Preface: A continuation of the previous essay, completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

Within the medieval Catholic framework, human action possessed a clear transactional meaning: through good works, confession, and the sacraments, one could institutionally accumulate the possibility of salvation. In the Calvinist system, however, action was completely stripped of this transactional function. Good works no longer produce salvation; instead, they assume a new role—as evidence, indicating that a person may belong to the elect. The meaning of action thus undergoes a fundamental shift: it no longer points toward God, but toward the subject themself and the social environment in which they are situated, becoming a mechanism of continuous identity verification.

The immediate consequence of this shift is a highly internalized psychology of self-auditing. Since behavior cannot alter the final outcome, yet remains the only visible indicator available, the individual can no longer permit indulgence, immersion in pleasure, or emotional loss of control. Self-discipline, restraint, and delayed gratification cease to be merely moral virtues and instead become necessary postures for confronting an uncertain fate. Within this structure, individuals learn to monitor themselves continuously; conscience itself is transformed into a discipline system operating around the clock, no longer requiring constant external coercion.

Under this psychological configuration, work and worldly success acquire a new interpretive logic. The logic is not that success brings election, but rather the reverse: the elect are presumed to possess a stronger sense of order, self-control, and capacity for sustained commitment, traits that are more likely to translate into stable professional performance and material outcomes in social reality. Over time, these outcomes are retroactively interpreted as outward signs of election. Although, in theory, success is merely an ex post marker, in actual social practice this distinction is rapidly blurred, and success itself increasingly comes to be seen as a symbol of moral and spiritual condition.

It is within this context that the psychological–behavioral structure later summarized as the “Protestant ethic” takes shape. As Max Weber famously observed, labor here is no longer merely a means of making a living, but is endowed with ultimate significance: it becomes a moral obligation, a mode of self-proof, and the only sphere of action in which the individual can continuously invest when faced with an unknowable destiny. When salvation can no longer be obtained through institutional exchange, all available energy is redirected toward outcomes that are visible, accumulable, and comparable.

More crucially, this structure does not automatically dissolve with the decline of religious belief. Because it contains no notion of completion or final confirmation, this logic of self-proof can detach from its theological origins and continue operating in secular society, transforming into performance pressure, occupational identity anxiety, and systems of social evaluation. What predestination produces, therefore, is not merely a religious subject, but a psychological model that modern institutions can continue to mobilize.

In France, Calvinism emerged in the form of the Huguenots. Far from being a marginal group, the Huguenots were concentrated among the urban middle classes, commercial elites, and segments of the nobility. This social composition endowed them with exceptional organizational capacity and discipline, while simultaneously provoking intense suspicion from both royal authority and the Catholic Church. The result was decades of religious warfare, ultimately ending in forcible suppression through state violence. The French case demonstrates that when Calvinism entered a highly centralized state whose legitimacy rested on Catholicism, it was perceived not as a religious faction to be integrated, but as a structural threat.

In the Low Countries (later the Netherlands), Calvinism became deeply intertwined with political resistance against Spanish rule. The central issue here was not doctrinal difference alone, but a structure of oppression formed by Spanish royal authority, Catholicism, and heavy taxation. The discipline, autonomy, and moral legitimacy provided by Calvinism supplied cities and guilds with tools for organized resistance. This religious–political alliance ultimately facilitated the birth of a republic, with Reformed Christianity becoming part of the new national identity. The Dutch example demonstrates that, under favorable conditions, Calvinism could function as the ideological foundation of a republican system.

In Scotland, Calvinism achieved institutional consolidation through the Presbyterian system. The key innovation lay in rejecting top-down episcopal rule in favor of horizontal governance by local elders and assemblies. This structure naturally weakened royal control over religion while providing local society with a highly disciplined yet non-monarchical mode of governance. As a result, the Scottish Reformed tradition became a long-term institutional force that both opposed the Roman Church and consistently checked secular royal power.

In England, Calvinism never fully dominated the established church, but persisted in the form of the Puritan tradition. The Puritans were dissatisfied with doctrinal reform alone and demanded a thorough “purification” of daily life, social customs, and personal morality. When these demands met resistance within England’s political structure, a portion of Puritans chose to migrate to North America. In New England, they encountered an almost blank institutional landscape, enabling them to fully implement Calvinist disciplinary logic and construct a colonial society characterized by high self-discipline and community-based surveillance. This tradition later exerted a profound influence on American political culture and moral imagination.

