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To West Michigan, Dutch American culture, I am an outsider with one foot inside that small tent. I don't live there anymore.

To West Michigan, Dutch American culture, I am an outsider with one foot inside that small tent. As a child I was always aware that to my mother there was a qualitative difference between "here" (meaning Saginaw, Michigan) and "there" (meaning Grand Rapids). She spent most of her growing years in a house on Calvin Street in eastern Grand Rapids, just down the street from the site of Calvin College (then). Her Dutch American relatives, six aunts and numerous others, lived around the area; in the summers we drove to Newaygo to attend a summer church camp run by her home church, Westminster Presbyterian in Grand Rapids (where her ashes are now interred).

This Dutch American background (such as it was) became more vivid to me in the two years I spent at Hope College, 1974-1976. I earned my degree there after three years at Michigan State (one year in a music program there that gave me practically no transferrable credits). I came to Hope as an outsider with some sense of how things worked in that community, but I had been formed by highly negative experiences in a mediocre public high school, and then three years (1971-1974) at completely secular Michigan State. I studied in an "alternative" residential liberal arts college, Justin Morrill College, which was closed in 1979. I liked Hope's far greater structure, but I never took it as the definition of a liberal arts college.  I knew there were other options, some of them very good.

I was completely unprepared for what Hope meant by Christian college at that time, since I was really interested in Classics (Greek, Latin, history, philosophy), and German, and kept a low profile in almost everything else except organ performance. My academic experience there was intense, demanding (I had was the only Classics major and had an Oxford-like experience of demanding, fast-paced tutorials), and formed in me the habits that Princeton would nurture to maturity. It prepared for me for the intensity of graduate studies in a major program of the history of Christianity (Princeton Theological Seminary), without which I would have been lost. That Calvin wrote in Latin (complex, literate, humanistic Latin) was no news to me.  (My dissertation work was on the Carolingians, thankfully, far removed from the obsessions of the Reformed.) The Christian emphasis, however, was at first an puzzling add on, even as I was nurturing a desire to study the history of Christianity very deeply.

Hope's cultural pendulum at that point swung "liberal" (thanks to then-recently-departed President Calvin Vander Werf), so I largely ignored the cultural evangelicalism of many of the students around me. It was a comfortable, even snug world, but it was never really my world; I would not have stayed there had that been possible. My academic work was done. I freely admit that I was in Hope, but not really of it. I joined the German Club, otherwise I was what in Princeton they called "a grind."

After Hope I spent a year as a Fulbright Commission English teaching assistant in Vienna (arranged by a powerful Hope professor with many ties there, Paul Fried), and then took up M.Div. studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton in turn left me with an enduring respect for serious, top-flight scholarship, tough writers such as Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and a far more global sense that both "Reformed" and "Anglican" worlds that were much broader and more diverse than my experience in Holland, Michigan had suggested. Eventually I became a librarian (another story), and ten years later returned to Princeton for doctoral study. The encounters I had with Evangelical doctoral students in the Ph.D. seminars were frustrating (with one exception), because their preparation was often so superficial, even glib. (Even that one exception previously had left the Assemblies of God for the Lutherans, ELCA.)  While at Hope I had become involved in an Episcopal Church, and that involvement left me with enduring liturgical preferences that eventually made my sojourn in the Presbyterian Church untenable.

During all this time I grew up in the cultural orbit (neighboring township) of Frankenmuth, Michigan, which offers a curious contrasting parallel to Dutch Americans in West Michigan. Frankenmuth ("courage of the Franks") was settled (1845) by immigrants from Rosstal, Franconia (Bavaria) sent by Pastor Johann Konrad Wilhelm Löhe just two years before A.J. van Raalte led his group to the shores of Lake Macatawa in West Michigan. The settlers of Frankenmuth in time wound up in the very conservative Missouri Synod and worshiped in German well into the 20th century, later than most equally conservative Christian Reformed churches worshiped in Dutch. The doctrinal rigidity of both groups is formally similar and each has regarded itself as "the true church," to the obvious exclusion of the other tradition (never mind everyone else). Growing up I was a heathen Congregationalist, so was (or would have been) beyond the pale of respectability in both groups: an outsider, with one foot inside the tent.

