New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty

7. Public Church

chapter 7 PUBLIC CHURCH . . . henceforth you will use the least offensive and most tolerant means, so that people of other persuasions may not be deterred from the public Reformed Church, but in time be induced to listen and finally gained over to it. After the hullaballoo over Lutheran conventicling and Quaker proselytizing , the directors of the West India Company shifted their policy for managing religious diversity in New Netherland. Their encouragement of an Amsterdam-style connivance of a Lutheran conventicle having failed, they turned to a capacious vision of the colonial public church that diluted its Calvinist character enough to reduce the provocations driving Lutherans into a separate congregation. Over the next two years (1658–1660), the struggle for connivance turned on a crucial function of the public church: baptism. The directors took a remarkably determined stance on a seemingly trivial issue. At their insistence, the baptismal formula, the series of questions asked of those who presented a child for baptism, was altered so that one word in the second question, ‘‘alhier,’’ meaning ‘‘of this place,’’ was dropped. Without it, the question asked the parents to accept the Christian Church as the True Church. Since Lutherans considered their church the true Christian Church, they could say yes without compunction. With it, the parents had to acknowledge the Dutch Reformed Church as the one true Christian Church, something they could not do without betraying their Lutheranism. Underlying the controversy over this one word (in Dutch) was a struggle over the overt confessional affiliation of the public church and all who participated in it. It was also a struggle unique to New Netherland. The trans-Atlantic Lutheran community had not succeeded in Public Church 187 getting a congregation of its own in America, but in this colony it was forcing the Dutch Reformed to adjust their Calvinist zeal. Unlike the men of Flushing, who had sought to do so by emphasizing local privilege, the Lutherans carved a space for themselves by stressing generic qualities over the specifics of the colony’s church.1 Baptism was vital because it represented the religious future of the colony . The population was growing rapidly through immigration and birth. Though the vast majority of adults in the colony in the 1650s had been born and raised in Europe, they were beginning to have children. How those children were raised would affect the religious composition of the colony in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the provinces of the republic , like Drenthe and Friesland, where a majority of the population were Reformed, it was in no small part because of the lack of religious alternatives . The public church with all its privileges and opportunities for instruction ensured that Reformed way was the prevailing religious path. In localities without a strong local Mennonite community or Catholic missionary presence, within a generation or two it was very difficult for the inhabitants to be something other than Reformed Protestants. The areas where significant portions of the population were not Reformed lay along the military borderlands in the south and east—Overijssel, Gelderland, and Brabant. All were open to infiltration from neighboring territories. Zeeland was something of an exception in being overwhelmingly (some 95%) Reformed, while Holland was exceptionally mixed, though never equally across the province. If the Calvinists were to prevail in New Netherland, then its religious future could be much more like that of Zeeland or Drenthe than Holland or Gelderland.2 The immediate effect of changing the baptismal formula was a temporary quieting of confrontations between Lutheran and Reformed ministers at a time when Amsterdam needed to be on good terms with as many Lutherans as possible—precisely what the directors most desired. For in the same years as the colony’s baptismal controversy, the Dutch Republic found itself pulled into a war against Sweden as an ally of Denmark to secure freedom of trade in the Baltic. Lutherans had dominated the Baltic since the early Reformation. In addition to the Lutheran kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden , crucial Hanseatic cities, from Hamburg to Lubeck and Danzig, were dominated by German Lutherans. Since most Lutherans in both Amsterdam and New Netherland were of German and Scandinavian origin, their 188 Chapter 7 connection to these powerful patrons and important trading partners of Amsterdam suddenly made them an issue of special consideration for the directors. Exactly what the directors’ intervention on behalf of...