholic forces Calvin's forces took control of Geneva - catholic priests were thrown into jail, catholic churches were destroyed, and Calvin's new Gospel was established in both Geneva and Zurich.

58 Executions of those who refused to follow his way took place over the first 5 years of his reign.

Michael Servetus, a Unitarian, a skilled doctor/debator and one who had the courage to go toe to toe against Calvin, the so-called great theologican, was burnt alive at Calvin's insistence.

Calvin was a vindictive and sometimes cruel man and to associate our great nation with such a man in the light of modern scholarship shows a lack of good judgment or a failure to avail one's self of modern scholarship.