These German-American Lutheran families were emotionally convinced, I am sure, that Jesus spoke Martin Luther's German via God's true Bible, just as many Dutch in West Michigan would have assumed that Calvin spoke and wrote in Dutch, and correctly conveyed Jesus' teachings in Dutch (of course! --he could not have been French!). To this day when I am confronted by passionate attachment to the 1611 Authorized English Bible, or the 1662 (or 1928) Book of Common Prayer, I can only smile: I have been here with others in other languages. Linguistic fundamentalists are everywhere, I suppose. Both groups used theology and language as shields against encroaching "American" ideas in rising generations --a losing fight, to be sure.

PiperHolland

Douma's book (How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch) delineated the manner in which Dutch Americans created and marketed new traditions through the development of Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan. Tulip Time marked not how much they remembered about the Netherlands, but how much they had forgotten. He specifically refers to Eric Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition," that cultural practices or traditions may not be genuinely historic but are adapted or invented to serve ideological ends. In turn, Werner Sollors (The Invention of Ethnicity) extended this to ethnic traditions; and in turn Douma extends it to Tulip Time in particular. It established a new channel of Dutch American ethnic identity that was a modern re-interpretation of actual 19th century Dutch identity which by the 1930s was passing or had passed away. By 1975 (my only direct experience of Tulip Time), it had become an unintentional but devastating caricature of Dutch Americans themselves, quite apart from anything really related to the Netherlands. It was very precious. It re-interpreted ethnicity in service to an ideology of the market.

I watched (though unawares as a child) this same invention unfold in Frankenmuth, mutatis mutandis. In 1959 William (Jr.) "Tiny" Zehnder Jr.,and Dorothy Zehnder organized a Bavarian Folk Festival to inaugurate major additions and renovations to the old Fischer's Hotel on Main Street. (I remember it!) The Bavarian Inn sat opposite Zehnder's restaurant (another repurposed former hotel), which had been operated since 1927 by William Zehnder, Sr., and then by Tiny's brothers. The original festival (1959) was a success and the community organized a Civic Events Council to oversee it annual continuation. From its beginning, the Bavarian Festival was an invented tradition, one marked by usually polite sibling and community rivalries.  For many years the Festival was a major "all hands" event in a small town, and a major source of social and financial capital. As the residents' ability to volunteer decreased due to homemakers' return to the work force and employment that did not allow so much time off, the Festival gently downsized and its now four days rather than a week, and under the control more of commercial entities more than of volunteer community organizations.

Other than commerce, why did the Festival endure? Its continuation was possible because of the unusual, cohesive character of the town, where civil, business, church, and school authorities all knew each other their whole lives. It expressed a positive way forward with a German American identity in a town that still felt it. German Americans, unlike Dutch Americans, had to negotiate the realities of being related to the enemy in two world wars, an enemy who committed the Holocaust, and in defeat endured a bitterly divided homeland (1949-1989). German Americans sought to be a model all-American minority because earlier generations (especially 1914-1918) were none too sure about them.  In the 19th century, earlier German American celebrations originated in the overlapping circles of workplace, Arbeiterverein (workers clubs), churches, and civic organizations.  That network largely passed by the turn of the 20th century (the Arbeiterverein were sometimes suspected of socialism!). With well-known German American celebrations in Wisconsin and Chicago as both example and warning, Frankenmuth's Bavarian Festival --entirely unrelated to any of those earlier-- allowed ethnic reclamation by using the word Bavarian rather than German. In the 1960s and 1970s hardly a (West) German flag was to be found: all the flags were the lozenge-patterned blue and white Bavarian flag. I worked as a waiter in the Bavarian Inn in the summers of 1972-1974 and 1976, putting on the slight lilt of Frankenmuth English to complement the hokey costume.