Taken together, the outward diffusion of Calvinism did not produce a unified Protestant world. Instead, it generated a discipline-based network spanning Europe and the Atlantic: doctrine was shared, but institutional forms were adapted locally; mutual recognition existed, yet there was no single center of authority. This network remained in long-term structural opposition to the Catholic world—not merely over theology, but over fundamental questions of the source of power, social governance, and the formation of the modern subject.

In Catholic monarchies, Calvinism was regarded as a non-negotiable hostile structure. In countries such as France and within the Spanish sphere of influence, political legitimacy rested on the tight coupling of monarchy, Catholicism, and a unified confessional order. Religion was not a private belief but a symbolic foundation of national unity. Calvinism rejected papal supremacy, denied the church’s role as an intermediary of salvation, and rapidly formed disciplined, horizontally connected communities among urban and noble classes. These characteristics undermined not only doctrine but the structural foundations of royal legitimacy itself. Consequently, in France, the Huguenots were not treated as mere religious dissenters but equated with political disloyalty, leading religious conflict to escalate into civil war and systematic repression until this parallel structure was crushed by state violence.

In Protestant states with an established national church, Calvinism instead became a persistent source of internal instability. England provides a clear example. Its Reformation was state-led: doctrine could change, but the church had to remain subordinate to royal authority. The purpose of reform was to consolidate state power, not weaken it. The Calvinist position represented by the Puritans insisted that reform could not stop at doctrine but must extend into church structure, ritual forms, and the entirety of social life. This stance denied both episcopal authority and the monarch’s ultimate right to adjudicate religious matters, rendering Puritans neither heretical enough to eradicate nor conformist enough to integrate. They thus became legally legitimate yet perpetually inconvenient troublemakers, whose very presence eroded the stability of the established church.

In monarchies that urgently required highly unified legitimacy, Calvinism was viewed as a long-term threat to sovereignty itself. Early modern European states sought to integrate local authority, noble power, and religious legitimacy into a single sovereign center and were deeply suspicious of any organization with strong autonomy and ambiguous loyalty. Calvinism’s emphasis on church autonomy and Presbyterian governance promoted horizontal authority and internal adjudication, with legitimacy derived from shared faith rather than royal delegation. Obedience no longer flowed vertically toward the state, but circulated within an internal network capable of self-discipline, self-judgment, and transregional connection. From the royal perspective, this was not merely religious disagreement, but a structural risk in which sovereignty was diluted and dispersed—even in the absence of open rebellion.

In England, Calvinism did not manifest as overt opposition to the established church, but fermented internally in the form of Puritanism. This determined the nature of the conflict: not an external religious war, but a prolonged internal struggle over legitimacy. Puritans did not deny that England had undergone reform; rather, they argued that reform had been prematurely frozen at the level of doctrine and had failed to penetrate church structure and social life.

Their most fundamental challenge was the rejection of episcopacy. Puritans refused to recognize a hierarchical church system governed by bishops, viewing it as lacking biblical foundation and as a structural conduit for royal interference in religious affairs. More radically, they denied the monarch’s role as the supreme arbiter of church matters, rejecting royal authority over doctrine, ritual, and organization. This directly struck at the core of the Anglican settlement, whose premise was that royal authority replaced papal authority as the ultimate source of religious order.

Even more subversively, Puritans were not content with internal church reform; they sought to reshape the entire society according to “saintly standards.” Faith was not a private affair but a comprehensive code of life: family order, public morality, festivals, entertainment, work rhythms, dress, and speech were all expected to conform to visible signs of election. Religion thus ceased to function merely as a legitimizing tool of the state and instead became a force that morally judged the state itself.

Against this backdrop, Puritans came to be seen by the English monarchy as a structural threat. Under James I, the crown made its position clear: differences in piety might be tolerated, but organizational forms that challenged episcopacy and royal supremacy could not. Under Charles I, tensions intensified further. Puritan ministers were dismissed, fined, or barred from office; nonconformist gatherings were restricted; publishing and preaching spaces were steadily constricted. Persecution was not always bloody, but it was systematic, designed to prevent the group from reproducing or expanding within society.

Gradually, Puritans recognized a hard reality: they were not reformers who could secure space through compromise, but an internal heterogeneity permanently marked as “insufficiently loyal.” Remaining in England meant endless, attritional struggle with crown and church, with little chance of institutional victory.

From this recognition emerged a rational conclusion: rather than continue fighting within a state structurally incapable of accommodating their model of governance, it was preferable to leave the field entirely and seek a space in which church, society, and moral order could be constructed from the ground up. It was this judgment—rather than simple religious zeal—that ultimately led Puritans to turn their gaze across the Atlantic.