I'm not a baptist, but the reason why our government is a representative democracy is to lessen the chance that it will be easily corruptible as hiearchial governments surely are.
Roman Catholics need to admit that the reason Protestants (and even baptists) exist at all is chiefly due to the corruption in the renaissance Roman Catholic church and secondly, due to our freedom of religion (directly coming from Protestant's fear of the tyranny of centralized religion).
On Calvinists burning things: In England (and Scotland) the Monarch seized Church lands (25% of the land, and therefore in those days, the wealth), which were usually under the supervision of monasteries. Did their cloisters and chapels get destroyed? You bet, but it wasn't a bunch of religious fanatics doing it...more often than not it was the nobility to whom Henry VIII gave those lands... As to the murders at the Somerville Convent--being in the (overwelmingly Baptist) South, I'll attribute that to Yankee barbarism.
I do have serious issues with the Calvinist iconoclasm though...indeed many of these were fanatic.
Currently I am studying (and have studied) Reformation history, and its fascinating (and seems a common human trait) that it was the 2nd Generation from the Reformation times which seem the most extreme. John Calvin for example is, as a rule quite a bit more mild theologically, than the Calvinists of the early 1600s. (and please don't dredge up Servatus....as Roman Catholicism was instigating the burning of thousands of Protestants at the time Calvin executed one (already twice condemned by the Catholic courts) heretic). It seems the children of reformers tend to go too far, before the pendulum swings back.
I doubt there is a Catholic on this thread who would debate the first point. The Church was in need of a cleansing, but not to be tossed aside.
On the second point, the idea of freedom of religion is a backlash against religous coercion and violence from either side. It's not unilateral. You can't tell an Irishman that on St. Paddy's eve.
SD