"Historic Frankenmuth" is made-up history at its finest, an imagined narrative in service to an ideology of the market. The town looks like a theme park mashed up with a wedding venue and a fudge shop. Holland, by contrast, is a larger small city with more to do than just tourism; the Dutch kitsch is comparatively restricted to Windmill Island and a few other locations. They are, each in their way, sui generis appropriations of fading ethnic consciousness.

When I lived in Europe, I immediately sensed the profound difference between the invented traditions of Tulip Time and Bavarian Festival and the national experiences and characters of the Netherlands, Bavaria, and Austria.  The gap left me scornful of those invented American ethnicities for a long time. To be sure, each community remembered the largely rural, pre-industrial 19th-century Netherlands or Franconia, with a great deal left out that was present even then.  For example, each neglected to mention that in both the Netherlands and much of Bavarian a significant amount of the population was Catholic! (Franconia was historically mixed). Subsequent to their departures, indutrialization and the experiences of the wars and the then-very-present Cold War assured a general atmosphere of willful social amnesia and fear of the past that contrasted very oddly with the happy-go-lucky invented pasts in Frankenmuth or Holland. I suspect that imagined history has returned over there as well, in the form of ultra-right or neo-Nazi movements.

Since I had very little background in evangelicalism, scholarly examination of the Bible was nothing new to me: the textual methods were very similar to those employed by Classicists on "difficult" texts. Early on in Princeton (1977) I just could not fathom the passionate objections to documentary hypotheses about the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") and the Gospels. I had little appreciation for the anxiety of many classmates and their habits of proof-texting or the assumption that Jesus' place and time was just like ours. Hence I had little idea how passionately many would cling to their belief that God could bless only procreating, married heterosexuals.  It turned out, over a decade or so, that many alumni/ae of Hope were gay or lesbian --so many that once I asked one, "Was I really so socially out of touch that was completely oblivious to your identity?"  He responded, "How could I have expected you to know something that even I did not know or acknowledge about myself at that time?"

During the 1980s and 1990s the horrific experiences of illness and deaths of numerous gay friends, and those who survived, meant that ahead of the curve I grew away from the homophobic culture in which I was raised. I was also living in the East, and in much more cosmopolitan, pluralistic environments. I grew impatient with the endless Presbyterian fights over the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers. I was so done with that. When a person I knew in seminary and truly respected was essentially run out of his parish in California (by vengeful elders of a neighboring Presbytery, not by his own congregation), I called B.S. --I had had enough. In 1992 I joined the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York City (Episcopal) and embraced my identity as a high-church Episcopalian, but one who likes good preaching, competent theological reflection, and tenacious, progressive social outreach.   My "elective affinity" ethnicity had long since become Scottish (in large part because of my name), and my Dutch heritage became less important. My understanding of Calvin was completely revised by reading William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (1989) in my Ph.D. residency.  Bouwsma restored Calvin to a context of other 16th-century writers and humanists such as Eramus and Montaigne.  I found that my previous understanding of Calvin had been just as invented as Tulip Time. When I visited Hope once for an alumni/ae event, I realized that I grown away from what I never really embraced anyway.

In the same years, Hope's pendulum swung in an extremely conservative direction during the campus pastorate of a certain Ben Patterson (1993-2000), an evangelical hired by Gordon van Wylen and tolerated by John Jacobsen (presidents). Patterson instituted or encouraged practices --such as public confession, confrontations with faculty members, praying outside the residential rooms of gay students for their conversion and correction--which I regarded as beyond the pale, divisive, and unfaithful. James Kennedy's Can Hope Endure? A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education (2005) confirmed my worst fears. Patterson's departure in 2000 did not usher in much change, however. In 2005 the highly respected Miguel de la Torre (since at Iliff School of Theology, Denver) was forced out of the faculty (how many Hispanics did they have then or since?). De la Torre's offense: he wrote a newspaper column satirically condemning James "Focus on the Family" Dobson's "outing" of the animated character Sponge Bob Square Pants as gay. (I'm not making this up! --can sponges be gay? Who knew?) Plainly the College could not tolerate any challenge to televangelists and their ilk lest its stream of money from evangelical supporters dry up.  (I'm looking at you, DeVos and Van Andel families!) Apparently if Dobson said it, then College President James Bultman believed it, and that settled it. (Always beware of making the former baseball coach your College president!)

