With the exception of Frankenthal, then, worship required some degree of compromise for Dutch Reformed migrants living up and down the Rhine watershed in the second half of the sixteenth century. As this chapter has shown, members of these congregations were more willing to compromise when it came to rites of passage than to the central rite of community of their faith: the Lord’s Supper. By way of conclusion, however, it is useful to note that their willingness to compromise depended not only on which ritual they intended to perform but also which confessional boundary they were being asked to cross. They were extremely careful not to cross lines that required mingling with Anabaptists. Of course, Anabaptists were nearly universally reviled across Europe after the Münsterite Rebellion of 1535 showed that group—in the eyes of most sixteenth-century observers—to be politically rebellious, socially deviant, and even sexually perverse.
1 Haude, In the Shadow of “Savage Wolves”; Waite, “From Apocalyptic Crusaders to Anabaptist Terrorists.” Given that many Reformed Protestants had supported revolts against governments in France and the Netherlands in the 1560s, they had an especially strong reason to want to avoid this stigma. That problem became more difficult because Anabaptist and Reformed theological challenges to late medieval understandings that the sacred could take material form in this world were so similar, a point that encouraged Reformed polemicists to sharpen their polemic against Anabaptists.
2 Van Veen, “Reformed Polemic”; Van Veen, “Calvin and the Anabaptists,” 364–72. And because members of these congregations periodically expressed Anabaptist ideas, the threat that others would see them as sympathetic to Anabaptism was felt strongly by pastors and elders attuned to the dangers.
3 Spohnholz, “Overlevend non-conformisme, “ 89–109; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 93–95; Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 89–90; Pettegree, “Struggle for an Orthodox Church,” 45–59.Dutch Reformed migrants were also extremely reluctant to compromise with Catholics, though their incentive here was spiritual: they did not want to promote what they saw as the “idolatry” and “superstition” of the sensorially rich and materialist characteristics of Catholic worship. However, in situations where Catholic political and ecclesiastical control threatened their survival, they sometimes found themselves accepting compromise. Reformed migrants had a harder time forgiving the voluntary attendance of Catholic worship than when their fellow believers reluctantly baptized, married, or attended funerals to avoid dangers that might otherwise arise.
Meanwhile, although previous scholarship has stressed that these migrations engendered remarkable conflict between Reformed migrants and Lutheran hosts,
4 Works that emphasize conflicts include, Scholz, Strange Brethren; Pettegree, “London Exile Community”; Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten. when it came to rites of passage at least, the migrants proved remarkably willing to compromise. Migrants who asked to wed and baptize their infants in Lutheran churches and bury their dead in Lutheran cemeteries seem to have done so without sparking serious conflict. Those other scholars are not wrong to have highlighted the conflicts—they were heated and real. But our broader comparative approach shows that they were not totalizing. Of course, as Petrus Dathenus pointed out, with regard to baptizing in Frankfurt in 1562, the theological disagreements on these points were less stark than those shaping Reformed objections to Anabaptists and Catholics. And yet, Dathenus’s colleague Gaspar van der Heyden disagreed with him. At least for baptism, Lutheran-Reformed polemics could be heated.
5 Nischan, “Exorcism Controversy.” But the point is that they did not always need to be. There were moments when both sides could turn down the temperature to accommodate a cautious and reluctant coexistence.
The celebration of the Lord’s Supper required compromise too; but never one that involved crossing confessional boundaries. Instead, when faced with restrictions on the celebration of Holy Communion, Dutch Reformed migrants worshipped in members’ homes, in houses purchased for the purpose, in barns, or in fields outside of city walls, or they just put off the sacred sacrament until conditions allowed it. The unusual compromise regarding the celebration of the Lord’s Supper at Wesel only proves the point. Reformed migrants there were willing to satisfy the most difficult requirement for their stay—worship in the city’s multiconfessional communion services—only because they retained control over ecclesiastical discipline and thus who belonged to the invisible community of saints that made up Christ’s true church. Like the last two chapters, this chapter has demonstrated just how valuable it has been to compare the experiences of different migrant communities through a variety of lenses. The next chapter, though, asks what kinds of relationships they developed with coreligionists back home in the “fatherland” and across the wider international Reformed diaspora.