Once In Grace?

The dying Cromwell: Is it possible to fall from grace?
His Puritan Chaplain: No, My Lord Protector.
Cromwell: Ah, then I am saved, for I was once in grace.

And with that, allegedly, he died.

That is Calvinism conventionally so called, the five points made by the Synod of Dort, known in English by the acronym TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Points of Catholic orthodoxy extracted from the whole and then exaggerated to the point of dangerous error, but nevertheless fundamentally concerned with the mystery of election with Christ's Human Nature rather than having to rely on our own flawed and feeble efforts, and therefore known to those who preach or hear them as "the Comfortable Doctrines".

A sign setting out TULIP, and tastefully illustrated with a drawing of a tulip, was prominently displayed behind the pulpit of Pastor Fred Phelps at the Westboro Baptist Church, more than suggesting, in that American context, that his and its roots were in the Primitive Baptist movement, although I very much doubt that any of its institutional manifestations retains any contact with him or it. Yet he and his congregation, made up almost entirely of his relatives, seemed to live in constant dread of being damned for the slightest thing, also a point of Catholic orthodoxy extracted from the whole and then exaggerated to the point of dangerous error, but expressing and embodying the opposite extreme to that ostensibly forming their own doctrinal basis. There were repeated references to estranged family members who had "chosen not to be part of God's Elect anymore" and similar turns of phrase.

All in all, as odd as Phelps's own record as a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, or his ability to retain the allegiance not only of his children but also of their spouses, or their devotion to the First Amendment as if it were a Biblical text while otherwise offering an almost welcome critique of Americanism as idolatry, or their most un-Protestant denial to the next generation of any opportunity to marry, since they are forbidden friends outside the family. That last is bound up with their conviction that they know at precisely which (very late) eschatological stage the world now stands. But that, too, has nothing to do with Calvinism, which stands in the Christian mainstream of recognising that the signs of the End Times in the Bible are signs of every age in human history, so that we must be constantly on our guard, since "we know not the day nor the hour", the view that the whole of human history is the End Times having been greatly strengthened by modern knowledge of how brief it is within the history of the universe as a whole.

Not all Calvinists in general, and probably few or no Primitive Baptists in particular, would agree with that final point. And nor, entirely separately, would Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.