Harvard and America’s Recurring Crisis of Trust

Yves here. Get a cup of coffee. Our house theologian Henry Moon Pie provided some very valuable input on this post on Harvard, its role in the rise of credentialism, and the erosion of elite legitimacy, noting:

My 50th class report has a surprising quantity of “What happened to Harvard?” in the reports, mostly coming from the right. More broadly and importantly, the piece addresses the crises in institutional credibility, a perceived loss of morality and ethics as Christian belief and practice has declined precipitously among elites, and the increasing use the State or the State in combination with media and social media to exert external control over individual belief and expression.

Moreover, the piece contains some history of the evolution of Calvinism in the USA, some of it new to me, that should entice all the history hounds in the Commentariat.

By Bob Goodwin, a retired technology executive and New England Yankee now living on Mercer Island, Washington. He is currently working on The Proxy Empire, a book examining America’s inheritance of European imperial contradictions

Harvard has always stood at the fault line between grace and authority. Founded in 1636 to train Calvinist ministers in a new world, it was born into a theology that held grace as sacred, unpurchasable, and invisible – known only to God, evidenced through industry, and feared too much to fake.

But from the beginning, Harvard faced a familiar temptation: to institutionalize what was meant to be internal, to certify what was meant to be watched over with trembling.

Over the centuries, as American culture moved from personal salvation to credentialism to identity as the source of moral legitimacy, Harvard moved with it, not as a follower, but as a mechanism of each transformation. This essay traces that arc and argues that today’s crisis of trust in Harvard is not a break from its past, but a deep return to its founding tension: can an institution create excellence without claiming to own grace?

“Grace” is not a fashionable word in modern discourse. It fell out of favor when Harvard moved beyond its Puritan roots in the early 18th century and embraced proto-Unitarianism, a shift that distanced the institution from the stern metaphysics of predestination, depravity, and the elect. They even taught that God had decided from eternity who would be saved and who would be damned – a mystery no amount of piety or success could ever unravel.

These terms came to be seen as relics of an irrational, fear-driven past. But that judgment was never quite honest.

What those older terms embodied was not fear but a logic of dependence, a recognition that some things, like virtue or excellence, could not be claimed, only received. Even as Harvard discarded the vocabulary of grace, it preserved the structure. The names changed, but the shape remained: moral standing still had to come from somewhere. What once came from divine favor became the product of credentials, and later, of identity. But the impulse is the same.

Grace, in its original Calvinist framing, was not just about an ultimate place in heaven It marked, in the present, a kind of entitlement: unearned, unprovable, and yet deeply consequential. That is the meaning I restore to it in this essay.

The idea of grace still carries religious connotations, but I extend it here to capture a shift in meaning: from the era when concepts like predestination and total depravity fell away, right up to our secular present, when many of us have no church affiliation at all.

In my own family, the explicitly religious dimension was long stripped away, yet the Yankee archetype preserved nearly all the markers of grace. It was embodied by the Harvard-educated patriarch who taught his children to work the land without displays of ego or wealth, cultivating instead a covenant built on wisdom, responsibility, and quiet example. Grace, thus conceived, is a state of mind: an assumption of election, inherently unprovable yet necessarily expressed through elegance, industry, and morality.

But what truly anchors grace, and what binds this essay together, is that it is never purely individual. If grace is no longer granted by God, then we must ask ourselves: from where, exactly, does it come? Harvard still tries to answer this question, acting as an external arbiter of grace even as it relies on internal evidence – character, discipline, humility – to signal its presence.

Between 1620 and 1650, tens of thousands of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic not to flee religion, but to preserve it. What they brought with them was a theological and cultural system known as Calvinism, a minority tradition in Europe, but one that would become foundational to New England’s identity.

While often lumped under Protestantism alongside Lutheranism, Calvinism was sharper-edged: it emphasized total depravity, predestination, and the belief that salvation was God’s alone to give, never earned, never bought. It distrusted human authority, demanded constant self-examination, and made industry not a virtue but a sign – evidence, perhaps, that one was among the elect.

We remember the Puritans today as rigid or joyless, and not without reason. But theirs was also a culture of astonishing seriousness: of covenant, discipline, and the belief that a godly community could be built from the ground up, one soul at a time. Luther’s followers sought assurance in God’s promise alone, whereas the Calvinists uneasily scanned their own lives for hints of election.