Nothing changed. In 2009 Dustin Lance Black was insultingly treated by the same College president, and (still) Dean of Students Richard Frost, treatment that warranted national press attention.  Opponents of this rude nonsense organized a group Hope Is Ready, but unfortunately it was not.  The College's current policy (2011) is riddled with inconsistencies and hypocrisy: "Hope College will not recognize or support campus groups whose aim by statement, practice, or intimation is to promote a vision of human sexuality that is contrary to this understanding of biblical teaching."  Further down: "Hope College promotes the indispensable value of intellectual freedom . . . . Hope College affirms the dignity of every person." Obviously this is untrue and a bold-faced lie: you can talk about "it" (non-heteronormative sexualities) but do nothing more than talk.  Your talk better not "promote a vision." (What does that even mean?0 As though the College says: We talk the talk of intellectual freedom and personal dignity, but we will not walk the walk.  If you talk about this particular subject that is "contrary to . . . biblical teaching," we will shut you up.  Apparently being gay is, according to Hope College, contagious. This kind of policy relegates the College to the evangelical reservation: only those who agree need apply, and are wanted; the rest are second-rate. It affirms superficiality and mediocrity as a consequence of narrow-minded, misguided Christian faith.  It is unfortunately consistent with Richard Frost referring to "you people" in a semi-clandestine conversation with Dustin Lance Black.

In 2013 James and Deborah Fallows visited Holland as part of their journey through America that they called "American Futures" and resulted in their book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (2018). Holland was one of the first towns they visited, and they saw much to like: a vibrant, highly functional community with a both financial and social capital and sense of the future quite at odds with our paralyzed and dysfunctional national discourse. They wrote about the many positive aspects of Holland, but about its negative aspects, too. In his final post about Holland, James included a number of 'I won't live there' messages, the first of which came from me:

I'm a graduate of Hope College, magna cum laude in [XX subject in the late 1970s]. I know the area well. I have some Dutch ancestry. My sister is [an official] about 30 miles north. I know Holland and western Michigan and Dutch-American culture from the inside.

I grant all the excellent qualities you have written about --hard work, ingenuity, social cohesion, and a sense of an America very different from DC or NYC.

I won't live in Holland, and when my own children [three ages 15-19] have looked at colleges (or will), I never suggested my alma mater. My reason: the social narrowness of smug Dutch-American culture. Although there is a very significant Latino population in Holland, it has not successfully challenged Dutch-American Christian Reformed hegemony. That hegemony will allow no compromises.

You alluded to this smugness when you mentioned the failure of the gay rights initiative(s) there. I wouldn't want to raise my children in this atmosphere, and I don't want my children going to college in it. The hateful things that were said during that discussion give evidence of the smugness of that culture.

I live in Connecticut now (outside New Haven), and there's a lot wrong with CT. But we experience far more cultural, religious, and racial diversity here. It's not perfect, but we're working on it.

Holland has many fine qualities. But it's suffocating for many people, including me. Do mention the numerous people from Holland, and Western Michigan, who have fled the cultural suffocation.

Later in the same post James Fallows summed up Hope College pretty accurately (and with more than a touch of snark):

Hope College, once considered a "Harvard of the Midwest," now aspires to be a middlebrow Christian college. Babbit lives! A pharisaical pedagogy prevails ("Thank, God, we are not as others!")

James Bultman, Richard Frost, and Hope College trustees: I'm looking at you.  In 2017 Bultman's successor, John C. Knapp, resigned a year after nearly being forced out, by most accounts because he wanted to move the College to a more mainstream, inclusive position, again warranting negative national attention.

