The United States of Calvin: How Christian Nationalists Frame the Past to Shape the Future

As the United States prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Christian nationalists are promoting the myth that the founding fathers were predominately orthodox Christian men. I argue that recent efforts to sustain this myth by Christian nationalists like Doug Wilson center on a historical figure who was nowhere near the Pennsylvania State house in 1776: the Protestant reformer John Calvin. I demonstrate how Christian nationalists’ mobilization of Calvin rely on historical narratives advanced during the late nineteenth century by Dutch pastor and politician Abraham Kuyper. Throughout his writings, Kuyper valorized Calvinist rebels across time, from the sixteenth-century religious wars in France to the eighteenth-century American Revolution. Identifying Christian nationalists’ appropriation of Kuyper’s Calvinist genealogy helps us better to understand their efforts to dissociate the American Revolution from the Enlightenment and read founding documents like the Declaration of Independence in ways that promote Christian hegemony.