> Double predestination is the idea that not only does God choose some to be saved, he also creates some people who will be damned.[0]
Even setting aside whether that's a mainstream Calvinist belief or not, the idea of "Good people" and "Bad people" is deeply ingrained in American Culture. "The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"- that very phrase presupposes the existence of two groups of people, one Good and one Bad, setting aside the whole 'right to bear arms' thing.
And just as deeply ingrained in American culture is a lack of sympathy for "Bad people". You can make prisons a living hell, keep people in there for life after "3 strikes", remove their ability to find jobs if they ever get out- because they're Bad people and helping Bad people is wrong. It's morally superior to punish Bad people more, since they are Bad. Politicians get elected on that, calling it 'tough on crime'.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism#Do...
FWIW Calvin taught double predestination (as the Wikipedia article says). It's the logically- and biblically- consistent view. But again it's not a "bad people deserve what they get in this life" justification.
I'm with you on America's "tough on crime" BS.
To give but one example of the difference in mindset: Portugal has had great success by decriminalizing drugs and treating addiction as a mental health issue, whereas America prefers to throw people in a cage and ruin their lives because "drugs are bad". That's part of what America means by being "tough" on crime: lack empathy, don't look at individual circumstances, and treat mental health issues as crimes to keep feeding a for-profit prison industry and ever-increasing police power.
Edit: I wonder if the downvotes are partisan over my mention of Biden’s role in our current state of affairs. Just trying to help explain America’s peculiar pathology that led us to the shameful statistic of having the highest incarceration rate in the world.
But instead, it spends even more money punishing those who commit crimes. This has zero effect on reducing crimes, but makes people feel good about punishing the bad guys, because again: it's morally superior in American culture to punish 'The Bad People', and it's difficult to be elected on a platform that can be seen as helping 'The Bad People'.
The cost of putting 100 at-risk kids into after-school programs to help steer them away from crime isn't small. But if it keeps 1 person out of prison, it pays for itself many times over. And Americans, generally, don't want to fund this sort of thing.
If those words meant something different, such as people will be caught and expected to redress their crimes or prisons will attempt to reform behaviour and provide the tools to steer away from a life of crime after release, then being tough on crime would have fewer detractors.
And in many respects those detractors are right. The resources being invested into the current tough on crime measures would be better invested into addressing the causes of crime. It won't solve all of the problems since there are some genuinely nasty people out there, but there is a good chance that it would do a much better job.
There's this arc in the Bible. Near the beginning of the Old Testament (say, Deuteronomy), there's a lot of "God will reward you in this life for righteousness" (heaven wasn't even invented yet) and "look how many cattle and wives he has; surely he is righteous; don't you want to be like him?" It's only later that this starts to change. You see this change a little in Job, where a righteous man is punished by God. And then it kicks into overdrive with Jesus, who is a reformer.
So it's not like the "Prosperity Gospel" messages aren't there -- they are, in the Old Testament. But they miss all the subsequent reform.
2. "The English Civil War"
One weird thing about all this is that the Calvinists (who I think of as aligned with Cromwell) went north; they became Puritans and went to New England. Their descendants also ended up, later, in the Pacific Northwest. They became abolitionists and such.
And the English who went to Virginia and the Carolinas, and who practiced slavery, were more aligned with the royalists. The plantation was like an exaggerated bizarro version of the English "country home".
Which then makes it strange that a lot of this Calvinist, Cromwellite stuff eventually ended up "on the right" in American society, with the "planters".
I think that’s fair. It’s where Jesus’s hearers got that mindset he’s trying to change. Also see Luke 13 where Jesus is like “do you think the people that building fell on are any worse than anyone else?”
The notion that God will only save some people and that they will have done nothing in particular to deserve it - and then of course, religious people always believe that they are among the people who will be saved. So "God will save some people but not others; they don't deserve it; and the saved just so happen to include me!" This all comes off a bit arrogant to me, as GP alluded to.
Generally I think it goes doctrine of inerrancy (belief that the Bible is perfect and infallible) -> cherry pick some Bible verse glorifying material success and implying God will give it to you if you're good enough -> preach this to your congregation.