THE FATHER OF CHRISTIAN CAPITALISM

Three years ago, during the commemoration of the 500^th Anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, I thought that I might write something about him too, and this is what I had come up with.---

John Calvin, the “Pope of Geneva,” one of the chief holier-than-thou’s of the Reformation, who resurrected St. Augustine’s unconscionable denial of salvation to the non-elect, including all non-baptized infants, he might have been considered a shoe-in for the Religion section, yet here he is, and for a very good reason. In fact, he is the one who holds the dubious distinction among all Christian leaders, Protestant and Catholic alike, as the father of Christian Capitalism, in the strict economic sense. The infamous institution of Indulgencies, within the Catholic Church, testifies only to the corruption of the latter, rather than to an introduction of any particular capitalist principles. But it was Calvin’s sanctioning of usury as a legitimate Christian practice, which has indeed earned him the historical “honor” now placing him in my Capitalism section.

As for the other sides of John Calvin’s nature and ego, he appears to me as a rather unsavory character in every possible respect. Aside from his amoral doctrine of the elect, which is bad enough already (it does not matter what you do in life, but if you have been pre-elected by God to be saved, you shall be saved, and if not, you shall be condemned!), his manner of dealing with heretics, taking the cue from the Catholic Church, is similarly reprehensible. Many people were tortured to death, burned, and beheaded during his rule of terror in Geneva, despite the pleas from other Protestant communities to spare the victims. Whether his longtime correspondent and occasional critic Michael Servetus, arrested by Calvin during his visit to see him in Geneva, was burned at the stake on his direct command, or with his indirect imprimatur, is technically unimportant. (It is said by some historians that Calvin had recommended beheading, rather than burning, but others insist that the poor man's slow burning death was all Calvin's idea.)

On the less violent side of his decrees and activities, he surely went overboard in suppressing everything not measuring up to his ascetic ideal of Christian life and religious practice. It will suffice to say that all mirrors were banned in Geneva, to prevent people, and women in particular, from engaging in such unwholesome preoccupations as staring at their reflections. Indeed, in almost every aspect, whether religious or laic, Calvinism has been a thoroughly disagreeable phenomenon, giving the detractors of European Christianity yet another reason for dismissing it in toto as an “immoral” religion.

So far so… bad, about Calvin, and now is the time to restore some sort of balance to the picture.

Looking at Calvin’s “Christian usury of the elect,” as I have dubbed it, it may be argued that there is also a good side to it. Lest an impression appears of a coldhearted monster and an anti-Semite, whose purpose was to deny to the Jews their official monopoly on lending money at interest, let us clear up a few things.

The business of banking had sprung up among the Christians long before Calvin,--- in Italy, and elsewhere, and what he did was to address this convoluted issue honestly. There is indeed an absence of usual hypocrisy in his treatment of usury. Interest loans had of course been prohibited by the Christian Church, but it is no secret that Christian lenders always found loopholes in this prohibition, and were getting obscenely rich, like, say, the notorious Medici family, from a plethora of exemptions to what was none other than usury in disguise.

Thus, it can be said that Calvin stripped the Christian practice of usury of its hypocrisy. At the same time, his legalization of usury went hand in hand with his encouragement of charity for the poor and also of lending money to the needy without an expectation of return with interest.

Furthermore, I might even say that Calvin’s historical role in Switzerland was to create a” banker-friendly” culture, first among the strictest breed of Swiss Christians: the Calvinists, but quickly spreading to the other denominations. It would take a couple of centuries of course for the nation to become the banking center of Europe, but it goes without saying that the Swiss have immensely profited from Calvin’s removal of stigma from Christian usury, allowing them to conduct their banking business in good conscience. Whether indeed for this reason or not, the fact remains that ever since Calvin’s time, the fortunes of Switzerland were on the ascending line, allowing this hybrid nation speaking four different tongues and having little else in common to achieve a virtual great power status in terms of its aggregate wealth, citizen prosperity, and international prestige, at the same time as, for instance, the superrich powerhouse of Spain found itself on the descending line. Let us remember that having expelled the Jews and established the Inquisition mainly to persecute the Jewish converts, Spain never filled the resulting economic vacuum, and, temporarily sustained by fabulous treasures delivered by her conquistadors from the New World, succeeded in mismanaging this wealth, and ended up bankrupt. Ironically, although a much larger economy,  today Spain’s per capita GDP constitutes merely a fraction of the Swiss statistic, whereas Switzerland is consistently topping the overall rankings of world economies in the Global Competitiveness Report, well above the United States, who is in the seventh place.

…John Calvin was a ruthless despot, who routinely killed or at best banished his opponents, while enjoying playing the dual role of God and Caesar over his submissive subjects. He brought much grief to his Geneva fiefdom, yet today’s Switzerland owes him a large debt of gratitude.