In 2016, the 40th anniversary of my graduation from Hope College came without my even remembering it. I received an unsolicited note subsequently from a Hope development officer, and I responded:

The dust-up about Lance Black was truly the end of me and Hope College, then. Living in CT, a state where the legislature passed marriage equality, a judgement that was sustained by popular referendum in 2008, the whole “gay” controversy is just so over, and marriage equality is an established fact on the ground here, and was in 2009. Amazing to say, the sky has not fallen in, western civilization did not come to an end here (necessarily more than it has anywhere else in the age of Trump); I don’t notice that personal morality has improved (or declined) since 2008. But candor has improved, and that can’t be a bad thing. Good friends who have been partners for decades —longer than many so-called “straight” couples— have become legally equal to my own marriage relationship, and I can’t see what’s wrong here.

Perhaps this is an overly confessional letter, because you wrote to me at the end of Lent, a good time to attempt greater self-awareness. I just don’t think about Hope College or my past relationship with it very much; it doesn’t feel relevant to much in my day. Our three children have each found their way through the college application process, and I never considered recommending Hope College to them — I just think they would find it too “other.” My younger son is a finalist for a  merit scholarship at DePauw University School of Music (vocal performance), but living in Greencastle may be a stretch for him. [In May 2018 he finished his sophomore year there, and is commited to staying to complete his degree.] He calls it the middle of nowhere, but I’ve let him know that nowhere is somewhere other than central Indiana —I’ve seen the middle of nowhere, and it’s called Houghton, Michigan. DePauw’s “look and feel” is much more emotionally and religiously accessible than is Hope's, and since he has both profound faith questions as well as long-time gay friends (though he is straight), I just didn’t see him at Hope.

Since I’m not wealthy —I’m director of an academic library— and not the profile of the usual Hope alumnus, I really don’t think I have very much to offer your College. I do wish Hope College well. My own acquaintance with the Reformed tradition at Princeton Seminary led me to understand it as very open to the world, to the new findings of the humanities and sciences, and not afraid of the truth. I suspect that colleges of any theological stripe which regard themselves as the Fortresses of Faith will have a very tough go of it in the coming decades. If Hope College were a good deal more open, and more willing to defy previously-articulated evangelical orthodoxies, it could really have something very positive to offer American higher education. Lord knows that higher education (and especially private higher education) as a sector is in deep trouble.

That note, and this blog post, says what I have to say.

Michael Douma's book was really helpful to me. I can now see, in the course of my own family background, how genuine Dutch identity in the Netherlands changed as it did from the 19th century to the modern, very liberal state. I can see how Dutch Americans evolved their own historical tradition that is almost a caricature of the Dutch and really has nothing to do with them. Just as Frankenmuth Bavarian identity has almost nothing to do with contemporary Bavaria and Franconia. That Hope College chose to double-down previous mistakes and became a defensive denizen of the shrinking evangelical academic reservation is a consequence of the "invented narrative" of Dutch American culture, shop-worn and sad. The accelerating withdrawal by younger "New Millennials" from organized religion of every stripe bodes ill for a College that values a defensive orthodoxy over liberating pedagogies.

It's almost July, and I remember how amazingly beautiful West Michigan can be this time of year, especially near the Lake. Shelly and I will visit my sister in Muskegon, and our younger son at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Grand Rapids has changed profoundly: for example, the town LGTBQ adopted anti-discrimination ordinances in 1994, East Grand Rapids in 2015; Holland has yet to do so. The Grand Rapids arts community thrives, as do numerous ethnic communities. There is much to like and much more ahead than behind.

I regret that Hope College chose the path that it has (Babbit lives!). I havelittle to do with it or about it. My own life has gone on elsewhere, and for that Deo gratias!

I am indebted to John Fea for pointing out Michael J. Douma's How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch: An Historical Perspective on Ethnic Minorities (Amsterdam University Press, 2014, 978-90-8964-645-3). Douma's book has been a delight, enlightening and useful to my continuing question "how can I teach about evangelicalism to students who have almost no awareness of it?" without becoming either divine or pedantic. Americans of Dutch heritage are no more uniformly evangelical than any other group, but Douma's insights provide clues to the challenge of teaching about other people's arguments to those who don't already know or care about them.