Harvard was founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony not merely to train ministers, but also to preserve the fierce moral and intellectual intensity of American Calvinism as the colony grew. It was a state institution, created to ensure that the theology of grace, industry, and self-discipline did not erode as distance, prosperity, and pluralism took root. There was no separation of church and state. Ministers were civil officers, theology was public infrastructure, and Harvard was the crown jewel of that system.

But Calvinism shaped more than doctrine; it shaped Harvard’s core idea of excellence. To be elect was not to be pious, but to be relentlessly capable: disciplined, alert, and productive without ostentation. That ethic of internalized standards, external results, and suspicion of shortcuts has defined Harvard’s culture ever since. Even long after predestination faded, the machinery of elite formation it left behind continued to run. And Harvard still runs on it.

The seeds of Harvard’s future challenges were planted at its founding. Calvinists were masterful institution-builders who deeply distrusted institutions, including their own.

Calvinism produced something the world had never seen: a culture of industry so intense it scaled a nation with no central coordination. It wasn’t just work. It was self-discipline, accountability, memory, and moral pressure sustained across generations. No one distributed it, and no one controlled it. Grace couldn’t be bought or proven, so the only answer was relentless effort. That effort didn’t guarantee success, and never expected it. But when enough people live that way, something happens. America happened.

Over generations, Calvinism evolved, because it had to. Just as Silicon Valley eventually needed managers, a civilization built on pure self-auditing cannot master electricity, coordinate a grid, or build a university system. A culture that rejects centralization and credentialism might be perfect for settling a continent, but it cannot sustain technological or institutional dominance indefinitely.

Nor is it clear that settling a continent in this manner produced outcomes we would universally celebrate today. Calvinism celebrated exceptionalism, but its best minds were eventually drawn into organizing collective effort. And some tensions are real: you cannot have full autonomy and full specialization at the same time. A society that demands everyone spend their flesh for the common good cannot also second-guess every act of service. At some point, trust had to be externalized.

The real tension wasn’t whether Calvinism could adapt to complexity. It was whether adaptation would kill the thing that made it powerful. America’s early exceptionalism came from a culture that trusted individuals to govern themselves under unbearable moral pressure, without supervision.

But as the nation grew more complex, it needed institutions to coordinate knowledge, manage specialization, and sustain scale. The challenge wasn’t building those systems; it was doing so without extinguishing the internal fire that made the system work in the first place.

How do you certify excellence without replacing grace? How do you organize trust without making it conditional? Those are the problems Harvard, and eventually America, tried to solve. And it has gotten a lot right. Harvard remains Calvinist in core ways: the belief in self as seen through disciplined excellence, the humility, the internal audit. And America, for all its contradictions, still measures people in ways that are profoundly different from Europe or Asia: not by background or role, but by whether they deliver under pressure.

The 1690 Salem witch trials were not an echo of medieval superstition, but a symptom of theological upheaval. Grace was being redefined. In a society where invisible election had long underwritten trust, legitimacy, and self-understanding, that quiet consensus began to erode. Harvard, through figures like Cotton Mather, was already moving toward a more rationalized and institutional theology, a shift that would over a century culminate in Unitarianism.

But in the transitional moment, when the inherited faith that “only God knows” began to give way to the idea that grace might be recognized, tested, or even certified, a deep unease took hold. For those who had lived in the quiet confidence of being known by God, it marked a terrifying shift, from the common self-confidence based in faith of one’s grace, to the idea of being judged by another and found wanting. When faith is no longer sufficient, and no new foundation has yet been laid, panic rushes in. You begin looking for signs. And when signs fail, you begin looking for enemies.

Harvard stood at the center of a theological fracture in late 17th-century New England. As grace became harder to discern in a growing, more complex society, the institution shifted: rather than reaffirming its original commitment to invisible election and total depravity, it began to teach the outward behavior of the elect.

Grace was redefined, less a mystery known only to God, more a posture taught through moral instruction. This compromise provoked unrest. Ministers trained in this new model were seen not as spiritual guides but as enforcers, and congregations resisted what felt like surveillance disguised as salvation.

In 1701, Connecticut pushed back, chartering Yale to restore doctrinal purity and re-anchor grace in predestination. But the deeper tension remained unresolved.

