Calvin Seminary Class of 1960

Burning the Wooden Shoes

The Banner is the official periodical of the Christian Reformed Church and probably the most famous editorial written in living memory (Nov. 3 1980) was editor Andy Kuyvenhoven’s declaration “it’s time to burn the wooden shoes”. If you Google you won’t find the article itself (perhaps The Banner should post it on its website for study sake) but you will hear its echoes. Thirty years later the phrase is still generating conversation.

After Ed published my contribution to his “Denominational Derby” and the first comment mentioned ethnicity I knew I had hit the nerve, THE nerve in the depths of the Christian Reformed Church’s most insecure, angst ridden self.

The CRC Amid White Evangelicals

Ed’s twitter intro to the piece innocently expresses a common impression of the CRC. “Guys named Smith and Kowalski wanted to write about the Christian Reformed Church. I opted for @PaulVanderKlay http://wp.me/p36rtR-oR  ;)”

My impression is that most of the readers who frequent Ed’s blog are white, young, raised evangelicals who may well have attended the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. My guess is that to many of them CRC people and churches look white, evangelical but have uncommonly Dutch last names. They probably have friends who have gone to Calvin College and heard strange tales of hoards of CRC students who went to the same schools and maintain intricate webs of family relations.

The CRC has always had its own difficult relationship with evangelicalism. Part of the CRC’s reason for splitting from the RCA in the 19th century was fear of confessional assimilation in the broader American church. The rallying cry was “Reformed distinctiveness” in which the CRC would imagine itself as being its own shining light to the broader American church to convince it of the CRC’s superior theology and practice.

To most white evangelicals (and now post-evangelicals) this attitude looks strange. Sure the CRC has built some impressive institutions and mothered some fine scholars but it has not created a Niebuhr or a Graham who would transform the American church scene. Many of its most potent scholars and leaders in fact would leave CRC institutions behind them as they would create or use larger platforms, evangelical or mainline to impact the broader church. Westminster Seminary would not be CRC. The Reformed Journal would be admired but would never have the impact of Christianity Today.

CRC Racism

When the broader American church’s racism was exposed by the African American civil rights movement at the end of the great African American migration the CRC’s own stories of racism would be revealed. The CRC, like most white denomination had come by its sources of racism honestly.

1. Churches with their roots in former colonial powers (yes the Dutch too had their colonial empire) had their own racist notions of national superiority. Sometimes it was blatant and crass “If you’re not Dutch you’re not much” or sometimes it was imagined benevolent as “the white man’s burden”.

2. CRC thinkers while sometimes critical of biological Darwinism sometimes embraced racial social Darwinism. I remember the first time I read Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures imagining I smelled those ideas beneath his words. Today we might be in denial or imagine we are “shocked, simply shocked” that such a thing would be true but many who would be considered or consider themselves educated before the horrors of Nazi camps drank from these streams and assumed that colonial assertions of white supremacy found their validation in Darwin’s findings.

3. CRC immigrants who came to American in the 19th century found themselves in competition not only with other immigrants from Europe and around the world but also increasingly with African Americans coming to the North looking for work. This too would be a source of racism in the CRC. CRC transplant colonies in Grand Rapids, Chicago and Paterson would blame African Americans for the loss of their imagined idealized communities which would fuel racist hatred. CRC politics would tend to align more easily with American conservatism which would exacerbate the problem as African Americans would switch party allegiance from Republican to Democrat.

4. We can’t of course ignore the fact that racism is natural to all human beings. CRC members are people too and so of course subject to natural racism.

Why the CRC Can’t Find Racial Rest

When you talk about CRC dutchness you trigger this history. The CRC continues to try to come to terms with its past and what it means for the racial dynamics of its present community. Through the Synodical Committee on Race Relations the CRC institutionalized its desire to fight racism but it has not yet found a place of resolution. This will be a difficult task given the fact that its majority population has a thick, ethnic culture, but that culture itself is smaller than the broader cultures of the groups that are minorities within the CRC itself. This means that two opposing forces are continually fueled from outside the CRC and their conflict played out within it.

• Dutch CRC culture finds itself a tiny evaporating minority in the broader North American church scene, currently torn between mainline and evangelical impulses. This encourages the CRC to express a reactive ethnic identity that keeps its Dutch identity and history alive. The CRC is used by this ethnic, immigrant community to preserve its identity and history. There is something foundational about Dutchness to the CRC despite years of trying to “burn the wooden shoes”. This will greatly complicate its ability to resolve its racial issues with other communities that are minorities within the CRC and the broader cultures.
• Ethnic minorities in the CRC (Native American, African American, Hispanic, Asians) bring both similar and unique minority identity and history issues with them into the CRC. Within the CRC they are a minority compared to the Dutch, but their groupings beyond the CRC are larger, better led, and better defined than any “Dutch” identity in the broader white culture. Given their struggles with the broader white culture they must continue to define and assert their identities which get played out in the CRC as their group vs. “white”, even though the Dutch use the CRC as a way to also assert their uniqueness against broader white evangelical culture.

Given the history and these dynamics it should be no surprise the CRC can’t find simple resolution of racial struggles within itself. Once you identify the CRC as “Dutch”, which is difficult not to given its history, you immediately trigger these dynamics. The “Dutch” may feel “their CRC thing” used for identity preservation as being threatened while the non-Dutch naturally ask themselves “do we belong here really? Are we really equal brother and sisters in this CRC thing?”

So the Dutch use the CRC to preserve their history and identity against broader white American mainline and evangelical traditions. Minorities that have struggled against broader white culture in general come into the CRC and naturally look at the Dutch as “white”. They note that unlike themselves, the Dutch can conveniently in broader society (often unconsciously, think white privilege) be considered as “white” when it suits them and yet use the CRC to distinguish themselves from it, something that the other ethnic groups cannot do.

Next: Missional and Relational Vs. Confessional and Liturgical

So when Ed notes my last name as not being Polish (competing ethnic group in the GR area) or Smith (I’ll quote from a now famous CRC Smith in my next post) he triggers this dynamic.

The first tension that this elicits are racial, the second is confessional (the next posting). The CRC asserts itself as a confessional church, but I’ll assert that what really holds it together is relational. It was missional and relational strengths that has helped the CRC become more multi-ethnic, rather than confessional or liturgical (understood broadly in the Imagining the Kingdom way by the famous CRC Smith). As the CRC continues to become more multi-cultural it is its confessional and liturgical identity that are under pressure. More on that later (I hope).