Heaven's Wrath: Interview with Danny Noorlander

Interviewed by Deborah Hamer

Today on the blog Gotham editor Deborah Hamer speaks with Danny Noorlander, associate professor at SUNY-Oneonta, about his new book Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, religion in New Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, and what is on the horizon for his next book.

Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World
By D.L. Noorlander
Cornell University Press, 2019

Your book argues that if we are to understand the religious situation in New Amsterdam (or any other part of the Dutch colonial world), then we need to look first at the religious context of the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  What was going on in the Dutch Republic and how did that influence the organization of religious worship in early New Amsterdam?

In the early seventeenth century the Dutch Republic was a fairly new state, still fighting Spain, its former ruler, in the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648). Among the varied people of the Dutch Republic were Catholics, Mennonites, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Jews.

Calvinists didn’t originally have the greatest numbers, but they were the loudest and most active in promoting their faith when the Dutch first broke with Spain, and through their influence the Republic soon adopted Calvinist organizational preferences, not in a state church, but a public church, which is an important distinction. The Reformed Church was the public church because it received public funds and monopolized public worship. Yet people didn’t just become members at birth. They could attend church, marry there, and baptize their children there—they could, in short, do everything that people today might see as “membership”—without technically being members. They were just “liefhebbers” or supporters of the church.

More difficult to attain, full membership was reserved for men and women who made a public profession of faith and subjected themselves to church discipline. They could also participate in the Lord’s Supper, which was an important community event, and they had better access to charitable resources.

Opponents of Calvinist arrangements and doctrines continued to challenge Calvinist dominance in the Dutch Republic, most famously in the Arminian controversy of 1609 to 1618. But the Calvinist faction won that dispute, which guaranteed that they would continue to control the public church at home and, by extension, the Dutch colonies.

Because New Amsterdam was owned and administered by the Dutch West India Company, historians have often assumed that profit was prioritized above all else, including religion.  How do you understand the relationship between the trading company and religion?

In my book I describe the company’s attitude toward the church as “supportive yet cost-conscious.” As a joint-stock company—a corporation with investors—the directors worried about costs and profits; they worried about making money both for themselves and their investors, the greatest of whom actually nominated them for their positions.

Wooden sailing vessels from the Dutch East India Company and Dutch West India Company

We also have to remember, though, that early modern joint-stock companies were different from the major companies of our time, and not just because they used wooden sailing vessels and we use massive cargo ships and airplanes. The largest early modern companies employed thousands of sailors and soldiers, waged war on competitors and enemies, established colonial settlements, collected taxes, and wrestled with questions of political, legal, and religious authority. Within their spheres of influence, they bore the same powers and responsibilities as the state. Because the West India Company was an extension of the state that created it, it necessarily partnered with the Reformed Church.

Far more than that, I also argue that the union was strong in this case because of the martial, politically-charged times in which the company was born and the Calvinist loyalties of many investors and directors. That context and those influences magnified whatever religious element would have existed in the company anyway, creating religious opportunities and an intense sense of mission for Calvinists in the early Dutch Atlantic. They saw the company as a tool for extending the Protestant Reformation and the Reformation’s wars to other continents. And the company hired hundreds of Calvinist clergy to assist in those endeavors.

When we think about New Amsterdam, religious tolerance often stands out as one of its most salient characteristics.  But your book shows that the tolerance which was available was conditional and complicated.  How would you characterize the experience of religious minorities in New Amsterdam?

I already explained how one church, the Dutch Reformed Church, received public funds and monopolized public worship in the Dutch Republic and its colonies. As a historian and teacher, one of my greatest challenges is trying to square those arrangements with the widespread reputation for tolerance. I’m still not sure I do it very well!

The reputation derives in part from misunderstandings about the many English who settled in New Netherland, some of whom, like Anne Hutchinson, were religious refugees. But that is, in my opinion, weak evidence of tolerance because the Dutch didn’t really see the English as different; they didn’t see them as a people who needed to be tolerated. Puritans may not have used all the same layers of organization found in the Dutch Reformed Church, but they were both still Calvinist in doctrine, and the fact that the two could live together in America isn’t so remarkable.