Fea pointed out Douma's book and Douma's response to a misleading article in the Economist that sets out a complex reality in simplistic, bite-sized terms appropriate to The Economist's readers. The pretext was a remarks by U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, and the sagas of Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince, all recognizably Dutch-American conservatives of a certain positivist stripe. Like many Americans academics, in past months I have winced at the antics, pratfalls, and utter cluelessness of Betsy DeVos, incumbent Secretary of Education. Anyone who knows West Michigan (and Holland, Michigan in particular) will know name well, such as the DeVos Field House at Hope College, and the endless genuflection towards the Amway Corporation, alleged to be a barely legalized, cult-like pyramid scheme. A member of the Van Andel family (DeVos' relations) has established rules for restricted access to Holland State Park's Big Red Lighthouse appropriate to a medieval lord of the manor (photo above); Erik Prince (Betsy's brother) remains a person of interest to Robert Mueller's investigation. Any long familiar with the Dutch American pale of settlement in West Michigan might role their eyes.

To West Michigan, Dutch American culture, I am an outsider with one foot inside that small tent. One quarter of my personal ancestry is Dutch (maternal grandmother, and Fries to be exact) and may mother lived decades as a Dutch American expatriate in distant, foreign parts --those of industrial eastern Michigan. (Her ashes are fittingly interred in Grand Rapids.) I earned my bachelor's degree at Hope College, but only after three years at Michigan State in heathen East Lansing. So I could have been an insider, but chose otherwise. (I will say more in a subsequent post.)

Douma's eminently readable book, accessible public history well-informed by theoretical, scholarly insights, presents Dutch American ethnicity as an evolving set of internal disagreements about how to cope with an external human and natural environment very different from the particular, original locations in the small country from which the ancestors emigrated. He limits his investigation to the 19th and 20th-century Dutch immigration to the Middle West, which was only tangentially related to 17th- and 18th-century Dutch American immigration to New York and New Jersey; he also leaves aside Dutch "Indos" from Indonesia.

Location, location: the emigrants came from pre-industrial villages and small cities in Gronigen, Friesland, Utrecht, and Overijssel that were transformed by industrialization and modern transportation shortly after their departure in the 19th century. They arrived in differing areas of the Middle West: West Michigan, the plains of Iowa (Pella, Orange City), burgeoning Chicago (South Holland), and were dispersed throughout Wisconsin.

The emigrants' descendants experienced varying personal and community outcomes in urban, small city, and rural locations. Dutch-American immigrant identity largely evaporated by the 1920s in many locations except two areas with a critical mass of shared ancestry: the West Michigan axis of Holland and Grand Rapids, and the the neighborhoods of Pella, Iowa (southeast of Des Moines) and Orange City (northwest Iowa). Three of those areas were anchored by colleges associated with the Reformed Church in America (RCA): Hope College (Holland, Michigan), Central College (Pella, Iowa), and Northwestern College (Orange City, Iowa). Grand Rapids became the Mecca of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), and home of Calvin College and Theological Seminary (to become Calvin University in 2020).

The educational institutions are an important hook: Dutch Americans were justly famous for their work ethic and religious commitment. As my mother said, "God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland," referring to the dikes, sea-walls, and canals of the Netherlands, an intending the remark to mean, "therefore, get to work." Dutch Protestant Christianity of the Reformed tradition carried all the marks of Calvin's humanist character: based on texts (the Bible above all), theological reflection, and leaning towards pietism in a rather learned, cerebral manner. The revivalist enthusiasms of late 19th-century America were alien to Dutch temperaments and Dutch Americans became evangelical only as those immigrant tendencies passed. Originally birthed in the afschieding (secession) of orthodox, traditional Dutch Calvinists from the Netherlands State protestant church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) in 1834, the secessionists in America fell out amongst themselves in 1857 over the Dutch immigrant's incorporation into the American Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (now RCA), which some considered to be entirely too worldly, lax, and American.

