OK, here ChatGPT is actually saying some interesting stuff! But I probably won´t be pursuing this line of inquiry further. At least not now.
These two questions are tightly linked. Both point to a paradox:
The most morally intense forms of early modern Christianity often produced the fastest routes out of Christianity.
I’ll treat them in two connected sections, then offer a unifying synthesis.
I. Why Calvinist societies secularized faster
This does not mean Calvinism was “less religious.” It means it transformed religion in ways that made it easier to abandon later.
1. The interiorization of religion
Calvinism:
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Rejected sacramental mediation
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Reduced ritual density
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Centered faith in inward assurance and moral evidence
Religion became:
A state of the soul, not a public ecology of practices.
Once belief is interiorized:
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It can be privatized
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It can be doubted
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It can be replaced by ethical systems
Catholicism, by contrast, embedded belief in:
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Festivals
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Sacraments
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Social institutions
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Sensory culture
Those are harder to “turn off.”
2. Moralization without repair
Calvinism linked:
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Moral discipline
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Social surveillance
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Signs of election
But offered:
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Few mechanisms for moral repair
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No confession
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No graded penance
Result:
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High moral pressure
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Anxiety
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Either intense conformity or rejection
When belief cracks, it tends to collapse completely, not partially.
3. Rationalization of God
Calvinist theology:
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Emphasized divine sovereignty
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Minimized mystery in ritual
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Encouraged systematic theology
God becomes:
A supreme rational legislator.
This makes God:
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Philosophically abstract
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Morally intelligible
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Eventually… dispensable
Once ethics can be articulated without revelation, secular moral philosophy emerges easily.
4. Disenchantment of the world
Calvinism:
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Destroyed saints, relics, sacred spaces
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Flattened the cosmos
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Removed intermediary beings
The world becomes:
A morally neutral stage for human action.
This is Max Weber’s Entzauberung:
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Necessary for scientific rationality
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Compatible with secular governance
5. Political consequences
Calvinist societies:
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Developed strong bureaucratic governance
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Moral law enforced socially
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Religion aligned with civic discipline
Once the state can enforce morality:
God becomes administratively redundant.
II. How Jansenism prepared the ground for secular moralism and purity ideologies
Jansenism represents a different path to the same outcome.
1. Moral absolutism and spiritual exhaustion
Jansenism:
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Set impossibly high standards
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Restricted communion
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Viewed most human acts as sinful
This produced:
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Scrupulosity
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Despair
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Withdrawal from religious practice
When religion becomes:
Psychologically unbearable, people abandon it.
2. Ethics detached from grace
Jansenists:
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Emphasized moral purity
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Distrusted ritual mediation
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Downplayed joy, festivity, and mercy
Ethics becomes:
A cold system of right and wrong, not a lived economy of grace.
This moral seriousness survives religion itself.
3. Transition to secular rigor
Many Jansenist-influenced elites:
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Became Enlightenment moralists
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Legal reformers
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Republican theorists
They retained:
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Purity ideals
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Moral suspicion
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Hostility to compromise
But removed:
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God
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Grace
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Sacraments
This yields:
Secularized virtue ethics without forgiveness.
4. The genealogy of purity politics
Jansenist logic reappears in:
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Revolutionary Jacobinism
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19th-century moral reform movements
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Modern ideological purity cultures
Features:
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Moral absolutism
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Public denunciation
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Little tolerance for ambiguity
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Expulsion rather than reconciliation
In this sense:
Jansenism is a religious ancestor of modern secular moral puritanism.
III. Converging paths: two roads to secular modernity
| Path | Calvinism | Jansenism |
|---|---|---|
| Core dynamic | Discipline → rationalization | Rigor → exhaustion |
| Religion becomes | Interior belief system | Moral burden |
| Failure mode | Replacement by ethics | Abandonment of grace |
| Secular outcome | Rational moral order | Purity ideology |
| Emotional tone | Anxiety → pragmatism | Guilt → revolt |
IV. One-sentence synthesis
Calvinist societies secularized faster because they interiorized faith, rationalized God, moralized behavior without sacramental repair, and disenchanted the world—making religion structurally replaceable—while Jansenism, through moral absolutism and suspicion of grace, produced spiritual exhaustion and bequeathed its purity logic to secular moral ideologies.
V. Final note (connecting to your broader arc)
Across your questions, a single pattern keeps emerging:
Religious systems that eliminate mediation, ambiguity, and repair tend to collapse into either authoritarian discipline or secular moralism—both of which can survive without gods.
If you want to continue, we could:
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Compare Catholic vs Protestant routes to modern bureaucracy
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Trace how sacramental logics survive in secular institutions
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Or examine why modern moral purity movements feel religious but lack forgiveness
You’re effectively mapping the deep structure of modernity’s moral psychology.
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