During the First Great Awakening in the early 1700s, revivalism surged—explicitly rejecting Harvard’s moral rationalism and drawing many toward Connecticut. Yet even that movement showed signs of instability. The same spiritual insecurity that had once fueled the witch trials now erupted again, but at scale: not in fear, but in fervor. Fainting, shouting, and ritualized expressions of grace marked a deeper crisis—no longer confined to one village, but sweeping across the colonies. The Calvinist project to reassert moral clarity was already cracking under the weight of its own revival.

Like the witch trials scaring Harvard, by the 1750s even Yale had switched sides. What began as a bulwark against theological drift now followed Massachusetts in regulating how grace should be taught. Doctrinal expectations were centralized, and clergy became state-trained professionals.

As America approached independence—but still a generation or two before mass migration—traditionalist Calvinism refused to go quietly, and in fairness, it shouldn’t have. Families who had spent their flesh for over a century weren’t willing to be told they might not be elect after all. They certainly weren’t going to let Yale-trained ministers override their congregations.

At first, they resisted locally, voting with their feet, changing pastors, shifting congregations. But church and state were still entwined, and in many towns, there was no community without the church. So they left the state. First to Vermont, then to upstate New York, and eventually westward.

We still see artifacts of this migration. Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon movement, was born in Vermont in 1805. The “burned-over district” of western New York became a hotbed of emotional revivalism and spiritual unrest. This wasn’t a rejection of religion; it was a desperate attempt to reclaim grace from institutions that had begun to ration it.

More stable expressions emerged too, as reformed Protestant groups like Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists offered mainstream alternatives to a Congregationalism increasingly diluted by rationalism and Unitarianism.

The election of James Monroe in 1816 marks a true inflection point in American history—not just politically, but culturally and theologically. It was the moment when the frontier opened to mass migration and the old coastal order lost its spiritual mandate.

Monroe’s overwhelming victory over Federalist candidate Rufus King – Harvard-educated, aligned with Congregational orthodoxy, and rooted in the commercial cities of New England – was more than a political defeat. It was a cultural rupture. The same Calvinist communities that had fled Connecticut’s institutional overreach now stood at the center of a national populist wave. Suspicious of centralized authority, hostile to regulation, and unwilling to have grace mediated by elite credentials, they pushed west and brought their moral vision with them.

For a time, Jefferson and Madison had managed to hold the contradiction together, but the War of 1812 shattered the balance. The Federalists, desperate to protect their Atlantic-facing model of trade, hierarchy, and Harvard-style virtue, tried to halt westward expansion—and when that failed, they flirted with secession. Harvard stood squarely on the losing side. It responded in a familiar way: by asserting institutional authority, claiming the right to define virtue, and expecting compliance.

But this time, Harvard misread the country. Badly. The populists didn’t just win. They moved on. They took the moral engine of the nation with them.

For a generation or more, Harvard remained prestigious but peripheral, an elite without a mandate. The American experiment, now propelled by Scots-Irish, German, and later Irish migrants, carried Calvinist fire westward to Ohio, Michigan, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. The scale was astonishing, and unmistakably driven by the same grace-based industry that Harvard had once helped steward, but no longer understood.

As America industrialized, something shifted, not because Calvinism failed, but because new kinds of problems emerged that congregations alone couldn’t solve. The moral seriousness of grace-driven communities could settle frontiers and sustain trust at the local level, but it couldn’t build canals, finance cities, or engineer railroads. These were problems of complexity and coordination, of scale beyond the reach of personal reputation. You couldn’t rely on character alone to choose a bridge designer.

In this new landscape, Harvard, still shaped by its Calvinist inheritance, stepped forward. It didn’t abandon its mission; it adapted it. Credentialism emerged not to replace grace, but to extend discernment into domains where lived virtue could no longer be observed. It was a new form of trust: still rooted in rigor, still anchored in standards, but now designed to manage a society that self-governing communities could no longer contain.

For decades after 1816, Harvard remained prestigious but culturally sidelined. Yet as the country industrialized, credentialism evolved from a stopgap into a structural necessity. The rise of law, medicine, engineering, and finance demanded formalized expertise. Apprenticeships gave way to institutions.

By the 1840s, Harvard was rebuilding its authority, not through theology, but through professionalism. Its law and medical schools trained a new class of institutional actors. Its scientific faculty gave structure and credibility to an emerging secular worldview. And gradually, Harvard reentered the center of American life, not as a steward of grace, but as a certifier of competence. The country still ran on moral seriousness, but now it needed experts. Harvard offered both.

