Catechisms, Bibles, and other printed works were critical for the successful plantation and growth of Dutch religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. This essay examines the provision, regulation, and various controversies surrounding religious books and pamphlets in that period. Under the joint supervision of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed churches of the Netherlands, colonial clergy were supposed to teach everyone from Company soldiers and officers to European settlers, from Africans and African slaves to Native Americans. And the clergy certainly had some missionary achievements, especially where the Company’s power was greatest. However, colonial clergy and churches also faced tremendous difficulties and fell short of their original plans and goals. Studying the different tools they had at their disposal—studying the creation (and destruction) of their printed materials—helps us see the church’s own culpability in these difficulties and failures. Early seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism was restrictive enough and the churches of the Netherlands worried enough about deviance and heterodoxy that they unintentionally undermined their own mission and reduced the Dutch footprint overseas.

This study focuses on disputes among Dutch Calvinists (Reformed Protestants) in Asia and in Europe over how to administer the sacraments of baptism and communion to people with little or no exposure to Protestant Christianity. Historians have tended to view these conflicts as evidence of Calvinist rigidity and the incompatibility between Protestantism and non-European societies. When examined within global patterns of Christianization, however, it becomes clear that Calvinists had much in common with Roman Catholic missionaries in trying to convert people across cultural borders. All missionaries had to negotiate the inherent tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy in early modern missionary programmes. Many Calvinists on the missionary frontier, like their Catholic counterparts, opted for syncretistic strategies over objections from authorities in their religious heartland.