Consequently: the Dutch colleges became involved in Reformed disputes (Hope, founded 1851 and 1866 to the RCA; Calvin founded 1876 to the CRC; the RCA founded Northwestern College in 1882, and took control of Central College, founded 1853, in 1916). Consequently (also), Dutch Protestant religion took on an disputatious character that both nurtured and was fed by intellectual argument. Consequently (also), Dutch Americans became over-represented in skilled trades, the professions, and the sciences. West Michigan, which lacked major extractable natural resources, and depended upon manufacturing and trade (with its access to the Great Lakes), owed much of its economic development to skilled labor, and the manufacture of furniture, building materials (such as bricks), and pharmaceuticals.

Douma's book lends some weight to a view that Dutch American cultural and economic impact was not hindered but furthered by intra-Dutch immigrant debates and rivalries. In West Michigan cities the narcissism of small differences between the RCA and CRC correlated with a range of economic and cultural positions and produced varying responses to and acceptance of mainstream Anglo-American culture (regarding organizations such as the Freemasons, for example). Southern Michigan, originally part (with northern Ohio and Indiana) of the Midwestern "third New England" by the mid-19th was long habituated to Yankee habits of thrift and cultural positions such as Abolitionism; the Dutch immigrants were both similar and different to the Yankees as well as to the numerous other ethnic minorities present (especially Eastern European). Dutch Americans were at first outsiders to the fraught American conflicts that foreshadowed the Civil War, and a number of young Dutch American men absorbed a "American" habits and dispositions through war-time military service. Dutch American rivalries extended a discourse that unintentionally preserved or prolonged Dutch American identity in those areas of Michigan and Iowa that held a critical mass of Dutch descendants. In time these descendants remembered not Dutch culture so much as the culture of their grandparents or great-grandparents: "Tulip Time" in Holland Michigan (an ethnic festival in May) harks back not so much to the Netherlands as to memories of an idealized Netherlands in the minds of the early immigrants.  Dutch American identity has by now evaporated or turned into genealogical interests with a barely religious overlay.  The institutions of the CRC, RCA and the colleges have moved on to other identities and evolving missions.

What does this tell me about teaching American evangelicalism to secular or minimally Catholic undergraduates who don't have (or sometimes want) a clue? It reminds me that cultural identities are always a work in time, evolving in changing circumstances, and apt to idealize their own pasts. Their disputes, far from weakening them (unless they become too divisive), in fact strengthen them by giving the participants something to really care about. Whether many Evangelicals' current nearly cultic for the Chief Executive will in fact divide them from their recent compatriots (those Evangelicals who did not support him) remains to be seen: how divisive will that dispute become? Douma's book also reminds me of the way that religious commitment can be felt as nearly an ethnic identity, and thoroughly entangled with multiple, sometimes conflicting other commitments.

Sometimes it can also really help when a professor includes a sufficient (but not overpowering) testimony: "here's why this subject really matters to me." I find that students often respond to genuine commitment: this is important because it expresses something close to my heart. (I have seen, believe it or not, the teaching of accounting standards enlivened in this manner.) My subsequent post will tell a bit more of my own story.

 

Part of my work since 2009 has been teaching topics in American religion to undergraduates. Since my scholarly training focused on Christianity, most of the class concerned Protestants and Catholics in American history and culture. Most of the students lacked any real working knowledge of any religious community, even if they were graduates of Catholic schools (a small minority). The course will meet a distribution requirement, and with vanishingly few religion majors, I kept a broad focus. Given my students' effective religious illiteracy things went reasonably well.  (I do not intend to exclude any American religion, but I do want to stick to my competencies.)

