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In his 1970 traditional Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman explored 3 ways individuals can reply to institutional failure: by standing by the establishment anyway, by talking as much as agitate for change inside the establishment, or by leaving the establishment in protest. The European wars of faith, and protracted makes an attempt by the victors in these conflicts to hem within the losers, produced manifold examples of all three.
In 1834, a Calvinist minister within the Netherlands named Hendrik de Cock—fed up with theological liberalization inside the official Dutch Reformed Church and particularly with the church hierarchy’s choice to ban him from talking in opposition to what he noticed as errors being preached by his fellow clergymen—led some 120 congregations in breaking away to kind the rival Reformed Church buildings within the Netherlands.
The transfer “didn’t go unchallenged by the authorities,” explains the Free Reformed Church buildings of North America (FRCNA) web site. “King William I invoked an previous Napoleonic regulation which forbade unauthorized conferences of greater than twenty individuals, with a view to stop the individuals from worshipping exterior the Dutch Reformed Church. The Secession church buildings have been persecuted for various years. A few of their pastors have been imprisoned, those that assisted them have been typically excessively fined and troopers have been quartered within the houses of those ‘bother makers.'”
Though William’s son and successor lifted these restrictions just a few years later, many secessionists had apparently had sufficient. 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 city of Holland, Michigan, established by van Raalte and his flock in 1847, now stands as a testomony to the promise of exit.
However packing up and leaving is just one doable response to persecution. “Not all of the orthodox individuals within the Dutch Reformed Church went together with the Secession,” notes the FRCNA. “There have been those that shared the identical objections with regard to doctrinal purity and church authorities with the Seceders, however they rigorously felt that they need to attempt to promote a return to orthodoxy inside the Dutch Reformed Church.” Right here we see emotions of loyalty motivating the train of voice.
In actual fact, Hirschman’s try to catalog the assorted types of activism accessible within the face of institutional dissatisfaction misses no less than a few extra potentialities. For one, his voice-exit-loyalty schema appears to miss violent resistance—and the spiritual historical past of the Netherlands provides a vivid illustration of this feature as nicely.
On the time of the Reformation, Holland—the nation, not the city—was below the management of the Habsburgs, who weren’t inclined to tolerate anti-Catholic heresy. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the ruling household’s efforts to suppress Protestantism grew extra brutal, and petitions by Dutch nobles for an finish to spiritual persecution went unheeded. A response finally got here within the type of iconoclasm (actually, rampaging by means of Catholic church buildings and destroying spiritual icons) and, below the management of William of Orange, warfare.
This “Dutch revolt” would drag on for 80 years, culminating within the formal liberation of the Dutch Republic in 1648 as a part of the bigger Westphalia settlement. However no sooner did the Dutch Reformed Church come to prominence within the Netherlands than repression of different religions started. This brings us to one more doable response to institutional failure, one which’s onerous to pithily seize in a phrase like voice or exit however that is perhaps summed up as going underground.
As early as 1581, the “overt apply” of Catholicism was outlawed within the Netherlands. Maybe due to the nation’s emergence out of the furnace of non secular battle, non-public worship continued to be permitted. This led to a historic curiosity: the creation of secret church buildings “hidden in plain sight” inside houses and companies. Catholics would collect in such locations to obtain the sacraments, based on the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, “continuously with the tacit consent of the authorities, who have been typically ready to show a blind eye for a small favor, so long as the church buildings remained unrecognizable from the surface.”
One such church—carved out of the highest flooring of a canalfront row home in Amsterdam’s red-light district—exists at the moment as a monument to this slice of Dutch historical past. Guests to the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (“Our Lord within the Attic Museum”) can ascend a winding staircase by means of an ordinary-looking seventeenth century manse earlier than rising right into a spectacular multistory chapel, full with statuary, triptychs, and altar.
Amsterdam after all boasts a mess of world-renowned points of interest, from the nationwide Rijksmuseum to the devoted Van Gogh and Rembrandt homes, from the house (now a museum) the place Anne Frank and her household hid throughout the Holocaust to town’s well-known red-light district, canal cruises, and occasional retailers. However historical past fans might take pleasure in paying a go to to Our Lord within the Attic and experiencing, up shut, one spiritual minority’s intelligent technique for avoiding persecution with out resorting to both voice or exit.
If a European trip is exterior your finances, contemplate a visit to the opposite Holland, a Midwestern city of fewer than 35,000 residents that punches above its weight for tourism. There you will discover Dutch crafts on the market alongside the eighth Road purchasing district, an opportunity to climb into America’s solely working windmill imported from the Netherlands at Windmill Island Gardens, and a tulip pageant that pulls tens of hundreds of gawkers every spring. Inside a brief drive are the seashores of Lake Michigan (together with one boasting Holland’s historic “Massive Purple” lighthouse) and Saugatuck Dunes State Park, the place guests can hike alongside sand deposits reaching 200 ft tall or be taught concerning the space’s historical past and nature by taking a guided tour with Saugatuck Dune Rides.
Holland, Michigan, proudly payments itself because the “Metropolis of Church buildings,” with an unusually excessive variety of homes of worship per capita. A lot of them are from inside the Dutch Reformed custom—a small reminder of the city’s origin as a secure place for spiritual dissenters craving to breathe free.
This text initially appeared in print below the headline “To Conceal From the State, or To Escape?.”
