Our Cultural Bias
This book is akin to a guide to remodeling a house that uses the remodel of a specific house as a narrative throughline. The decisions made during that remodel are not mandates for you to make the same decisions. The ultimate goal of the book is not to encourage all homeowners to remodel in the same style. Instead, it is to create a coalition of homeowners who have intentionally renovated historic houses for the modern age (put in internet, plumbing, electricity, smart thermostats, and solar panels while cleaning out the termites, stripping lead from the walls, and reinforcing weak parts of the foundation).
In this metaphor, the house we’re remodeling—i.e., the culture we inherited and have chosen to reshape and optimize—is secular Calvinism.[[53]](#_ftn53) Calvinism is a religious sect from which Puritans hail; Calvinist is to Puritan as Anabaptist is to Amish (all Puritans are Calvinist, but not all Calvinists are Puritans).[[54]](#_ftn54)
As our “old house” to be “remodeled” is secular Calvinism, you may find it helpful to understand what the original construction looks like. Understanding our cultural position will help you personally correct for personal biases and distortions created by the lens through which we see the world. (It might also give you insight into the world perspective of a seldom-discussed culture, something we always find interesting.)
Scott Alexander, author of the popular Substack/blog Slate Star Codex, describes the stereotypical Calvinist (specifically Puritan, the better known regional sub-group) as an “Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian … who takes morality very seriously.” “People complain that there is too much neo-Puritanism around these days,” Alexander wrote, “but they usually just mean people are moralistic reformers. I have the opposite worry: what happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs? Anyone who is serious about “Making America Great Again” should be deeply worried. … The virtue-obsessed nonconformist eccentric inventor philanthropist – has almost disappeared.” [[55]](#_ftn55)
The one thing almost everyone knows about Calvinists is that they believe in predestination—which we absolutely do. A mechanistic, clockwork understanding of reality is one of the foundations of our culture. The one thing almost everyone gets wrong about Calvinism is that they assume a belief in predestination implies a lack of belief in free will.
Just because past events could have only occurred in one way from our current perspective in the timeline does not mean we lacked free will in the moment. When we look back at the events of yesterday from our perspective today, the day could have only happened one way—and yet every decision we made yesterday was made with our own free will.
While events that will take place in the future seem limitless, they appear fixed when we look back along our timeline. Theological Calvinists believe God exists outside that timeline and therefore, from His perspective, future events are no different from past events. Just as God’s perspective outside the timeline does not negate free will, your perspective today—at this point in the timeline—does not negate free will you exercised in the past.[[56]](#_ftn56)
Secular Calvinists hold a similar belief but see the laws of physics—rather than God—as existing outside the timeline. The fact that physical laws exist outside the timeline and necessitate its path does not negate free will. In other words, just because our lives can only occur in a single way from the perspective of the laws of physics does not mean we lack free will from our own present perspectives. (The same is true if we live in a branching timeline, in which case each individual stream of the timeline is still determined by a mechanistic set of rules over which we have no influence.)[[57]](#_ftn57) This understanding of reality influences how our intentionally designed culture interprets matters like emotional states (something we address later in the book). It also explains why we believe a person’s choices can both shape a timeline and be predestined within it.
Discussion of free will dovetails well into Calvinists’ assumption of the total depravity of man. Culturally, this means we have a very dim view of individual self-worth and the worth of humanity as a whole: Humans are wretched—we must strive to overcome our nature while knowing we are destined to fail. In other words, this viewpoint acknowledges how fallible humans are but, nevertheless, maintains that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
While Calvinists are rare these days, they used to be common enough that their stereotype became a media trope. Cultural Calvinism is almost holistically portrayed as villainous,[[58]](#_ftn58) [[59]](#_ftn59) in great part because the culture is opposed to indulgence in activities like art, music, and dancing (but weirdly pro-sex—more on this in future chapters). This comes from a belief that emotions should be viewed with extreme skepticism (unless said emotions are tied to fervent theological and metaphysical research).