A better reason to see the Dutch as tolerant is their commitment to “freedom of conscience,” as they called it. Again, this did not mean people could worship without restriction, but it gave them a degree of security they didn’t have in, say, Spain in the same period. It made the Dutch “relatively” or “comparatively tolerant.” According to these conscience rights, people in Dutch communities could believe whatever they wanted, and they could worship however they wanted in the privacy of their homes, with their families. They just couldn’t do it publicly. And some Dutch rulers (most notably in Amsterdam) even ignored the illegal public activities.

Unfortunately for religious minorities in New Amsterdam, local rulers tended not to be so lenient. They worried that illicit worship would incite God’s wrath, and they worried about the possibility that religious diversity would lead to schism and violence. So they usually pursued illicit preachers and suppressed illicit meetings. Had Anne Hutchinson lived long enough to organize the same kinds of meetings in New Netherland that aroused so much ire in Massachusetts, the experience of other religious dissenters in the Dutch colony suggests that she would have been arrested and expelled a second time.

Religious time in New Amsterdam can, in some ways, be divided into the period before Pieter Stuyvesant’s arrival to assume governorship of New Netherland in 1647 and afterwards.  How did the governors who preceded Stuyvesant get along with their religious counterparts in New Amsterdam?  And how did Stuyvesant?

Peter Stuyvesant

When it comes to religion, there was never really a peaceful period in New Netherland’s history. But there is, as you said, an important difference in the religious conflicts pre- and post-Stuyvesant. How much that had to do with him personally and how much of it was because of the time he ruled, when the colony finally had a substantial population, is open to debate.

The clergy often butted heads with Stuyvesant’s predecessors over moral questions and questions of power. The two best examples are Reverend Michaelius, who fought with Governor Minuit about illegal trade, among other matters, and Reverend Bogardus, who was one of the most outspoken opponents of Governor Kieft during the Indian wars that destroyed Kieft’s administration and reputation.

An ardent Calvinist, Stuyvesant got along better with the clergy: He finished the chapel in the capital, which had languished as a construction site during Kieft’s War, and he paid clergy more than they had been paid before. They also advised him sometimes on secular matters.

But that didn’t create religious harmony in New Netherland because the very same Calvinist loyalties that guaranteed better relations between the governor and clergy guaranteed his support of their social goals, which included the suppression of any  Lutherans, Quakers, and Jews who were too open with their religion. All the major controversies about illicit worship and most of the arrests, fines, deportations, and other punishments for religious crimes in the colony occurred during Stuyvesant’s tenure.

Again, though, his predecessors didn’t have the same opportunities to deal with these things because they didn’t serve as long as him, nor did they have such a large, diverse population. I should also note that the governor wasn’t an autocrat; he couldn’t and didn’t rule alone, but with councilors who sometimes agreed with him and sometimes overruled him.

There were a significant number of enslaved people in New Amsterdam.  What were their religious lives like?  And what did Calvinist ministers think about the slave trade and the institution of slavery?

I don’t do a lot with the first part of your question in my book—the question about slave religion—because my focus is on Calvinism, and there weren’t many slave converts to the Dutch Reformed Church. I do, however, have a chapter on Calvinist attitudes toward slavery and Calvinist missionary efforts among free Africans in Africa, free and enslaved blacks in America, and Native Americans.

The few Dutch Reformed ministers in the Netherlands who wrote about the slave trade tried to have it both ways: They might say that servitude was sinful, but God sometimes allowed slavery, they also claimed, to punish people or teach them faith and patience. The ministers said that the Dutch should only purchase slaves obtained in a “righteous war” and only sell them to Protestants, that Dutch masters shouldn’t treat their slaves as the Spanish allegedly did, with great cruelty, but treat them well and raise them in the Christian religion. Some clergy even suggested guidelines for the manumission of slave converts.

No one seems to have paid much attention to this advice. Dutch slave traders did sell slaves to Catholics, for example, and in the long term, Dutch masters were no less cruel than others.

Among these masters were the church and clergy. Most ministers had at least one slave as a domestic laborer or “servant,” as they usually called them, and some clergy in Brazil and Suriname even had plantations. There’s evidence that they taught their slaves from time to time, but again, the number of converts was small, clergy often complained about slave knowledge and commitment, and they got more restrictive about baptism over time.

