The Eating of Sausages

The Eating of Sausages

Reformed Protestantism was born in Zurich in 1522, when a few brave believers defied a church ban on eating meat during Lent.

By BARTON SWAIM

D.G. Hart is a cantankerous conservative, a stalwart Presbyterian and a talented polemicist with a delightfully perverse sense of humor. (For years he coedited a newsletter called the Nicotine Theological Journal.) He is best known for his books critiquing American religious cultures of the 20th century, particularly "The Lost Soul of American Protestantism" (2002) and "From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin" (2011). He isn't known as an expert on early modern Europe, however, and I wondered whether he was the ideal candidate to write a history of Calvinism. I underestimated the man. "Calvinism" covers its imposingly diverse subject with scholarly precision and the kind of charity and balance one hopes for in any historian.

Calvinism is a form of Protestantism that may be simpler to define by what it is not. As a historical phenomenon, it is neither an obsession with the doctrine of predestination (Calvin himself rarely wrote about it) nor the anxious introspection that, according to Max Weber, led northern Europeans of the 17th century to achieve high levels of wealth-making productivity. The religious doctrines and attitude to life now signified by the word "Calvinism" actually predate John Calvin (1509-64).

In early 1522, in Zurich, a small number of believers met in the home of Christopher Froschauer for the purpose of defying a church teaching that banned eating meat during the Lenten season, a prohibition nowhere found in the Bible. They ate sausages, and the resulting controversy led in time to the city council passing an ordinance affirming the freedom to do so, stating that "no Christian is bound to do those things which God has not decreed." The sausages controversy, as Mr. Hart says, nicely captures the essential conviction of Reformed Protestantism: God's word alone defines what it is to be faithful to him. The tradition came to bear John Calvin's name—"Calvinism" and "Reformed Protestantism" are more or less synonymous—not because Calvin originated it but because his enormous body of writing exhibited this principle from beginning to end.

In "Calvinism," Mr. Hart skillfully combines political and institutional history, on the one hand, and theological developments and the "history of ideas," on the other. The former predominates in the first half of the book, covering the two centuries when Reformed Protestantism was found predominantly in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the German states. From the mid-16th century through the early 18th century, the state of Reformed churches depended largely on which monarch or prince ruled at the time. As late as 1719, for instance, Charles III Philip, the Roman Catholic Elector Palatine, adopted a series of policies aimed at squeezing the Calvinists out of Heidelberg altogether. He imposed fines on anyone caught using the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism, confiscated Reformed churches' Bibles and Psalters, and sent in soldiers to occupy the city's Church of the Holy Ghost. This kind of volatility characterized the experience of Reformed churches all over Europe.

Hence one of the chief factors in determining the vigor of Reformed Christianity, Mr. Hart writes, "was the capacity of ecclesiastical figures to create structures independent of the state for overseeing and determining religious affairs." In the 1570s, as the Dutch freed themselves from Spanish domination, citizenship was effectively separated from church membership; church attendance became voluntary, giving ecclesiastical authorities much greater latitude in instructing their flocks. Yet even in the Netherlands there were church-state entanglements for another 200 years.

The second half of Mr. Hart's book chronicles the ways in which Calvinist churches began at last to break free from state power. The "Great Disruption" in Scotland in the mid-19th century was the turning point. For more than a century, the Church of Scotland had maintained the "right of patronage," according to which wealthy landowners chose the local church's minister, whether the congregation liked him or not. The Calvinist-dominated Church of Scotland was Presbyterian in structure (governed by elders, or presbyters, from each congregation, not by a hierarchy of bishops). Many ministers felt that the practice of patrons "installing" ministers violated the spiritual independence of the church, and in 1843, 121 ministers and 73 elders walked out of the Kirk's General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland—a major blow to the idea that the church must accept some level of control by earthly authorities.

In the U.S., where Calvinist ideas arrived with the first settlers, state interference in the affairs of the church was never the problem it had been in Europe. The problem here, among the Reformed as among those of other traditions, was the reverse. Many American Presbyterians had been led to think that the point of their faith was to influence society and especially the political realm. Mr. Hart records a wonderful moment in 1926 when a Presbyterian minister named J. Gresham Machen, then a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, was urged to vote "yes" on a motion before the New Jersey presbytery supporting Prohibition. It seemed to be the obvious thing to do—most Presbyterians supported Prohibition—but Machen couldn't find any support for such a resolution in the Word of God. So, to the ultimate detriment of his own career—he would lose a promotion at the seminary as a result—Machen voted "no." Mr. Hart sees this vote as, in a small way, a culmination of Calvinistic thought and practice.

Where does Calvinism stand now? Mr. Hart, whose other writings tend toward pessimism and regret, sounds almost cheerful about Calvinism's global presence. "Reformed Protestantism has been a global faith since the 17th century," he writes, and it is equally so now. It thrives in South Korea; self-consciously Reformed churches in the U.S. aren't on life support as their "mainline" counterparts are; missionaries from Reformed denominations are spreading throughout Africa and Asia; and there are even modest signs of a Calvinist resurgence in Europe.

In the developed world, established churches have dwindled to the point of insignificance, and national loyalties (along with national borders) mean less and less. If Mr. Hart's view of Calvinism is right—that it has flourished best when freed from the encumbrances of the nation-state's power—its history is far from over.

Mr. Swaim is the author of "Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-1834."

A version of this article appeared August 20, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Eating Of Sausages.

The book is called:  Calvinism: A History by D.G. Hart