New Netherland’s Paradox: Dutch Tolerance / Dutch Intolerance

Evan Haefeli has done an excellent job of positioning New Netherland in the context of the Dutch nation and its expansive worldwide empire that stretched from the Far East to South America and to the West Indies. In focusing on the Dutch colony that eventually became New York, he argues that the colony deserves greater recognition for its contribution to American religious liberty. This is a book that historians of religion and politics in the seventeenth-century will want to read.

To say that the religious landscape in New Netherland was complex understates the Dutch world. Haefeli’s title suggests that his main concern is the origin of American religious liberty, but that is a small part of the book. His main concerns are to explain “Dutch tolerance” and to assess the successes and failures of the Dutch as they implemented it in New Netherland, to demonstrate the uniqueness of this policy for North America, and then to tie these developments to American religious liberty.

Haefeli worked less from new evidence (although he benefits from new translations of Dutch materials) than from a new reading of the existing evidence. New Netherland is a “new telling of an old story” (p. ix). To provide a fresh version, Haefeli devoted considerable attention to recent interpretations of the Dutch religious experience on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, he gave considerable space in the text to argue against these recent interpreters of the Dutch experience. Specialists will find these debates of greater value than general readers.

Beyond a lengthy introduction and a conclusion, Haefeli divided his book into ten chapters. He spends considerable time defining Dutch experiences and how the Dutch in both Europe and in New Netherland fended off three main religious polities that could not find a home in the Dutch Reformed Church: Lutherans, Quakers, and non-Christians. He gives some attention to Roman Catholics in Europe in the context of providing examples of what the Dutch did not want to be—for example, in comparing Catholic intolerance to Dutch tolerance. The Dutch were neither proselytizers nor evangelicals, at least as those words applied to Quakers. The Dutch were as firm in their belief that their Church was the true church as were the Massachusetts Bay Calvinists; the difference was that the Dutch felt less threatened by deviants. In describing the Dutch, Haefeli variously uses terms such as tolerance, liberty of conscience, religious liberty, monopoly, established church, religious diversity, and pluralism. At first glance, these terms do not seem interchangeable or synonymous. For example, how does an established church square with liberty of conscience? The author provides a subtle and nuanced analysis as he tries to explain the Dutch religious experience.

Haefeli asks: “What is religious tolerance and how does it happen?” He admits that a consideration of tolerance is “a much more complicated matter” than most would think and is “difficult to study.” Dutch tolerance was “the whole process of negotiating religious coexistence.” Dutch leadership did not intend to encourage religious diversity through tolerance; rather it was how the Dutch coped with it (pp. 1, ix, 15).

Two quotations, one taken from New Netherland governor Peter Stuyvesant and the other taken from his directors, capture the essence of this study and the tension it attempts to explain. Governor Stuyvesant told some Lutherans who challenged Dutch tolerance that he had “taken an oath in Holland before the supreme authorities not to allow any other religion to be established in this land” (p. 67). However, the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber of the West India Company (WIC) asked Stuyvesant to “shut your eyes, at least not force peoples’ conscience, but allow every one to have his own belief, as long as he behaves quietly and legally, gives no offense to his neighbors and does not oppose the government” (p. 229). This paradox, to neither accept nor persecute, Haefeli labels “connivance,” which was the basis for Dutch tolerance. Then, however...