By Francis X. Maier

But first a note: Be sure to tune in tomorrow - Thursday, October 10th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing second Synod on Synodality now underway and other developments in the Universal Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column...

Americans have a genius for amnesia. It's in our DNA. Henry Ford captured this best more than a century ago when he said "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today." The past comes with annoying lessons. It interferes with our imagining the future. And yet it's inescapable. The past shapes who we are and explains where we came from - details that are handy when trying to understand a crisis like the political car wreck we face this fall.

The United States began as a marriage of Biblical faith and Enlightenment thought. The tension between those elements in the American character has fed the nation's dynamism from the start. The Calvinism of founders like John Witherspoon, rooted in the Scottish Reformation, combined with the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment, shaped the early American experience. Together they distinguished the American Revolution from the more extreme revolutionary events in France and set it on a far more successful course.

Calvinist Protestantism is key to understanding the American psyche and its political implications. On the positive side, Pierre Manent, the French Catholic political philosopher, credits "the magnificent contribution of Calvinism to modern political freedom." In Calvinism's deep respect for the law, "human power is liberated or encouraged, but no human being, religious or secular, is above the law." He contrasts this with his own (Catholic) Church's regrettable past preferences for authoritarian regimes and resistance to liberal thought. For Manent, Catholic thought has always been "more alert to the risks than. . .to the grandeur of political freedom."

The same Calvinism, though, has a downside of unintended consequences. And it's chronicled by both the Yale historian Carlos Eire and the late Anglican philosopher George Parkin Grant. Calvin's motto was "glory to God alone." In Calvinist practice, this led not just to a powerful faith but also to an intense iconoclasm. The elimination of relics, sacramentals, religious statues, "magical" thinking about saints and the Eucharist, and belief in such things as Purgatory logically followed.

In effect, Calvinism desacralized the world, wiping out the mediating links in worship and everyday affairs between this life and the next. In doing so, argues Eire, Calvin became "a pioneer on that steep trail" that has led, centuries later, to modern unbelief.

At the same time - wrote George Grant - Calvinism created a community of very driven individuals who sought to be God's elect. Today God may (seem to) be absent, but a community of the elect remains, more driven and puritanical than ever on issues ranging from "reproductive rights" to climate change. That sense of anointing, of destiny's special favor and its demand for an endless, urgent striving toward success, is at the heart of modern progressive politics. Destiny's favor comes with an intolerance for anything in its way.

That's why permissive abortion, in the Kamala Harris campaign, is not just another policy matter. It's a passionate element of creed. Put simply, a woman's right to kill her unborn child at any stage of development is a non-negotiable sacrament.

So what's the point in all of this? Again, the past shapes us. And while it needn't determine our actions going forward, forgetting its lessons c...