Secular Calvinists typically view emotions as a product of evolution with no inherent value. Humans feel the emotions we do because our ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring—they are nothing but a scar left by our genetic history. To a secular Calvinist, pursuing positive emotion for its own sake is as feckless as chasing after a fentanyl high. One might even go so far as to say negative emotional states are “better” because they are safer from an addiction/distraction-from-values standpoint. This mindset naturally produces the societal stereotype that Calvinists are obsessed with self-denial, pain, and suffering.
Morays around emotion play such a pivotal role in the Calvinist cultivar that if you look at historical Puritan language, you will find the word “sad” used as an adjective with positive associations, connoting something closer to stern, dignified, and contemplative. Culturally devoted Puritans, for example, would go out of their way to wear what they described as “sad” colors.
The disregard for emotion common in the Calvinist cultivar is not actually tied to the five points of theological Calvinism. Similarly, not all five points of Calvinism are major cultural factors. This exemplifies how religious philosophy alone does not explain 100% of a religion’s associated cultivar. It also explains why the modern theological revival of Calvinism did not revive Calvinist culture more broadly.
This causes Calvinists to see both self-indulgent hedonism and luxury as sinful. Because of this, historically, they had little motivation to spend money on themselves and saw most forms of charity as sinful virtue signaling. As a result, they reinvested almost all their money and time into their companies or specific charities meant to increase the efficiency of other people (such as libraries and schools). This constant self-reinvestment is how Calvinists gained the reputation for inventing modern capitalism[[60]](#_ftn60) [[61]](#_ftn61) and for producing very wealthy but miserly Ebenezer Scrooge-like characters. (For more on this subject see “Calvinist Stereotypes in Media” in the Appendix on page 721.)
For an example of what this ruthless, businesslike culture looks like in practice, here is a text Malcolm received from his mom when she heard about our pronatalist advocacy work:
“What’s your plan to monetize this new interest of yours?
Remember: everything is transactional.”
Calvinists were famous for proselytizing less than other denominations because they believed their world perspective was obvious to anyone who would just put in the mental effort and shed their biases (this stance also led to the culture’s relative extinction). Calvinist groups appeared less like a religious cohort and more like a really intense book club for those obsessed with living the most technically correct life possible and exploring the truth behind our metaphysical reality. This can be seen in stereotypes like:
“Calvinists are “cold,” “heady,” and “condescending.” They think they have it all figured out and everyone else is blind, slow, or stubborn. They’re so lost in their books, they’re not interested in the needs around them.”[[62]](#_ftn62)
While there are reams of Calvinist polemics and theories about better ways to live “correctly,” there is very very little written about what it is functionally like to live within the culture (outside of the more-communally-oriented Puritan branch, which is fairly well-documented due to its foundational role in the American colonies).
Occasionally you will find modern figures who leave Calvinist culture and write about what it was like to be raised within it. A good example would be Aella (a popular sex researcher and friend of the authors), who wrote of her upbringing:
“Conversation with him (her dad) was a daily challenge. He would frequently make blatantly false statements—such as “purple dogs exist”—and force me to disprove him through debate. He would respond to things I said demanding technical accuracy, so that I had to narrow my definitions and my terms to give him the correct response. It was mind-twisting, but it encouraged extreme clarity of thought, critical thinking, and concise use of language. I remember all this beginning around the age of five.”
This type of exercise persisted within my family even after it had secularized and reflects the Calvinist culture’s obsession with imparting a way of thinking and engaging with ideas as much as any specific idea.
The most offensive concept in Calvinist culture is the belief in “elect” individuals—that not everyone is or has the potential to be “saved.” This view is the product of a deterministic perspective on reality. Theologically, this means God knows whether you will be saved or damned before you are born. Secularly, this means some people’s lives do not matter in the grand scheme of the universe.
