What Ever Happened To Calvinism?

Do you remember when Calvinism was cool?

There was a brief window in the Post-9/11 world, say from the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, where Reformed theology was, for lack of a better term, a thing.

I grew up in the deeply Baptist South, in a place where Presbyterians were about as common and accepted as Zoroastrians. When I was a child, the only reason the locals would beat down the doors to a Presbyterian church was to let us know we were going to Hell for following Calvin.

So as a teenager, seeing these New Calvinists show up to my family's small Presbyterian church surprised me as much as if they had emerged from the communion wine. People were 'converting' to Reformed theology, and what's more, they were doing it because it was 'cool.'

Now 'cool' is, at best, a greased-up eel in a tub of butter when it comes to definitions, but one thing always involved is rebellion. Whether it's Flower Children putting daises in gun barrels or Metalheads decked out in skulls, spikes and chains, a sense of defiance is an eternal part of cool.

In the case of the New Calvinists, the defiance angle came from disagreeing with the doctrines of their parents and neighbors, whether those parents/neighbors were Baptists or Agnostics. Hell, I was a bad boy of theology at my Baptist school, in the sense that arguing constantly gave me a sense of power and purpose.

Checkmate, Bap-tards.

So you can imagine how weird it was when my classmates started admiring my dogged persistence in sticking to my guns and, dare I say, started treating me more like an actual bad-boy. I suspect this had less to do with my charm winning them over and more to do with the emergence of attention-grabbing Calvinist mini-Celebrities.

I'm not going to go into the doctrines of Calvinism or the extent that New Calvinism was actually Calvinist. The point is, it was an obscure subject that had the right mixture of density and edginess that pseudo-intellectuals congregate around in the Man Caves of the mind. Add in historical acceptance of beards, alcohol, and extreme quibbling over doctrine, and you've got a subculture a man with no sense of purpose in life can get behind.

But as always happens in subcultures, nothing can stay in the limelight forever. In recent years, I'm hard-pressed to find a Calvinist thought-leader in any area other than Christianized alcoholism or turning quisling for the LGBTQP2P crowd. Turns out that a vague sense of intellectual and consumerist superiority isn't enough to keep a movement interesting.

I suspect that a lot of the Calvin crowd has turned to Eastern Orthodoxy in recent years, as the "OrthoProt" meme suggests. After all, Orthodoxy is even more obscure in America, and thus easier to be smug about. It's just as compatible with Beer, Beards, and Bacon, with the bonus of candles and incense. Now instead of imagining yourself as a Great Protestant Writer, casting down the Catholic scum with your mighty pen, you can pretend to be a Great Orthodox Monk, living humbly in an obscurity that makes you better than everyone else. You can be right about everything without interacting with anyone!

I don't say any of this because of inherent problems with Orthodoxy (we can discuss those separately), but rather to say that we all know where this is going. There's gonna be another next thing to get excited about, to argue about the details of, to obsess over while ignoring the real problems of the human heart. My guess is that OrthoProts are going to dig up old heresies in their reading and weaponize one or another as the "One True Version of Christianity."

I'm not worried about the continuing coolness of Calvinism, but watching it spiral into another religious arm of Sodom and Egypt is disturbing. Maybe that's what really happened to Calvinism - the slow creeping in of the same bullshit that destroyed the mainline denominations. Can any subculture survive being cool? Not because of cycles of interest, but because every organization that can be used to push the Narrative will eventually be infiltrated and turned.