Most people probably didn’t notice the rise of credentialism at first. Unlike the open battles over grace that had defined earlier generations, professional expertise crept in quietly. It didn’t demand belief. People still trusted themselves, but they began to rely on doctors, lawyers, engineers, and bankers to navigate systems they could no longer fully understand. Contracts were signed, treatments accepted, bridges crossed. It didn’t feel like submission. It felt like progress. And to some extent, it was.

Credentialed expertise reduced the brutal risks of earlier life: death in childbirth, failed land claims, collapsed barns, broken partnerships. It didn’t replace grace. It just worked. But in working, it began to rearrange the moral architecture of society in ways few recognized at the time. The gatekeepers were back, but now they wore white coats instead of black robes.

In early Calvinism, worthiness – grace itself – was ultimately internal, invisible, and known only to God, even if believers looked anxiously for outward signs. Credentialism reversed this emphasis: legitimacy was increasingly defined externally, certified by institutions and evidenced through degrees, titles, and positions. Yet even in this shift, the internal Calvinist impulse of humility, introspection, and self-discipline quietly persisted, becoming embedded beneath credentialism’s external validations.

Even at its height, Harvard’s role in the credentialed order was to filter people, not ideas. It did not enforce truth; it certified passage. A doctor, lawyer, or engineer released into the world carried no guarantee of wisdom, only evidence of having been trained. That was enough to make the system work, most of the time. But the shift was profound.

Calvinism had anchored trust in behavior, judgment, and moral vigilance, all qualities visible to a community. Credentialism replaced that with institutional vouching, but only in specialized domains where personal trust and communal discernment could no longer reach. It said: we’ve seen enough—trust him. And mostly, people did.

But this new kind of legitimacy was thinner. It depended on the deeper assumption that the institution itself could be trusted, not just to certify skill, but also to recognize character. That assumption held, for a time. It added value. It smoothed cooperation. But beneath the surface, it quietly shifted the moral center of the culture from a trust earned in plain sight to one conferred behind closed doors.

In this profound shift, Harvard’s transformation was both theological and institutional. Theologically, it marked a turn away from Calvinist grace – hidden, divinely ordained, and inward – toward a secular moral respectability that was outwardly demonstrable and rationally defensible. Institutionally, it signaled a move from revealed religious authority (anchored explicitly in scripture and church hierarchy) toward reasoned debate, secular scholarship, and professional credentialing. Harvard thus became both theologically liberalized and institutionally professionalized, exchanging the internal mystery of election for external evidence of merit, and divine revelation for human reason.

By the 20th century, academic institutions were no longer just certifying competence. They had become philosophical authorities. Their credentialing systems continued to fuel science, medicine, and industry, but their deeper influence came from shaping how reality itself was framed. In field after field – economics, law, history, linguistics, mathematics, and engineering – academia no longer positioned itself merely as a transmitter of knowledge, but as a steward of universal order. It cultivated a mindset in which all questions had answers, progress was linear, and expertise was the rightful path to truth.

In effect, academia became a new metaphysics: not moral in the Calvinist sense, but ontological. It replaced grace with method, and revelation with system. Legitimacy no longer came from being known by God or by community—but from alignment with a logic that institutions themselves had constructed.

The liberal arts revolution was driven by Charles Eliot, who, as president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, reshaped the institution, and with it, the nation’s idea of education. Eliot transformed Harvard from a classical seminary into the modern template for the American university: a place where knowledge was plural, truth was discoverable, and citizenship required intellectual formation.

By the turn of the century, no serious intellectual in Massachusetts, even those headed into business, would skip an undergraduate degree. Education became the new prerequisite for moral seriousness.

That shift explains why Massachusetts remains a global center of education today. Even as late as World War II, the phenomenon was still regional, anchored on the East Coast, but its logic was already spreading. After the war, the credential became national. You could swing a hammer without a degree. But if you were expected to think, Harvard, or someplace like it, had to give you permission first. Cotton Mather had finally succeeded. What began in 1690 as a theological provocation became, at last, a spiritual power center. It redefined grace, and gave itself the authority to infer it.

Traditional Calvinist culture never disappeared. It dispersed. In large parts of the country, especially rural and working-class regions, the ethic of self-discipline, moral restraint, and earned trust still shapes daily life, even in the absence of formal credentials. These communities once formed the backbone of American industry before globalization fractured the economy. They continue to supply much of the military class, often drawn from cultural zones the credentialed elite barely understand.

