Public Orders into Moral Communities: Eighteenth-Century Fast and Thanksgiving Day Sermons in the Dutch Republic and New England

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, both in the Dutch Republic and in the colonies of New England, collective repentance and social reconciliation with God were institutionalized in great common rituals. In both polities, Fast and Thanksgiving Days were proclaimed by civil authority, and these occasions brought people together into churches to hear ministers interpret their common situation. These rituals were the main way in which the New England colonies and the Dutch Republic expressed their unity as political communities. It was this aspect of these sermons that made them of interest to nineteenth-century American and Dutch historians. In the nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands, N. C. Kist, the first holder of the newly instituted chair of Church History at Leiden University, finished his career with his two-volume Neêrlands Bededagen en Biddagsbrieven, offering both an interpretation and an antiquarian overview of all the Fast Days proclaimed in the Netherlands. In the United States, William de Loss Love published his exquisite The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England in 1895, similarly offering both an antiquarian list of all Fast and Thanksgiving Days and an analysis. Kist was deeply involved with the nation-building project of the early nineteenth-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. De Loss Love, the first chaplain of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, was as inspired by modern nationalism as Kist was. Both scholars interpreted the Fast-day ritual as an indication of the high moral purpose and commitment to the nation of their ancestors.

Praying for (the) Community: Disasters, Ritual and Solidarity in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

“…Historian Peter van Rooden acknowledges the cohesion effect of Dutch prayer days. 20 He describes how a discourse of religious nationalism becomes increasingly prominent in prayer day letters and sermons during the eighteenth century. Van Rooden traces the ideology and moral message communicated by the Dutch governments and religious authorities.…”