Reviews of Books

The Reformed Dutch Church has always struck this outsider as mysterious, even forbidding. But not for altogether sound reasons. The inhabitants of seventeenth-century Dutch New York whom I have studied were unexceptional early modern Europeans. In such places as Beverwijck/Albany, they succeeded in harmonizing religious obligations with everyday concerns. They braided together a meaningful liturgical year with trading seasons and agricultural cycles. Some members of the church used its authority to intimidate fellow-citizens; others were openly defiant of the righteous. Papists (few as they were) and Lutherans or, as the townspeople identified them, those of the Heidelberg Confession were treated with intolerance—but not always. Even though one of the town's ministers displayed a more than average fondness for beer and spirits, he was accepted with patience and some affection.	1
The truth is that my dread comes from reading novels and seeing movies. There—always in Africa—voortrekkers move across the veld in open wagons: women with faces darkened by close-fitting bonnets, men with black hats and squared beards; children with expressionless faces already showing years long in godly discipline. Somewhere noticeable is a Bible. Whatever their location, these distant Dutch colonists, implacably bent on their mission, appear inscrutable to those outside the fold.	2
Firth Fabend's rich and comprehensively researched study does not dissolve the aura of the Reformed Dutch Church. It does, however, expose the tensions and fears that insiders felt in the nineteenth century as they cautiously questioned or desperately clung to the fundamentals of their faith and sought to maintain their Dutch identity. Fabend's thesis regarding this transforming process is a straightforward one: "the persistence of Dutchness in New York and New Jersey throughout the nineteenth century was intimately related to the ethnicizing influence of the Reformed Dutch Church. But . . . powerful de-ethnicizing, modernizing forces that conveyed the Dutch and their church into the mainstream of American life ultimately prevailed" (p. 214).	3
Fabend's narrative first takes us to the bitter days of the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) in 1619. And well it might. The synod had consequences beyond the wildest dreams of the implacable Calvinist divines who won the day there. Fundamental tenets that would ground the Reformed faith in the Netherlands were laid down: predestination, election, the limited efficacy of Christ's death. Despite permutations in Dutch culture during the subsequent 250 years, Dort's pronouncements were given a primacy that was not to be questioned—unless one meant to query the very nature of being Dutch. When, beginning in the 1820s, sizable numbers of churchgoers in New York and New Jersey inaugurated just such a questioning—and showed themselves ready to live by new and different answers—the church underwent a series of upheavals that had no surcease for the next fifty years.	. . .