Likewise, iF anyone doesn’t like Catholicism, that’s his thing. I’ll do my best to show him he’s wrong, but even if I can’t, I still expect him to refrain from using it as a shorthand reference for everything he doesn’t like about America, just because he’s too lazy and sloppy to come up with a word that actually fits.

But railing against the Calvinists is much safer — people are less likely to recognize you for the conspiracy-minded crackpot that you are, and you don’t have to worry about being called an anti-Semite. Blackadder and Stuart are right — this scapegoating of Calvinists is straight out of the Loraine Boettner playbook. You might as well refer to anything anti-democratic or authoritarian as “derivative Catholicism”, given our alleged slavish devotion to the Pope.

And as usual, it’s left to Donald and Christopher to stand up to those who like to frame every issue as a “have you stopped beating your wife?” quiz (or in this case, “are you or are you not in favor of collective punishment?”).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012303327.html

I come from the so-called “Bible Belt,” and this IS, indeed, the god of most Protestants in that region of the country, whether you call their “theology” Dispensationalist,” watered-down “Calvinist” or “Evangelical.”

The vast majority of Calvinists would say that even though God collectively punished (e.g. the sin of Achan), we don’t have that right as fallen men. Just because God did or does something doesn’t mean we have the right or the ability to do the same.

In addition, MM lumps together dispensationalism and Calvinism – two schools that are at each other’s throats over precisely the ideas that MM cites as being common to both. Calvinists have predestination, dispensationalists are rabidly pro-Israel, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Dispensational thought is much more dominant in American evangelical thought than Calvinism; most evangelicals cringe at the thought of predestination, so saying that Americans support collective punishment as American foreign policy because of predestinational theology makes no sense.

Blame it on dispensational thought? Sure! Hagee &c. have been promoting it and goodness knows the Bush administration seems to buy into it. But don’t attribute it to Calvinism – it’s an insult to the good Calvinists I know who do not support what is being done to the Palestinians.

It’s incumbent on the person who makes a comparison to Calvinism in the first instance to explain why the comparison is apt. I don’t see why it’s my responsibility to write a lengthy post refuting a comparison that most people would immediately recognize as bafflingly inaccurate.

MM:

Calvinists quintessentially think that God has predestined some people to be saved and some people not to be saved. At the same time, at least in America (which is the purported comparison), it is quite routine for Calvinists to say that we can’t know for sure who is in either group. It’s all up to God to decide in the end. See, e.g., Sproul’s comments here. For similar opinions, see here, or here, or here (“We do not know whether our neighbour or enemy is one of the elect or not, but still we are to love them.”), or here (“Calvinists believe that Christ died to atone for the specific sins of specific sinners, and only God knows who they are.”), or here (“Calvinists would retort that only God knows who He has chosen. Therefore, in practice, it makes very little difference to preaching the gospel.”).

The American evangelical “hey presto, wave you hands in the air, call Jesus you personal savior, and bada-bing, bada-boom, you are saved” is merely a trivialized, derivative form of Calvinism.

Calvinism doesn’t lead to altar calls. Quite the contrary — if you think that salvation is solely up to God’s will and that we’re all totally depraved left to ourselves, then you don’t think that salvation can be obtained just by your own choice to say a few words at an altar. That’s why Calvinists usually don’t like altar calls. See, e.g., here, or here, here (“They pronounce that altar calls are wicked because a non-Calvinist, Charles Finney, originated them.”),

In short, “Calvinism” is an actual set of theological beliefs. It’s a word that has an actual meaning. It’s not just an all-purpose insult to be thrown willy-nilly at someone who merely thinks that one side of an international conflict deserves our support rather than the other side.