But as complexity increased and nearly half the population now feels compelled to seek a college degree, credentialism has quietly become the gold standard for grace. Harvard won, but it took 150 years. And in winning, it made a quiet concession: it could discard Calvinist theology, but it couldn’t discard Calvinist exceptionalism. Excellence was no longer revealed through divine election; it was presumed through institutional identity. Yet even now, among those who carry that identity, the posture is still familiar: Of course I am elect, and imperfect—so I damn well better audit myself for sin, and stay humble in my display. That isn’t just meritocracy. That’s Calvinism, still humming beneath the surface.

This returns us to the uncomfortable truth embedded in the beginning: Harvard never stopped defining grace. It simply changed the language. As the nation expanded, Harvard reinforced a culture of excellence, but always on its own terms. Initially, credentialed grace appeared optional; individuals could opt out and still maintain dignity.

But as educated elites multiplied and working-class institutions eroded, that grace increasingly felt mandatory. It hardened once more into a form of moral judgment. Just as in 1690, ambiguity about who truly qualifies as elect has triggered backlash. Today’s populist reaction – the so-called deplorables – is not merely political; it’s theological.

Once again, people who spent their lives working, sacrificing, and self-auditing are being told they lack moral trustworthiness unless granted institutional approval. Harvard, responding as it historically has when grace slips from its grasp, is tightening control, codifying behavior, and reasserting itself as the arbiter of legitimacy. The only difference now is that this quasi-theology isn’t preached from a pulpit but encoded in policy.

Many of the symptoms are familiar. When Harvard first tried to assert control over grace in the late 1600s, it did so awkwardly—shifting from inward self-audit to externalized behavior, from unknowable election to visible performance. It was clumsy then, and it is clumsy now.

Today, identity has become a new overlay onto grace, one that feels, to many, as alien as institutional control once felt to the elect. Where grace was once inferred through industry, and later certified through credentials, it is now demanded through recognition. The moral calculus has changed, but the suspicion feels the same. The masses ask: What happened to exceptionalism? And Harvard replies: Exceptionalism is no more predetermined than grace ever was.

But the deeper truth is harder: grace has become ambiguous again, and institutions are once again trying to resolve that ambiguity through control. That’s where the panic begins. What is our modern Salem? Maybe it’s reputational collapse, cancellation, blacklisting—not enforced by witchfinders, but by systems that, like their predecessors, can’t tolerate uncertainty. And once again, the public watches in fear, unsure who will be judged next, and by what standard.

The problem isn’t that history repeats. It’s that Harvard keeps trying to define grace. When Calvinism gave birth to a moral engine, it didn’t enforce virtue through rules. It let generations internalize it through fear, discipline, and faith. When credentialism arose, it didn’t demand moral conformity. It offered a framework that worked, and people accepted it because it delivered.

But now, for the second time, Harvard finds itself not just credentialing excellence, but policing grace: modifying norms, enforcing behavior, and publicly challenging the moral worth of individuals. That’s not ideological rot. It’s institutional panic in a world that no longer agrees on what excellence is. To enter a person’s life and directly question their grace is not necessarily unjust, but it is a sign that inspiration has failed, and control is standing in its place. Harvard’s moral instinct may be sincere, but its methods echo a familiar pattern. Its power has never come from enforcing virtue. It has come from building the future so well that others want to follow.

For many outside the elite orbit, the failure of credentialism has not been theoretical. It’s been personal. They were told that expertise would protect them, that the people in charge knew what they were doing. But what they saw instead were lockdowns with shifting logic, public health guidance that reversed itself, and institutions that claimed certainty even when they were improvising. They saw college degrees that delivered debt but not opportunity, research that couldn’t be replicated, and systems managed by professionals who seemed more concerned with language than with outcomes. Over time, the promise that credentials signaled competence began to fray. People who had never needed a degree to live moral, productive lives found themselves being quietly recategorized as backward, dangerous, or morally suspect, not for what they’d done, but for where they hadn’t gone. To them, the loss of trust wasn’t a culture war. It was a breach of contract.

Harvard has faltered before and recovered. At every point of low institutional trust, it has found ways to reinvent its relevance, not by demanding loyalty, but by offering frameworks the nation could adopt.

