This year is the five-hundredth anniversary of John Calvin's birth, but while the occasion is being marked by his followers, in the wider world the Protestant reformer is remembered with little affection. 'Calvinism' is regarded as a harsh and humourless creed, whose founder lacks even the glamour of his German counterpart Martin Luther. While the French thinker influenced Protestant churches internationally, in Britain he is mostly associated with the strict Presbyterianism once prevalent in dreich old Scotland.

It is true that the Calvin-infused, Hellfire-preaching Kirk was a stifling influence on Scottish culture for centuries, and there are still parts of the Western Isles where the McTaliban holds sway; though the pious inhabitants of the island of Lewis have recently been shaken, first by Sunday ferry sailings, and then by the inevitable consequence: same-sex civil partnership! But the name Calvin is rarely heard in modern Scotland outside the phrase 'the dead hand of Calvin', his legacy seen as a grim one best left in the past.

Intriguingly, though, the most enduring critique of Calvinism to be found in Scottish culture targets not its social conservatism, but rather the self-righteous individualism that can arise from its peculiar doctrine of the 'elect', the idea that the destiny of our souls is predetermined by God. James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) concerns a young man who is led astray by a devilish doppelganger who convinces him that, since he is surely one of the elect and thus guaranteed a place in Heaven, he can sin on Earth with impunity. Taken alongside Robert Burns' satirical poem 'Holy Willie's Prayer' (1785), this shows Scotland was the first country to make a morality tale of excessive religiosity, and by implication a pious duty of self-doubt. No wonder we drink.