Calvin and Secularization

Carlos Eire argues (in John Calvin and Roman Catholicism ) that Calvin develops a secular account of the rise of religion. Unlike Augustine and the Catholic tradition, Calvin locates the source of false religion in the human imagination, and leaves demonic activity completely out of the picture. As an early “armchair ethnologist,” Calvin paved the way for Enlightenment theories of religion:

“by observing Catholics as ‘others’ and by objectifying their religion as a purely natural, socially constructed figment of their imaginations, Calvin began to divorce religion from the supernatural, and to cast doubt on the possibility that religion per se always connects human beings to some numinous dimension. Banning the devil from the scene heightened human responsibility too, and made religion seem even more illusory and less connected to the world of spirit, even a mere figment of the darkest recesses of the human mind and heart. Further steps would have to be taken to dismiss all religion as ‘false’ and call it a delusion, along with the very idea of God, but Calvin opened that steep train of doubt, so to speak.” Eire places Calvin in a genealogy that leads through Vico, Hume, and de la Mettrie to Durkheim, Malinowski, and van Gennep.