Flocculencio
Donor
We should also note that the Dutch community in western Michigan is also quite religious and the Reformed church there is very conservative, although not as strongly now as 2 generations ago. The Reformed church was historically very Calvinistic and I would suspect that most of the Dutch colonists came from the conservative rural areas of the Netherlands, not from the historically cosmopolitan and tolerant commercial cities such as Amsterdam. Also note that the Dutch colonists in South Africa date from the 17th and 18th centuries and the Michigan immigrants from the 19h century, both were products of a still deeply religious tradition and not influenced by the secular Netherlands of today.
There was a lot of Huguenot settlement too. After being expelled from France and going as refugees to the Netherlands, large numbers of them emigrated to South Africa. That added a lot to the persecution complex.