Dutch Calvinism in Modem America: A History of a Conservative Subculture, by James D. Bratt

A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. J.H. (Hans) Kouwenberg is minister of St Giles Church in Prince George, B.C.

Dutch Calvinism in Modem America: A History of a Conservative Subculture. James D. Bratt, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984, 329 pp. Pb. $19.95.

It often amazes me how much of an ability for healthy self-analysis which sister denominations of about a similar size as ours, albeit of a more conservative beat, have made. But why are we in the Presbyterian Church in Canada so infrequent or reticent in documenting and discussing our religious history and analyzing our theological “parties” and trends? Perhaps it is true as Professor R. Sheldon Mackenzie has put it that “Our people are not as disciplined nor as theologically curious as are members of the Christian Reformed Church. But given these and other such-like differences, we may learn from them . . .” (Presbyterian Record, March 1, 1986, p.35). Perhaps such a book as this will spur us on to reflect on our own traditions and theologies.

The Christian Reformed Church and Reformed Church of America, with respectively 828 and 930 congregations and 172,786 and 214,500 communicant members each in 1980, have made significant contributions to the Reformed tradition in North America. Indeed, although one may lament the still heavily ethnic, largely Dutch, still conservative culture of these two bodies, yet their theological streams have inspired a number of vigorous institutions – for example, educational and socio-political – which are becoming more and more ecumenically based, and they have “sent” a number of educated laity into other Reformed and Presbyterian churches.

With its well-documented research (18 pages of selected bibliography) and 80 pages (!) of helpful notes, this book is literally a “Who’s Who” of Dutch Calvinism in America. As one who has his roots in this tradition – until his fourteenth year anyway – I found it fascinating reading. Mind you, the emphasis of the book is mainly on “America”, not North America. The smaller, but significant influence of the C.R.C. and the R.C.A. in Canada does not, regrettably, receive extended treatment. More recent immigration in the later 40’s and early 50’s shaped the Canadian experience (see To All Our Children: The Story of the Postwar Dutch Immigration to Canada, Albert VanderMey, Paidea Press, 1983). Nevertheless, because even these Canadian groups received their spiritual direction from American seminaries, until more recently, the documentation of the roots of what made and makes up a Dutch Calvinist is instructive.

This book explores the ethnic, intellectual, and religious history of “those [Reformed church] communities established by the Dutch who immigrated to the United States between the 1840’s and World War I. It describes the substance of their thought – the ideas, the opinions, the issues of consequence – but especially the mentalities that shaped it” (p. ix).

The background to this mindset is traced in the pietistic “Secession” from the National Reformed Church in the Netherlands and the influential neo-Calvinistic thought and writings of Abraham Kuyper – convert, editor, theologian – co-founder of the Calvinistic Free University of Amsterdam, politician, and publicist, and his disciples. Bratt goes on to define and illustrate the varieties of Reformed experience which found themselves in America after successive waves of religiously inspired emigration. He defines four basic mentalities in the Dutch-American community. They are illustrated by a diagram (p. 47). Bratt refers to these categories of mentality again and again throughout his book.

Bratt documents the ambivalent attitudes of the Dutch to “America”, the new land itself, to socio-political questions of the time, and to the first World War. Some attention is paid to a number of significant post-war heresy trials (this was the time of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies in America) and what he calls the ensuing “defensive”, conservative stance of the Dutch Calvinist churches. Not quite fundamentalist, yet borrowing fundamentalist terminology, they stood against “the liberal theology of the present time” and the “intruding sinful world” (p. 115). Bratt observes that “for [theological] creativity and bitter strife, the [first] postwar period has no equal in Dutch-American history. This distinction did not derive from either the intellectual superiority or moral deficiency of its participants but from the pressures of the time – the demand for acculturation, the need to agree in fundamentals in order to keep acculturation from taking away too much (and, one might add, from the persistent notion among the Dutch that every man should be a theologian). Thus the positive Calvinists came to grief at the very time they should have been victorious. In 1916 these‘progressives’ seemed likely to gain the most from Americanization. But dramatically in 1922 and subtly in 1924 the community repudiated their philosophy, reducing them by 1928 to a minority bereft of their old voices and following the pietists’ lead” (p. 118).

Bratt goes on to detail what he calls the “religious fortress” and “garrison” mentality prevalent from 1928-1948. “Little hoping to change the world, Dutch Americans concentrated on maintaining purity and cohesion distinct from it” (p. 124). He adds a chapter of “four renegade novelists” by way of illustrating the “rebellion and refraction” against this defensive mentality. (I found this chapter the most unsatisfying, as an obtrusive insertion, reworking previous material, admittedly from another more literary than strictly theological point of view. Others have found this chapter delightful and witty. Perhaps one has to have read some of these authors to appreciate this section more.) After the second World War another onslaught of “Americanization” struck the churches and this time with more success. “In all, the 1950’s constituted Dutch America’s latest watershed decade” (p. 187). Controversies now traded more often than not between “the ‘progressives’ [who] were positive Calvinists in slightly different dress; [and] the ‘traditionalists’ [who] were Confessionalists in the old . ..” (p. 190) positions which continue into the C.R.C., and to a lesser extent the R.C.A., of today. Bratt notes that “A more expansive approach came from the newest bloc of Dutch North Americans, the postwar immigrants to Canada. . . Quickly they put the C.R.C. into their debt; by 1965 their addition of fifty thousand accounted for some twenty per cent of the denomination’s membership. Equally important was the matter of cultural memory. Theirs showed some signs of internal strain but nothing like the degree of difference between their experience and that of the C.R.C. in the statis. The new immigrants had grown up in the full system of separate institutions, very often under Calvinist-run governments, and amid sophisticated post-Kuyperian developments in Neo-Calvinist theory. On the other hand, they had suffered five years of Nazi occupation… Whatever mood they were in, it was not that of successor of narrow defensiveness” (p. 195). With new ties to Europe and European theology both the C.R.C. and also the R.C.A. (through the theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner) experienced resurgent theological ferment. Bratt’s second last chapter, “Americanization Again 1948-1963” documents these and other developments. His last chapter, “Evangelical and Ethnic 1964-1970’s” wittily seeking to avoid “engaging the future” and yet giving some indications of it, documents new directions and a more open stance in the C.R.C. and R.C.A.

I have sought to give something of the wide scope and fine attention to detail which this book evidences. For an update on the Dutch American Calvinist heritage, full suggestive leads about seeking to serve the Lord within a Reformed and Presbyterian setting, this book is hard to beat. It is worth reading and re-reading!