But today’s crisis feels different. Credential inflation, the collapse of the working-class economy, and the quiet failures of managerial elites have exposed the fragility of the method. For the first time in 300 years, we can look at a Harvard degree and ask a question once unthinkable: Is this person reliable? That question is not an attack. It’s a signal. The entire system rested on the belief that the gate meant something. If that belief breaks, it is not the public that has failed Harvard. It is Harvard that has failed its own inheritance. It replaced faith with credentials, and bet that certainty would hold. But certainty, like grace, remains elusive. And when trust in either is lost, the answer is not control. It is humility and reinvention.

There is also a metaphysical failure at play, one harder to articulate, yet deeply felt. The modern liberal arts tradition, shaped significantly by Harvard, constructed its worldview around facts, systems, and the scientific method. For decades, this framework produced extraordinary achievements: technological mastery, institutional legitimacy, and a confident belief that the universe could be rendered fully intelligible.

But that confidence is fading. Discovery has slowed. Big data and artificial intelligence have underscored that many truths are less absolute – more ambiguous, contextual, or elusive – than previously imagined. Recent public crises, most notably during COVID, further exposed credentialed authorities asserting control while circumventing their own professed standards. The scientific method itself did not fail; rather, the belief that it inherently conferred moral authority has faltered. This isn’t exactly Harvard’s fault.

It is, however, an inevitable outcome of a system that elevated methodological rigor to metaphysical truth and transformed credentialed experts into a secular priesthood. Again, we find ourselves on familiar ground: a Harvard president, reminiscent of Increase or Cotton Mather, tempted to frame confusion as heresy and dissent as contagion—still grasping to reclaim grace, yet lacking the vocabulary to name it.

Falling birthrates are not just economic or demographic concerns. They are metaphysical signals. For most of history, young motherhood was honored not because it was proven, but because it was sacred. Faith conferred grace on the act itself: to become a mother young, married to an unproven man, was not reckless. It was righteous. Grace guaranteed support before credentials could be earned. A child was not a reward for success but a covenant the community pledged to uphold.

But in a culture where legitimacy is conferred through credentialism, youth becomes disqualifying. Fertility is highest when credentials are lowest, and yet we have built a system where parenting is discouraged until a résumé is complete. No one explicitly forbids early motherhood. But in the absence of grace, there is no cultural mechanism to sanctify it. The result is predictable: hesitation, isolation, and collapse. We do not need to agree on what’s better. But we must at least acknowledge what has been lost.

Institutional stress has strange effects. As trust declines, the number of elite candidates does not diminish; if anything, it grows. But with excellence harder to define and consensus no longer stable, many of those candidates turn from distinction to certainty. Without clear ways to stand out, they compete instead on ideological purity. The result is a narrowing of acceptable discourse, not just in politics, but within the very institutions once built on humility, doubt, and discovery.

Regardless of how one feels about climate change, it is striking to see scientific institutions not only enforcing consensus, but actively resisting what would once have been seen as reasonable public debate. The problem is not the facts. It is the loss of confidence that disagreement can be morally neutral. As institutions absorb identity positions that may be valid in isolation but discordant with the broader population, they can become estranged from the very society they were meant to serve. And when disagreement is treated as a kind of epistemic betrayal, trust doesn’t just erode—it inverts. The institution becomes trusted least by those who once trusted it most.

Credentialism initially emerged as a necessary institutional overlay to solve the problem of allocating grace at scale, of providing society with trustworthy signals of excellence and competence in an increasingly complex world. Early credentialism had enormous value: it reduced risks, improved efficiency, and enabled specialization at unprecedented scale, essentially stabilizing trust beyond local community reputations.

Yet credentialism also came with diminishing returns; over time, its narrow focus increasingly misallocated grace—delaying critical life decisions like family formation, systematically excluding the working class, and eventually losing precision in identifying genuine excellence. Institutions like Harvard, shaped profoundly by credentialism’s legacy, gradually found themselves pushing the pendulum too far, unintentionally weakening the very trust they sought to preserve. Today, we face the unintended cultural consequences of that overextension: institutions conferring grace too late, too narrowly, and too imprecisely, resulting in widespread anxiety, demographic decline, and growing skepticism toward institutional authority itself.

Harvard is no longer a singular institution in American society, nor is academia itself. But it remains hard to imagine a more promising place from which to launch the next institutional innovations around grace. Harvard was both an original arbiter of grace allocation and, later, the driving force behind credentialism, creating a nationwide regime for allocating trust, authority, and opportunity.

