"The Sioux Center Affair" (end)

It's almost impossible to follow the long succession of charges and counter-charges that banged along between synods and classes, between what once was the Teachers Meeting and the Consistory, and what became Sioux Center I and Sioux Center II. It's tedious and tiring, maybe especially so when the history abides faithfully to a theory that the historian's job, first and foremost, is to present the facts only.

Let me attempt to end this without venturing further into the weeds of a story probably best tucked away another century in some rusty file drawer. Once money became part of the Sioux Center Affair, it just about took over the tale. It wouldn't have, of course, if so much water hadn't gone over the dam already, but it did because the financial burden on whoever was going to pay whom what lump sum was substantial. No ruling elders wanted to soak their congregations, and Synod apparently felt that once the problem was all about cold, hard cash, the courts not the church had most effective jurisdiction.

So the remainder of the story of the establishment of two Christian Reformed churches in a tiny little Dutch hamlet in the far northwest corner of Iowa is an almost endless series of charges and counter-charges, of applications for loans and ample rejections thereof, of courts and Synods and Classes, of two bodies of believers stubbornly unwilling to pay the price of their own warfare in filthy lucre. 

Eventually, the loan [to secure funds for a new church] was funded locally, and the building now occupied by Covenant Christian Reformed Church, was begun in 1929 and completed at an approximate cost of $23,000. With the dedication in February, 1930, in people's minds if not in their hearts, the Sioux Center affair finally came to a close after a full decade of contention and dissension.

The best we can say is--thank the Lord!--it ended. Today, on Sunday, my wife and I worship in that church. 

Van Dyke's telling is heartless, but I don't mean it in a traditional sense. It's not heartless in its pursuit of the truth, but in its avoidance of anything subjective, anything that might be categorized as conjecture on his part, his determination not to introduce the central characters. 

At the end of his long and wonderful tale, Professor Van Dyke lists a number of "what ifs." One of them involves two preachers whose names he does mention at times, although not extensively nor exhaustively. Still the single question suggests that would we be listening to someone who remembered the whole sordid affair instead of a professor of history writing three-quarters of a century later, the tale might well have been told significantly different. "What if De Leeuw had played the role of pastor instead of partisan?" Van Dyke asks. "What if Ypma had not consistently pursued a hard line during negotiations?"

What those questions intimate is the possibility that either or both of those pastors play an outsized role in the decades-long feud. At least in the mind of the historian, the questions are--and were, back then in the 1920s--worth asking. Rather than pursue them however, Van Dyke's do-no-harm methodology keeps him from speculating.

And I certainly don't want to blame some individual or individuals for the decade-long debacle that Christian Reformed people not only suffered but, in fact, perpetuated. What I'm saying is that that level of anger and resentment, all that (do-I-dare-say?) hatred, all that animosity had to originate in human hearts and souls, in ordinary human beings, all of whom were most probably more sure of their own righteousness than they might have been. There's more to the story, I'm sure, something Van Dyke knew as he was assembling the narrative because what I remember him telling me is that the silence concerning the subject was profound and would not be dismissed. 

Over the weekend, one of the lawyers for Donald Trump rode the circuit of talk shows pressing the claim that whatever Donald Trump says, on-air or on-line, stands firmly under the first amendment. The lawyer's attempt to focus the judgments to come as "freedom of speech" questions may be right, but those claims originate in the personality of a man who, having just been admonished in a court of law not to speak out the way he always does, did so anyway. "If you come after me," he wrote, "I'll come after you." To say that the indictments leveled by the Department of Justice are in fact about the First Amendment is but half-truth when they do not take to mind the person who spoke those words. 

When I characterize Van Dyke's history as being "heartless," I don't mean to say that he shows no empathy or compassion, that somehow he's unrelenting in his criticism of what went on in a church in Sioux Center Iowa, a church, for years, split like a ripe melon. What I mean is the opposite really--by training as well as by his position in the congregation itself that was right then celebrating its history, his reluctance to talk about the actors--any of them really--as admirable as it was in 1993 and even today, yields a narrative that seems almost lifeless, displaying so little humanity.

And yet, it's worth my time and yours, maybe as much now as ever in the face of another season of "contention and dissension." Writing in the late 80s and early 90s, thirty years ago, about events that transpired a hundred years ago, Van Dyke says in his summary conclusion, "The underlying cause of the matter was a fundamental disagreement as to how the congregation was to maintain its orthodoxy in time of cultural change."

Some things haven't changed.