Remember that Calvin and associates ratted on Servetus to the Catholic Church when he lived in France.
And I may as well throw a huge amount of fuel on the fire here, as well. Of course, the closest theologically to Calvin in his doctrine of theocratic determinism at the time (and of greatest relevance intellectually since many classical Greek works came in as banned books from Moorish Spain) was Islam.
You know, it's interesting that people are so quick to point to Darwin as the root from which the various plants of modernism, communism, behaviorism, etc.. grew. However, the determinism that lies at the heart materialistic determinism stems from much further back. On a cosmological scale, the idea of a clockwork universe, wound up and left by its creator to run according to its inherent rules put into place at its origin (and the smallest step to a clockwork universe running according to its own rules) has as its intellectual predecessor someone much farther back than Chuck Darwin.
That predecessor was John Calvin, and to a less extreme extent Martin Luther, both of whom dominated (or otherwise influenced) religious and intellectual life of northern Europe in the succeeding centuries. The modern idea of "man" as a ghost in the biological machine, his will and freedom of choice mere illusions of his origin, have their highest and most deliberate exposition in the theology of John Calvin. It's almost funny to see people talk about the wonder and glory of materialistic determinism in the way it has produced life and humanity while ignoring or otherwise treating as irrelevant the implications for what it means to be a choosing human able to know truth. The parallel to Calvin bloviating about G-d's having ordained Adam and Eve (and everyone else) to sin and to be either saved or cast into hell based not on what he foresaw they would willingly do but on what he had foreordained they should do and all for his glory (whatever
that's supposed to mean) is unmistakable.
None of the proponents of either seems to be too worried that his system removes any basis for being able to know truth (even the "truth" of the system in question) and, knowing it, choose it over error. Why? Because each system absolves them of all ultimate responsibility for their actions? Because each system gives them an Explanation of All that is somehow comforting in spite of the way either eliminates the basis of what each knows in his own heart what it means to be a choosing human being with a sense of right and wrong? Because each system in its totalist outlook gives them a way of being on the Winning Team (well, only
maybe in the case of Calvinists) and no one likes being alone? Because people want to be right and either gives them a way of feeling right (note that neither really gives them a way of knowing that they are, indeed, right) without having to offer too much of an explanation except for "That's the way X made it; that's the way it's supposed to be"?
St. Carlos Sagan's "The Cosmos, all there is, was, and ever shall be" and Calvin's theological determinism* of are just two sides of the same ontological coin.
*"God of his own good pleasure ordains that many should be born, who are from the womb devoted to inevitable damnation. If any man pretend that God's foreknowledge lays them under no necessity of being damned, but rather that he decreed their damnation because he foreknew their wickedness, I grant that God's foreknowledge alone lays no cecessity of the creature: but eternal life and death depend on the will rather than the foreknowledge of God. If God only foreknew all things that relate to all men, and did not decree and ordain them also, then it might be inquired whether or no his foreknowledge necessites the thing foreknown. But seeing he therefore foreknows all things that will come to pass, because he has decreed they shall come to pass, it is vain to contend about foreknowledge, since it is so plain all things come to pass by God's positive decree." (Calvin's Institutes, c. 23, s. 6) (emphasis added)