Religious Dissenters Fled Holland (The Netherlands) and Established Holland (Michigan)
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In his 1970 classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman explored three ways people can respond to institutional failure: by standing by the institution anyway, by speaking up to agitate for change within the institution, or by leaving the institution in protest. The European wars of religion, and persistent attempts by the victors in those conflicts to hem in the losers, produced manifold examples of all three.
In 1834, a Calvinist minister in the Netherlands named Hendrik de Cock—fed up with theological liberalization within the official Dutch Reformed Church and especially with the church hierarchy’s decision to prohibit him from speaking against what he saw as errors being preached by his fellow clergymen—led some 120 congregations in breaking away to form the rival Reformed Churches in the Netherlands.
The move “did not go unchallenged by the authorities,” explains the Free Reformed Churches of North America (FRCNA) website. “King William I invoked an old Napoleonic law which forbade unauthorized meetings of more than twenty persons, in order to prevent the people from worshipping outside the Dutch Reformed Church. The Secession churches were persecuted for a number of years. Some of their pastors were imprisoned, those who assisted them were often excessively fined and soldiers were quartered in the homes of these ‘trouble makers.'”
Although William’s son and successor lifted those restrictions a few years later, many secessionists had apparently had enough. De Cock’s denominational schism had a trans-Atlantic second act when his fellow minister Albertus van Raalte led an exodus of dissenting Calvinists to the sparsely settled “western” United States. The charming lakefront town of Holland, Michigan, established by van Raalte and his flock in 1847, now stands as a testament to the promise of exit.
But packing up and leaving is only one possible response to persecution. “Not all the orthodox people in the Dutch Reformed Church went along with the Secession,” notes the FRCNA. “There were those who shared the same objections with regard to doctrinal purity and church government with the Seceders, but they
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