Yet we live today in a profoundly more complex world, and the once-effective credentialing system now faces serious diminishing returns, resulting in three critical misallocations of grace. Young people confidently pursue early degrees and careers but lack sufficient social trust and community support to start families during their biologically optimal years. Meanwhile, the working class has steadily lost societal grace, as credentialed elites increasingly outsource opportunities once allocated locally. Finally, credentialism itself is faltering: the rigorous identification of genuine excellence weakens as institutional trust declines, eroding moral supervision of elites. When a degree alone is equated with grace, essential cultural overlays – mutual accountability, mentorship, and genuine community commitment– fall away, leaving us urgently needing new institutional frameworks.

When envisioning solutions to the current misallocations of grace, we must recognize that meaningful institutional innovation rarely involves abandoning our heritage, habits, or existing institutions, even if today they seem inadequate or outdated.

Could we not, for instance, reestablish genuinely covenantal church-centric communities founded on mutual responsibility, adjusting tradition to modern contexts? Could we not meaningfully broaden the credentialing landscape, creating new degrees or respected paths specifically designed to restore dignity and social recognition to the working class?

And must we truly give up on elite institutions expecting rigorous self-examination and moral seriousness, acknowledging human imperfection – fraud in research, deception in public health policies – but still insisting patiently on better standards, allowing institutions like Harvard to reclaim their role as trusted beacons of credibility and integrity? These examples are illustrative starting points rather than definitive answers. Whatever form the future takes, it will inevitably begin with the strongest elements of our past and present, adapting and reforming them through new institutional mechanisms capable of managing modern complexity and restoring cultural grace. It always has, and always will, work that way.

I am convinced that covenant truly matters, that something vital has been lost through over credentialism, and it urgently needs recovering. Covenant begins by clearly asking, “Who matters most in our society, and why?” – a fundamentally Calvinist question, directed toward excellence that is assumed rather than proven. We need young mothers who feel confident enough to start families early; we need people whose skills and integrity sustain our tangible economy; and we need elites consistently held to the highest standards rather than the lowest.

Grace, properly understood, assumes excellence and invites it; yet excellence itself must be measured broadly – in honesty, fairness, and genuine charity. We must carefully avoid confusing grace with charity itself, subtly recognizing that assigning grace merely as a charitable act, rather than as a confident assumption of excellence, often ironically leads to less charity overall.

What defines a modern covenant? Today, covenants appear in degrees conferred by institutions, laws enacted by elected officials, policies created by government agencies, standards upheld by medical institutions, and in the implicit promises parents make to their children. For some, covenant still means shared faith within religious communities.

Yet our contemporary covenant has drifted toward minimalism, shaped profoundly by pluralism, a cultural accommodation allowing many different communities to peacefully coexist under limited and restrained rules. This pluralistic minimalism offers a basic social contract founded on respect, tolerance, and civility, but it often fails to instill a deep personal sense of responsibility for harms experienced by those who remain outside our increasingly narrow allocations of grace.

Pluralism is, in many ways, the central thesis of modern Harvard thought. And if we assume, as with Cotton Mather, that Harvard’s trajectory is clumsy but directionally sincere, then the question we face isn’t simply who receives grace, but what kind of covenant makes that grace meaningful.

The current emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion _ hough often awkward in its implementation – may be offering the first outlines of a new covenant. It acknowledges that credentialism carries with it a covenantal structure, and that grace has been misallocated. The effort to reassign grace through DEI reflects, however imperfectly, a recognition that identity can point to those left outside the old covenant.

Yet there is a critical difference: earlier religious frameworks defined grace as something that would necessarily produce charity; today’s discourse risks granting grace as a form of charity itself. Still, identity categories such as young parents or members of the working class could be viewed not merely as recipients of sympathy, but as bearers of covenantal responsibility and deserving of social privileges. The current enforcement strategies may be overreaching, especially when they lean toward shaming or exclusion. Calvinists, after all, believed in total depravity and were cautious to judge, lest they be judged in turn. And yet, paradoxically, covenants rooted in moral seriousness and shared obligation proved capable of producing remarkably high standards without relying on coercion or fear. That, perhaps, is the deeper lesson.

Harvard’s current push toward identity-based frameworks – often viewed critically as a break from its past – is in fact a clear attempt at restoring universality to a covenant that had become overly narrow through credentialism.

Yet Harvard, born Calvinist and reborn Unitarian, faces an inherent challenge: can a universal covenant truly flourish without communal specificity? Calvinism thrived precisely because its covenant was local, particular, and demanding. It built communities through shared moral rigor, not generalized benevolence. Unitarian Enlightenment ideals offer compelling breadth but lack a similarly rigorous communal grounding.