Whether you matter and manage to become a virtuous, productive person is predetermined. Because of this, you can speculate about your role in the timeline by reading the tea leaves of your heart: Every moment of procrastination or moral failing is a sign you may not stand among the elect. Early Puritan diarists are famous for thinking they’re definitely among the elect one day, then doubting their status among the saved the next; constantly vacillating between hope and doubt.
Perhaps, historically, the most important aspect of Calvinist theology was the belief that truth can only come from self-study: That no matter how well-intentioned a person may be, they risk corrupting the truth with their own perspective and biases if they attempt to guide you to it. This is why at some traditional Calvinist churches, churchgoers would sit and read their own Bibles rather than listen to a sermon-delivering priest.
The Calvinist insistence on finding truth independently produces an ethos of extreme skepticism—if not innate hostility—toward centralized authority at anything above a local level. As Calvinists see it, virtuousness is achieved through every human’s internal struggle with their fallen state. Thus, the more humans become involved in a thing, the more evil it is likely to be (e.g., big governments and companies are seen as more evil than small ones) and nothing is more evil than one human exerting control over another.
Calvinists were fervently pro-independence and anti-slavery, but less out of a belief in equality and more because they saw the removal of agency from another person as the highest order of evil an individual or institution could commit. Famously, John Brown and his family were radical Calvinists and multiple sides of my own family also hunted or otherwise fought against slavers—both by leading the Big Thicket Jayhawkers and by being heavily involved with the founding of the Free State of Jones (15 of the 50 founding members were either siblings or nephews of my direct ancestors).[[63]](#_ftn63)
This belief is reflected in the way we construct this book and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life. In each, we present an example of how things might be done while insisting that readers independently draw their own conclusions after thinking through matters on their own terms. To us, writing a book that tells someone how to think about the world robs that individual of agency.[[64]](#_ftn64) From our cultural perspective, robbing a person of agency is an act of evil.
So, while Calvinists see striving for equality as silly, their mandate for maximizing individual freedom is absolute and uncompromising to a point of apparent absurdity in other cultures’ eyes. The concept of the elect inherently implies that not all humans are equal, at least when it comes to being “saved.” While some people are born evil, and others are born lazy, it is wrong for anyone but that person to pass judgment on the content of their character.
Calvinist culture is basically dead due to its low post-secularization birth rate. Calvinists’ obsessive research into the metaphysical nature of reality and cultural emphasis on accepting hard truths drove their branch to be one of the first Christian sects to “secularize.” As such, their culture was hit by a collapse in birth rate a few generations earlier than the groups that are getting smacked with it now.
The Calvinist tendency to manifest more as a worldview than a community contributed to the culture’s downfall. As it began to secularize, community-oriented members tried to start unique and separate movements (often some form of deism) or were absorbed into adjacent cultivars (typically the Unitarian Church, Baptist Church, or Pentecostal movement). Only predominantly secular families maintained original Calvinist traditions as they weren’t exposed to any traditions of new Christian sects that might replace them.
Malcolm, whose parents were secular, would not even know his family was Calvinist had he not received a letter from his dead grandfather as part of his will urging him to not stray from “Calvinist values,” which prompted him to look into his family’s history and realize: “Oh, this is why my parents do all those weird things.”
A tendency for Calvinism to be contextualized as “the obvious truth free to anyone who looks hard enough”—and not a distinct culture—is part of why it lacked the sort of cohesive self-identity common among even secular Jews. A cohesive cultural narrative and sense of community identification is why Judaism has secularized fairly successfully while Calvinism largely fractured upon secularization.
We only present this explanation of Calvinism so that our readers can see the lens that distorts our view of reality and replace it with their own. Because our perspective inherently corrupts the information we share, we must be transparent about our biases so you can mentally correct for them. As a family, we can only save our own culture. You must take responsibility for saving yours. If we wrote this book true to form, readers should be able to apply its principles to any theology.