"The Sioux Center Affair" i

Old First CRC, Sioux Center

"How you going to keep them down on the farm,

Now that they've seen Paree?" 

It was a popular song just after the "war to end all wars," written and recorded in 1919, when the country was plump with vets home from France. Whether or not Sioux Center, Iowa, welcomed its fair share of fighting men, I don't know. There had to be some, but the numbers likely weren't high because at the turn of the century the town, just a few decades old, saw itself as just another Dutch village with some significant water between them and Friesland or Zeeland. To some, to many, to be "American" was anathema.

The idea of that 1920's pop ballad was pervasive, even if whole bunches of Sioux Center young men didn't hanker for one more Paris romp before coming home. They'd seen the world "over there," and what they recognized when they returned to Sioux Center was that home just didn't cover the subject anymore. What's more, in the Twenties, the town fathers (and they were) had some trouble facing the fact that their children, not just their veterans, were becoming English speakers and much more, well, "American." 

In its short history, no change in culture was more significant to the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) as the cleavage wrought by World War I: some believed with all their heart that they were Americans now; others were just as heart-felt despising it. A few Dutch-American vets reported being both shocked and embarrassed by their ability to follow what Germans were saying just a trench away, while they had no clue deciphering their doughboy buddies from New Jersey or Kentucky. 

To understand what some called at the time "the Sioux Center affair," the first item of business is to imagine how immensely difficult it was (and still is) for a people--Dutch or Danish or Luxemborgian, Mexican or Sudanese, to forsake the mother tongue. A friend of mine, whose parents immigrated, told me that his mother told him, late in life, that coming to Canada meant losing her sense of humor, most jokes built on double meanings. "I met a girl in a revolving door, and I've been going around with her ever since" is not funny at all if you don't know the language. 

Among northwest Iowa Dutch, no fear weighed quite so heavily than their antipathy toward of something they wouldn't have called--but we can--"Americanization." But they were here, in Sioux County, Iowa, and had been since 1870. To cope with the changes created by WWI required vigilance and fortification because they reckoned the force exerted by the New Country to be inestimably scary.  

"The Sioux Center Affair" was a breach in familial and confessional character that created two churches where there had been only one, a conflict among good Christian people that, a full decade later, ended anger and dissolution.

The story is not endearing. A church split bled for generations of people who simply refused to talk about a breakdown that lasted for an entire decade. 

Dr. Louis Van Dyke, a Professor of History at Dordt College is, penned the only story about "the Sioux Center Affair." My telling is totally indebted to his unpublished paper, available only in the congregational archives for First Sioux Center CRC. 

I remembered the paper only because I was a colleague during the time he wrote it, in the early nineties. I remember him saying that then, a half century later, those who remembered the fight didn't care to talk about it.

Van Dyke stated his mission this way: "The role of history. . .is not to dredge up old quarrels or to gossip about people who are long gone but to learn from the past in order not to repeat its errors." 

As a member of First CRC, Sioux Center, he was writing a history in a time of turmoil. Some area pastors, as early as 1980, had determined a distinctive new Reformed seminary had to be created because theological drifting within the CRC had become, to them, as painful as it was obvious. The insistence on a new seminary right there in Sioux County begat significant controversy. 

There's nothing new about church fights. Even New Testament churches were victimized by "schisms rent asunder" and "heresies distressed." In the 1920s as in the 1990s and even today, lay members had to face conflicting horrors--would it be schisms or heresies? 

"The question for us," Professor Van Dyke says in a short introduction to his study, "is not whether certain things had to happen, but whether they have to happen again." Given the track record of church fights here as elsewhere, the story Van Dyke documents is always worth remembering.