Thus, while pluralism correctly demands that we not revert to narrow evangelism, a purely abstract universality risks losing the intensity of responsibility that covenant historically imposed. This is the critical tension Harvard now faces: pluralism rightly rejects coercion, yet true covenants historically required communal expectations that could feel coercive from the outside.

The essential question, then, is not whether to return to religious exclusivity or retreat into vague universalism. Rather, it is how to reconstruct institutional frameworks capable of layering covenants within a pluralistic society. These frameworks must be specific enough to instill deep accountability, yet universal enough to sustain broad legitimacy.

Churches offer an instructive analogy. Historically, they provided moral infrastructure precisely because their expectations were clearly articulated and internally rigorous. Pluralism need not reject such structures entirely. Rather, it can insist that different communities—religious, secular, professional—each develop covenantal rigor internally, while respecting mutual external legitimacy. In practice, this could mean secular humanists building explicitly moral institutions around responsibility, integrity, and accountability, while faith communities reaffirm commitments to broader societal obligations beyond their own membership.

Covenant is another Puritan word I repurpose here for a post-religious and specifically post-Calvinist world, where community itself often seems to be lacking. By covenant, I mean a clear alignment of purpose that establishes mutual expectations, responsibilities, and behavioral standards among community members. Corporations partially model this, though their membership is conditional and temporary. Families also exemplify covenant, but have limited scale. Church communities traditionally embody this structure, though they are in decline today. Harvard alumni networks or trade associations have sometimes played similar roles, providing an external framework to support internalized grace.

Indeed, although grace itself is internalized, it effectively spreads outward and reinforces itself socially only through such layered covenants. Grace was always the seed, an assumed spark of excellence in individuals, and covenant the nurturing soil that allowed that spark to grow and be seen.

None of these ideas individually is novel; what has never genuinely been attempted is their conscious layering. Young parents would be institutionally affirmed not merely as beneficiaries of societal charity, but as bearers of a covenantal expectation: they have careers because the community needs them, but also supports them precisely because it has expectations of their excellence as parents. Uncredentialed workers regain dignity not through pity but by reestablishing clear societal expectations of skill and moral seriousness: universal but locally enforced. And Harvard-trained elites, rather than policing moral legitimacy through abstract policy alone, would embrace moral transparency and rigorous accountability as explicit covenantal duties, universally binding precisely because they hold disproportionate societal trust.

Consider Harvard itself as an example of layered covenants in action. The institution was initially built around a Puritan moral covenant rooted in internal grace, rigorous self-discipline, and communal accountability. This foundation was later supplemented by an Enlightenment covenant, emphasizing universal rational standards, reasoned debate, and broader societal values beyond religious doctrine. Ultimately, these two layers were overlaid by a third covenant of credentialed professionalism, where institutions explicitly certify competence, externalizing trust and legitimacy in fields such as law, medicine, and public administration. Together, these overlapping covenants demonstrate precisely how grace—though internalized—becomes socially reinforced and transmitted through successive institutional frameworks.

Yet today, identitarian universalism might be overly abstract, risking moral minimalism, while traditional evangelism remains too narrow to scale. What remains genuinely untested is the deliberate institutional construction of plural covenants: distinct but mutually respectful, rigorous but non-exclusionary, demanding but voluntarily adopted. Such an experiment is precisely what Harvard, given its history, position, and inherited obligations, is uniquely suited to initiate.

The honest conclusion to this inquiry admits openly that we do not yet fully know how to build layered covenants effectively, nor can we be certain if Harvard itself still holds sufficient cultural relevance to spearhead this project. Yet moral seriousness demands precisely this humility: to acknowledge ambiguity without succumbing to despair or cynicism.

Perhaps Harvard’s role now is not to prescribe answers but to embody the disciplined openness that originally defined grace: to invite experimentation rather than enforce conformity, and to accept uncertainty not as failure but as a necessary precondition for genuine innovation. We may not know exactly how plural covenants will look in practice, but we understand clearly why they are urgently needed. That knowledge alone compels our honest effort. Harvard once thrived because it trusted excellence enough not to control it entirely, allowing grace room to breathe. The same courage is required now: to build boldly yet humbly, knowing full well we cannot guarantee success, but confident nonetheless that seriousness itself, in all its difficulty and ambiguity, remains our best hope.