>
>Calvinism cuts both ways.
>
>Southern Protestants seem to take Calvin's predestination to mean
>that they are assured of God's grace. They believe that as born
>again Christians they are guaranteed salvation regardless of
>what they do.
>
I don't know where you're getting this. The most popular churches in the Southern US are not Calvinist. Also, those churches place a strong emphasis on the connection between professions of faith and salvation. Your salvation is contingent upon being 'one of us', but being one of us may have some sort of 'pre-election' as a necessary condition, but not as a sufficient one. (What I mean is that you may need to have a conservative haircut and a steady source of income, but you'll need more than just that.) This requirement is a constant source of ideological discipline among the flock. The sign-your-name-on-the-dotted-line churches -- chief among which is the Southern Baptist -- are surprisingly corporatist in nature. The head of the SB Convention is a virtual pope, and expects to be regarded as such.
Now perhaps your average Baptist feels impervious to damnation, but I think refering to Calvin hardly explains this attitude. Rather, we should think in terms of the ideological bubble in which the true believers live, one guaranteed by the social cohesion of the church to which they belong.
There are other churches as well which operate on a more primitive model. The various store front churches, most of which claim some sort of pentacostal provenance, tend to be decentralized, charismatic, and racially integrated. They are also harrased by the more wealthy and mainstream Baptist and conservative Methodist churches, which are corporatist, anti-charismatic, and whites-only. There's a distinction here that tends to be lost in the rush to condemn the general nastiness of so many forms of Protestant religiosity in the US.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- David Jennings SSS II | Agri-Services Labs CAES, UGA | (706) 542-5350 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Get this straight once and for all. The police isn't there to create disorder. The police is there to preserve disorder." - Richard Daley