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Religion in America Series Harry S A Perfect Babel of Confusion Religion in America Series Harry S. Stout GENERAL EDITOR A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies RANDALL BALMER RANDALL BALMER A Perfect Babel of Confusion Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXJORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright © 1989 by Randall Balmer Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2002 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balmer, Randall Herbert. A perfect babel of confusion: Dutch religion and English Culture in the middle colonies / Randall H. Balmer. p. cm. —(Religion in America series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-505873-9; ISBN 0-19-515265-4 (Pbk.) 1. Reformed church—New York (State)—History. 2. Reformed Church— New Jersey—History. 3. Dutch Americans—New York (State)—Religion. 4. Dutch Americans—New Jersey—Religion. 5. New York (State)—Religious life and customs. 6. New Jersey—Religious life and customs. 7. New York (State)— Ethnic relations. 8. New Jersey—Ethnic relations. I.Title. II. Series: Religion in America series (Oxford University Press) BX9496.N7B35 1989 88-25241 285.7747—dc19 CIP 246897531 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper for Kathryn This page intentionally left blank PREFACE From the earliest days of European settlement, the Middle Atlantic colonies of North America foreshadowed the religious and ethnic diversity that later became the region's hallmark. Nearly a century after Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian navigator in the service of France, discovered the inlet into New York Harbor, Henry Hudson, an Englishman under contract to the Dutch East India Company, nosed the Half Moon through the same Narrows and struggled north on the river that now bears his name. The first group of settlers to disembark at Manhattan were Walloons, French-speaking Belgians, followed shortly by a modest influx of Netherlanders, Germans, and French. English Puritans bracketed Dutch settlement to the north and east in New England and on Long Island, while Swedes and Finns became the early denizens on the Delaware River to the south. Black slaves began arriving in the 1620s, and a considerable number of Sephardic Jews came in 1654 and 1655. The region's religious configuration bespoke even more diversity. Early reports filtering back to Amsterdam told of Huguenots, Menno- nites, Brownists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, even "many athe- ists and various other servants of Baal." The Jews proposed to erect a synagogue, French Jesuits from Canada mounted several missionary sorties among the Indians, and the spiritual guidance of the Scandina- vians on the Delaware lay in the hands of a certain Lutheran preacher "more inclined to look into the wine can than into the Bible."' If all this seemed a perilous environment in which to raise the standard of Reformed Calvinism, the ministers (dominies) assigned to the task never flagged in their zeal. Shortly after his arrival in 1628, Dominie Jonas Michaelius assembled fifty of the faithful for the ad- ministration of Holy Communion. While acknowledging that "one cannot observe strictly all the usual formalities in making a beginning under such circumstances," Michaelius and his successors managed to establish an outpost of Dutch Calvinism in New Netherland under the watchful eye of the Classis of Amsterdam.2 Soon (with the assistance of pledges exacted during the revelry of a besotted wedding feast) a V111 PREFACE chapel was constructed, and over the course of half a century the Dutch Reformed Church survived a perpetual shortage of clergy, various inept governors, and the colony's rampant pluralism. But the one thing Dutch Calvinism could not withstand was the incursion of English culture and Anglican religion. The English Con- quest of 1664 triggered a long, steady decline in the fortunes of Dutch culture in general and the Dutch Reformed Church in particular. By the turn of the century the church had suffered a disabling schism along social and economic lines, which prompted an exodus of farm- ers and artisans to New Jersey. Within a short time the Jersey Dutch became enamored of pietism as defined by clergy alienated from the religious establishment in New York and Amsterdam. New York's rapid Anglicization thereafter placed the orthodox Dutch on the de- fensive, struggling valiantly to reestablish Dutch schools and maintain their ethnic distinctiveness. They resisted the Great Awakening but by the mid-eighteenth century finally succumbed to the colony's domi- nant English culture. This study examines the clash of Dutch and English cultures and charts the religious effects of that confrontation. No institution re- flected the vicissitudes of Anglicization with greater clarity than the Dutch Reformed Church over the course of a century. The awkward posturings of the Dutch clergy mirrored the difficulties facing the Dutch as a conquered people. Moreover, the displacement of the Dutch by the English affected not only cultural institutions but also the religious beliefs and spiritual expressions of colonial Hollanders. Leisler's Rebellion in 1689, an insurrection of lower-class Dutch who had grown restive under English rule, provided the first real indica- tion of fissures within the Dutch community itself. The restoration of English government in 1691, followed closely by the execution of the rebellion's leaders, prompted many Dutch to flee the cauldron of discontent in New York City and Long Island for the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. This migration, in turn, laid the ground- work for the arrival of Dutch pietism and, eventually, the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of two disparate Dutch cultures, both irrevocably changed by the presence of the English. In New York City and on parts of Long Island the Dutch came under the influence of an English culture shaped, in large measure, by the Church of England. The Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel exerted an enormous influence over the colony through its Preface ix schools and its unabashed efforts to proselytize members of the Dutch Reformed Church. With varying degrees of zealotry, succes- sive Anglican governors sought to favor the Church of England and advance the designs of Anglicanism in the colony. In New Jersey, however, the Dutch drifted toward an evangelical pietism that tran- scended ethnic boundaries and thereby assimilated to a culture de- nned by New Light Presbyterians and other evangelicals. Whereas the Church of England guided the course of Dutch assimilation in New York, the Dutch in New Jersey plunged headlong into a kind of panethnic revivalism, which characterized the Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies. Denominational barriers eroded and language barriers receded in the waves of revival, and, thus assimilated, the Jersey Dutch prepared to enter the larger political arena of the late eighteenth century. In addition to showing that the Dutch were among the first to evince signs of revivalism, this study illustrates the power of political events and social forces in shaping theological beliefs and religious behavior. The predilection to pietism among Jersey Dutch grew quite decidedly out of the alienation of ordinary Hollanders from both the English and from those among their compatriots who had assimilated to English ways. But the reverse is also true: religious affiliations among the Dutch in the Middle Colonies provide a clue to political alignments during the Revolutionary era as well as to postures toward the domi- nant culture. The revivalistic Dutch, centered in New Jersey and the Hudson Valley, by and large identified with the patriot cause, whereas the orthodox Dutch who had Anglicized by the mid-eighteenth century supported the loyalists. Histories, according to the old maxim, are written by victors, and so it is with colonial Dutch religion. A succession of nineteenth-century Reformed church historians exulted in the triumph of an indigenous Reformed church that had assimilated to the dominant culture and fairly throbbed with pietistic vitality.3 These same historians charac- terized opponents of revivalism as stodgy traditionalists bent on thwarting the march of progress. Such a slant is understandable and perhaps even defensible, but it fails to account for the complex social, political, and economic factors that lay behind that triumph. More recent analyses have failed to recognize the profound differences between the Dutch cultures of New York and New Jersey, differences that emerge only when the two are juxtaposed. X PREFACE This study attempts to view Dutch religion and culture within a broader context, one that considers the entire range of ethnic conflict between the earliest settlers of a given colony and an overwhelming foreign entity, a power that conquered
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