Calvin's Political Legacy in the U.S.

For those interested in the similarities and differences between the Puritans and other Reformed-Calvinist groups in colonial and antebellum America, take a look at James Bratt’s essay, “The Prism of Calvin’s Political Legacy in the United States,” in the current issue of Perspectives:  A Journal of Reformed Thought.  I think Bratt does a good job of laying out the Puritan vision and comparing it to the Dutch and Scots Reformed in the North and the Southern Presbyterians.  As Bratt notes, the Puritan churches “were state-supported to the exclusion of all others with the aim of thoroughly reforming not only church but also state and society.”  I think there are obvious echoes of this, albeit in a different political and historical context, in Kuyper’s thought.  During colonial times, Bratt notes, the Dutch reformed were mostly a sectarian lot, but along with German, Irish and Scots Presbyterians, they founded Princeton University and established what we now call the Old Princeton tradition, which of course deeply informs contemporary American Evangelicalism.  It was the Southern antebellum Presbyterians who had a public ideology closest to the “withdraw from the public sphere” versions of contemporary fundamentalism, but for different reasons:  they had to try to preserve the integrity of the Church without challenging the institution of slavery.