by CHARLES H. PARKER
In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures
At the turn of the 1600s, a handful of Protestant pastors and chaplains in Amsterdam began accompanying ships of the United East India Company (VOC) to small Dutch commercial settlements in Southeast Asia. These Calvinist (also Reformed Protestant) ministers went to faraway lands to keep company employees from falling prey to false religions and to convert ‘heathens’ and ‘Moors’ (Muslims) to Protestant Christianity. Thus, Calvinism went global in the 17th century and, by the time the VOC closed its doors in December 1799, the Dutch Reformed Church had established dozens of churches, planted hundreds of schools, and converted thousands of Indigenous peoples around the world.
Calvinism achieved these distinctions against all odds. Its operations got underway a century after Catholic missions; the number of its ministers paled in comparison with the legions sent out by the Roman Church; and Calvinists held to the doctrine of predestination, which taught that God had already decided everyone’s eternal fate before he created the world. In light of these sizeable disadvantages, how did Dutch Calvinists pull this off? And, what did they learn from their experiences? The short answers are, first, that they turned out to excel at organising schools and translating languages, and, second, that global perspectives gave them new ways of viewing religion and culture in Europe.
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