Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (review)

Toleration is part of what may be called the national myth of the Dutch nation. As Benjamin Kaplan notes in the first of the eleven essays that make up this volume, based on a conference held at New York University, historians of an older generation wrote of a "National Reformed" tradition in Dutch Protestantism, prior to the advent of Calvinism, one that emphasized spirituality, not doctrinal orthodoxy. There was even talk of a Dutch "soul of the people" (volksziel) particularly suited to a philosophy of live and let live. Though the Arminians were soundly thrashed at the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619) by their orthodox Calvinist rivals, they won a different kind of battle, for, as Kaplan says, it was their conception of things—including an evolution toward greater toleration among Christians—that won the day among historians.

More recently, fine studies of local history have shown how toleration in its Dutch form—only the Dutch Reformed Church conducted worship in public—emerged not as the working out of a shared ideal, but as the outcome that was least objectionable to all the competing religious groups that made up Dutch society, including Calvinists, Arminians, Catholics, Mennonites, Lutherans, and Sephardic Jews.

Calvinists represented what was called the "public church" of the Dutch Republic; other groups were allowed to worship only in house churches, save for the Catholics, who were, by law at least, forbidden to hold services even in private. But the Reformed Church was also to some degree handicapped by the fact that many of its leaders and most ardent members were foreigners, emigrés who had fled persecution in the Spanish Netherlands. Their privileged status in public law makes it rather remarkable that Calvinist dominees were so fierce in their denunciations of false belief—notably popish idolatry. Judith Pollmann speaks of Calvinist leaders as betraying a "siege mentality," related to the fact that the Reformed Church was, in numerical terms, just one minority among others. She also highlights a Calvinist thinker who maintained friendly relations with learned men of other communions, while thoroughly approving thundering condemnations of their errors by his own clergy: churchmen had a duty to uphold standards of belief and conduct, lest people of weaker will get the wrong idea.

In general, the authors seem agreed that toleration in its distinctive Dutch form was not based on any agreed-on theory of toleration. Peter van Rooden flatly asserts that there was no connection between the actual status of various religious communities and the theories of toleration propounded by some writers. Jonathan Israel notes that Spinoza's praise of individual freedom of worship in the Netherlands should be read as propaganda: this was how Spinoza thought things ought to be, not how they were. As to why the followers of so many different creeds were more or less left to their own devices, Van Rooden cites various considerations of a practical order. Where town governments chose for whatever reasons to suppress dissident forms of Christianity, the population was entirely Calvinist. Amsterdam welcomed Sephardic Jews from Iberia because the business connections they brought complemented rather than conflicted with indigenous trade networks. Christine Kooi believes that Catholics were allowed to hold Mass—often after paying off the local sheriff—not because of a spiritualist strain in Dutch Christianity, but because persecution of the Catholic population, quite large in many areas, would have disrupted public order.

In sum, as William Frijhoff has said (a point endorsed by Christine Kooi), it is better to speak not of toleration but of co-existence among the different religious communities. But even a state of coexistence would imply the existence of elements compatible with the more recent idea of toleration, if not constituitive thereof. Frijhoff himself thinks there was something new in Dutch religious life: a "religious sociability" that crossed denominational lines, a "street ecumenism" which, unlike the rules for all the churches, allowed scope...