You can see these developments in New Amsterdam by comparing the work of Reverend Bogardus in the 1640s with the work of Reverend Selyns in the 1660s. Bogardus baptized and married free blacks and slaves, personally serving as godfather to more than one black child and recording their names in the same record book as the white names. But everything had changed twenty years later. Selyns wrote that he and his colleagues had decided not to baptize slaves because of their lack of faith—and because the Dutch suspected that they, the slaves, only sought baptism to ingratiate themselves with their masters and obtain freedom for their children. Whether he was correct about this being the true motive, Selyns went on to describe it as “worldly and perverse.”

For readers who are interested in slave religion and slave culture in general, I would recommend the more in-depth coverage of the subject in the recent work of Andrea Mosterman (“Sharing Spaces,” 2011) and Jeroen Dewulf (The Pinkster King, 2016).

One of the most innovative things about your work is that you study New Amsterdam and New Netherland within the broader context of the Dutch West India Company’s territory in places like Brazil or the Caribbean.  How does it change the way we think about New Amsterdam when we see it as one piece of a much larger empire? 

New Yorkers might not want to read this, but the first thing we see is how unimportant the colony was to most Dutch at the time. Manhattan was definitely not “the island at the center of the world.” Those who paid attention to what was happening in America in the early to mid-seventeenth century were far more likely to have their eyes on the South Atlantic, and the West India Company spent far more time and resources on its Grand Designs against Iberian colonies and Iberian shipping than it ever did on Manhattan and the fur trade.

Thinking more narrowly about the Dutch religious mission, misunderstandings occur when we rip the Dutch from this larger context and see them only as neighbors to the Puritans of New England or Jesuits of Canada. We can’t study the situation in New Netherland, then label any idea or approach as “Dutch” based solely on what we see there, because again, most Dutch showed a greater interest in the South Atlantic, and that interest was reflected just as much in ecclesiastical resources as it was in secular ones: Whether we consider total numbers of clergy, their salaries, their religious books and translations, or their work with indigenous peoples, the most expensive and intensive Calvinist reform programs and missionary undertakings existed in Brazil and, to a lesser degree, West and West Central Africa in the 1640s. Calvinist fervor and anti-Catholicism underwrote a lot of what the Dutch did in the early Atlantic world, but their resources were limited and their Iberian enemies happened to operate more in the South Atlantic.

That’s not to say that the Dutch Reformed Church wasn’t an important part of New Netherland society or that Calvinists didn’t try to enact reforms there too, because they did. And I try to highlight those issues and events in my book. They just didn’t win as many Native American converts in New Netherland as the nearby English and French.

Regarding your question about imperial context, consider also the following: Calvinist missionary failures in New Netherland occurred in part because of Native American needs and choices, meaning that Native Americans there didn’t have the same history with the Portuguese and the same incentives to unite with the Dutch as Native Americans in Brazil. I also show how, after the loss of Brazil, the churches of the Netherlands were more reluctant to loosen their grip on colonial religion and less willing to let the local clergy organize themselves into the very councils that would have helped with missionary work in North America.

You’re continuing to research New Amsterdam and the early modern Dutch world.  Can you tell us about how New Amsterdam figures into your ongoing work?

I’m writing about Jacob Steendam, who lived in New Amsterdam from 1652 to late 1660 or early 1661. He published a few poems about the town and colony.

Even if they know about Steendam, most people aren’t aware that he lived all over the world, including (in addition to America) Europe, Africa, and Asia, and most people don’t know that Steendam wrote hundreds of poems about his travels and experiences.

Part of the new book will be dedicated to New Amsterdam because of Steendam’s years there, but that will be one of probably six sections on the Dutch Republic and Dutch empire during the so-called Golden Age. I don’t intend the book to be a biography so much as a journey through the different “worlds” of the Dutch empire, with Steendam as locus and guide. More narrowly, I intend to focus on poetry, music, and their place in colonial life and colonial thought.

Deborah Hamer is an editor at Gotham.

Danny Noorlander is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Oneonta. He specializes in European expansion, the Dutch empire, colonial America, and the Atlantic world.