In teaching about evangelicalism, I hit a concrete wall. My students have assumed that Evangelicals by definition have been always and only conservative Republicans. They might feel some sympathy, I have learned, with a few conservative Evangelical viewpoints, especially amongst the males (immigration; economics; and the racial subtexts). But for the vast majority of my New England small-c and Capital-C c/Catholic students, Evangelicals are a strange tribe: inexplicable in all their ways, potentially hostile to Catholics and Northeasterners in general, and motivated by ineluctable commitments. Neither conservative Republicans nor high-profile Evangelicals are highly visible on the regional Tri-State, southern New England cultural spectrum. As one student wrote, "Evangelicalism: not for me." I am hardly trying to turn them into Evangelicals (I made that abundantly clear, and they heard me), but I had hoped to shed a little light on Evangelical history and culture in hopes of building some respect for this particular "other." I needed help.

I ran across John Fea's blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home after reading several chapters of his book by the same title; Fea's blog is genuine assistance to those few who would like to understand Evangelicals better, but have no interest in becoming Evangelicals ourselves. His new book Believe Me: The Evangelicals Road To Donald Trump (please order from Eerdmans, not Amazon) tells a story from inside Evangelicalism to those Evangelicals who did not vote for Trump, and to the rest of us.  Fea attended Trinity International University and teaches at Messiah College (Pa.); he earned his Ph.D. from SUNY/Stony Brook, so he also has commitments to scholarship off the Evangelical academic reservation. Thanks to John, I also began to read Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and Robert Jones' The End of White Christian America. I returned to Mark Noll's landmark The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) as well as George Marsden's landmark Fundamentalism and American Culture (2nd edition, 2006).

In 2017 Mathew Mayhew (Education, Ohio State) et al. wrote "Expanding Perspectives on Evangelicalism: How Non-evangelical Students Appreciate Evangelical Christianity," (Rev Relig Res (2017) 59:207–230 DOI 10.1007/s13644-017-0283-8), a survey-based social science project. The investigation revealed distinct differences in students' attitudes towards their evangelical peers related to demographics, institution type, and academic major. Students who self-identified as having religious experience (or identity) were apt to be somewhat more sympathetic to Evangelical students, who might well feel ostracized or devalued in more secular academia. "How do we encourage appreciation of a worldview as polarizing as the one the evangelical narrative represents?" (p. 225) When does a challenging or provocative Evangelical viewpoint become perceived as divisive or hostile? This is an eye of a needle hard to pass through.

This challenge is particularly trying where no Evangelical students are present. I have found an analogy when trying to teach about the fervor of 19th-century Prohibitionists: most students will recognize the problems of alcohol abuse and alcoholism but advocates for Prohibition simply no longer exist. Students might well respond to the challenges (or provocations) of "hot-button" issues such as abortion rights, LGBTQ rights (and cake-bakers, florists, et al.), and immigrants with or without documents --but lack any awareness of Evangelical resonance. I have had one earnest student say, "I don't believe in evolution because I'm Catholic," and had to point out to her that she may have unawares absorbed an oft-held Evangelical viewpoint, but that her refusal cannot be based upon specifically Catholic bases, at least according to the Pope (then Benedict XVI). I must also reflect that my African American and Hispanic students often will reveal greater awareness of Evangelicalism than whites.

I return to the question: how does one teach about those who regard their faith as primary to those who are unaware of why any faith might be primary? (Granted the former category can include a great deal of wishful thinking, rationalization, and even fear and hypocrisy when things go wrong: read Believe Me.) Years ago I encountered a similar wall when trying to teach about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and why he chose to participate, however tangentially, in the July 1944 plot against Hitler. One Muhlenberg College student candidly observed, "We don't understand anything about sacrifice because we have never been asked to sacrifice anything." The gulf is more imagination than thinking, or the ability to think. (I am by no means assuming that Bonhoeffer was or would be Evangelical in contemporary North American usages of the word; Eric Metaxas' book has been justly condemned as poorly sourced and even more poorly written, and I decline to link to it.)

In response, I have to cast back to my own limited experience of something bordering Evangelical America both at Princeton Theological Seminary and at Hope College (in my next post.) Personal experience may be a last resort --I am at my last resort.