My family emigrated to America like many other Dutch families after the end of WWII. We came in 1951 when I was five. We first lived with a family in Chicago, then moved to the Grand Haven area when my father found a job at a fishery. He had had his own fish business in the Netherlands. Our family attended the Christian Reformed Church in Spring Lake. I remember the little white church before they built the new one on the curve on Lake Avenue.  

I was surprised at times to overhear conversations expressing a negative view of the conservative nature of this area and its people from those who didn’t share our faith.  I never understood the criticism, it was our faith, and nobody was forcing anyone to share our beliefs. We worked hard, we took care of our stuff, and we respected other people’s stuff. People took care of themselves and didn’t depend on others; we went to church twice on Sunday and put money in the offering plate. As kids we did our schoolwork, obeyed our teacher and didn’t cause trouble on the bus. Our father only cussed when he was really mad. We had alcohol in the house, but nobody got drunk.

This was the way we lived, and I think our lifestyle was typical of the friends that we had.

The first Presidential election we saw, Dwight Eisenhower, was the Republican candidate in 1951. Eisenhower was a total hero to my family as the Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theatre of Operations. He was the Commander of Operation Overlord, the D-Day Invasion of Normandy that would set Europe free of Nazi Occupation. Eisenhower was the face of liberation. After my parents became citizens, they always voted Republican and held Republican principles.  

Thinking about the conservative nature of West Michigan and the political battles taking place today, and knowing that there are reasons for everything, I wanted to look further into how this all came about.  

The Dutch Influence

I shared my thoughts with my brother. He told me that our father was a member of the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands. I didn’t remember his party affiliation, but I did remember him talking about Abraham Kuyper. My father was born in Scheveningen in 1901. Scheveningen—right next door to DeHague, the center of the Dutch government—is a harbor and beach town on the North Sea with a large fishing fleet.

In his growing up years, my father would have been very familiar with Kuyper’s influence in the Netherlands.

I learned that Abraham Kuyper, who lived from 1837-1920, started the Anti-Revolutionary Party. It was organized to oppose the secular nature of the French Revolution. Kuyper was first a theologian, a follower of John Calvin. He organized the Reformed Church of the Netherlands which was established to oppose the state controlled Dutch Reformed Church which was becoming too liberal for many. Kuyper, theologian, newspaper editor, and politician served as Prime Minister for four years, forming a coalition with the Catholic Church.  

At the center of Kuyper’s belief was that God was effective in every area of one’s daily life, and all authority of governments on earth originates from the sovereignty of God alone. This philosophy put him at odds with government policies which wanted to influence the church. This all sounds very much like the idea that our rights do not come from the government, they come from God.

A new life in America

In the words of one of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  As it says in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.” These philosophies of government on different continents have much in common and it’s evident that the ideas of Kuyper and the Founders of America were very much in sync.    

Fellow Dutchman Albertus Van Raalte (1811-1876), a strong Calvinist, was the leader of the Dutch immigration movement to this area in 1847. He led a growing group of Dutchmen who fled the harassment from the Dutch government as they distanced themselves from the increasingly liberal state controlled Dutch Reformed Church. Van Raalte established the City of Holland, started schools and churches and Hope College. He was a strong abolitionist and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. As Abraham Kuypers influence grew in the Netherlands more and more Dutch came to America for freedom and opportunity and joined their fellow countrymen in what would be the West Michigan area.  

For the Dutch living in a crowded country with little free land, the idea of coming to America for living space was very inviting. There was an independent spirit that ran through the people who came from the Netherlands. They aren’t called stubborn Dutchmen for no reason. They came for religious freedom; they also came to work. They came to farm and raise livestock. They came to be independent businessmen. These qualities are very strong in Dutch culture. These settlers held the word of God as the lodestar of their belief system.  

My father brought us to America a hundred years later. He left a crowded nation recovering from war, at the end of five years of Nazi occupation. In a time of national rebuilding the crown didn’t mind that people wanted to leave to start life over somewhere else. I know my father much appreciated the space and the freedom of having his own land and building his own home here in America. I’m thankful that he did. I see now how much courage it took to move to a different continent in your fifties and start life over again.

History’s influence on our quality of life

This look into the history of some of my fellow countrymen answered some questions for me. I see the reverence for the Sabbath, for the word of God. The knowledge that God sees what you do, hears what you say, and knows your thoughts. You self-police because you are not your own, you are bought with a price, the blood of Jesus and you live to honor that. God promises to be your shield and your protector, and He never fails. I am not sure why the word conservative has been used to identify this lifestyle. Rather it is a strong belief system, a strong adherence to the word of God in the belief that God is a part of every area of one’s life. My family moved from a beach town on the North Sea to a beach town on the shores of Lake Michigan, and we assimilated with the folks who came here before us who had the same values and culture based on the word of God and this basic belief system has been passed down now through several generations.  

Many people are moving here now for the quality of life, but the quality of life is not an accident. It is this way because of the values of a wide variety of people who established these communities and maintained the value system. It’s a good system but is being challenged on every side. We believe it still works and is worth keeping.    

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