Why were the Boers so religious?

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.
 
I feel like the Boers' Calvinist promised land narrative is just like the U.S.'s roots. South Africa really wasn't a bad idea to create the anti-America of Draka, culture-wise. Geography-wise is a whole different story.

But the Draka are like a mishmash of reactionary exiles, they totally swamped the local Boers. So it wasn't even capitalizing the intense beliefs of the Boers. Stirling fail.

I think one difference is the general level of education in the society. Even on the frontier American society always had at least some aspiration to education cf the million-and-one tiny schools and colleges that got established. The Boers had no similar framework of humanist education. All they had was open space, a fear of the native population, and the Bible, which ia how you get the Israelites in Canaan narrative.
 
That's a very interesting and important distinction to make. Again, I'm wondering what other similar zealous settler groups are there to the Puritans and the Boers. Doesn't seem to be many Catholic ones, because Catholic colonization entails bishops and that links a scholastic tradition to Rome, and some degree of cosmopolitanism, I suppose.

Do the Amish/Mennonites/Radical Protestants count?

I suppose they do, though they seem far less expansionistic or evangelical than the other groups I've mentioned.
 
I think one difference is the general level of education in the society. Even on the frontier American society always had at least some aspiration to education cf the million-and-one tiny schools and colleges that got established. The Boers had no similar framework of humanist education. All they had was open space, a fear of the native population, and the Bible, which ia how you get the Israelites in Canaan narrative.

The boer society was a big fan of education, what they lacked was access to acceptable institutions of higher education (high school or above). The dutch east indies company saw capetown as a refueling center and it was supposed to be nothing more, and the boers were actually rebels for moving away from the accepted settlement area. Thus they were cut off from acceptable places for higher education because the company cut them off. When the British came in, the stubborn dutch nature meant that any british institutions of higher learning were unacceptable. The nearest acceptable ones were at the end of a months long trip in the netherlands and at the point the british came in the division between boer society and its mother culture in the netherlands was about a third of the way along (the conflict with the british completed the division). Afrikaaner society has as high a level of education as any society in the modern world, but they arent open to new ideas is the problem.
 
Thanks for responding. This kid was the literal opposite of the positive stereotypes American people have of Dutch people.

See I'm not certain what stereotypes americans have about Dutch people but i do know from hard experience that if you raise a kid in a conservative household with the screws on all the time you're gonna get one of two reactions. Either the kid will be a clone of the parents and not have an original idea in his head, or he'll react the way that kid did and totally rebel lol. I've seen it happen a lot in my own community. Technically speaking I'm one of those rebels though im not a bully lol nor do i do drugs. I simply can't abide by the unthinking conservative culture I was a part of growing up.
 
Now I'm wondering if the Scots-Irish were analogous to the groups I'm talking about, but I don't think they were particularly zealous. Then again, the Puritans were probably more zealous than the Boers so the comparison between Scots-Irish and Afrikaner might not be too far off.

I wonder what a settler state of Catholic Irish would have been culturally like.
 
Now I'm wondering if the Scots-Irish were analogous to the groups I'm talking about, but I don't think they were particularly zealous. Then again, the Puritans were probably more zealous than the Boers so the comparison between Scots-Irish and Afrikaner might not be too far off.

I wonder what a settler state of Catholic Irish would have been culturally like.

I don't think the Scots-Irish really are analogous to the Trekboers. They presided over a settler society which idealised a gentleman-farmer aristocracy. The Puritans were probably way more zealous than the Boers but there you have the idea of a society based around commerce and godly prosperity, which entails a strong respect for education , which inevitably- given the time period- means the influence of humanist values over time.

The Boers seem to have been a perfect storm of rugged individualism, puritanical religion, poverty, and a persecution complex.
 
No our sister churches are in Colorado and Washington state. There are a lot of free reformed churches scattered everywhere and that denomination is even worse then the one I grew up in.

Out of curiosity, how conservative were the Dutch Reformed people who settled in Southern California, especially as dairy farmers around cities such as Artesia and Torrance? I'm asking because my (ethnically Korean) church is affiliated with the CRC and meets at a building owned by a historically Dutch congregation and I'm also quite interested in local Southern California history.
 
Out of curiosity, how conservative were the Dutch Reformed people who settled in Southern California, especially as dairy farmers around cities such as Artesia and Torrance? I'm asking because my (ethnically Korean) church is affiliated with the CRC and meets at a building owned by a historically Dutch congregation and I'm also quite interested in local Southern California history.

Isn't California outside the main cities actually really conservative?
 
Out of curiosity, how conservative were the Dutch Reformed people who settled in Southern California, especially as dairy farmers around cities such as Artesia and Torrance? I'm asking because my (ethnically Korean) church is affiliated with the CRC and meets at a building owned by a historically Dutch congregation and I'm also quite interested in local Southern California history.

I dont know about those who settled in california, but i do know that the church i grew up in (canadian reformed, which is more conservative then the more liberal and larger Christian Reformed church, which has churches all over north america but which has its main core or home area in michigan) was affiliated with or has what we call sister church relationships (we acknowledged that their doctrine and ours was the same) with churches in Korea, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and with churches in the States. Basically any dutch farmer who settles anywhere can generally be considered to be very conservative. Its the country dutch versus city dutch dichotomy. Even those dutch who go to the Christian Reformed churches if they are farmers are generally a lot more conservative then the core Christian Reformed church. Education is extremely important to all parts of dutch society but only certain ideas are acceptable and the persecution complex exists to a degree in all elements of our society.
 
Just FYI a good (though not primary source, but its extremely well researched to the point where there are people in my community who are related to people mentioned in the book, one reason why i throw it out as a source) source on this topic is the Covenant by James A. Michener. It shows how the Boers started as a nascent people and shows from a first person perspective the drift that created the boer culture as a distinct cousin culture to the Dutch culture.
 
Might as well ask this here: so were Anglo-South Africans onboard with the apartheid thing as much as the Afrikaners were?
I think they had less f an emotional attachment to it, and jumped ship on it earlier (As well as comprising most of the liberals movements, if I'm not mistaken), but they still benefited from it to a degree, and were still afraid of racial war.
 
I feel like the Boers' Calvinist promised land narrative is just like the U.S.'s roots. South Africa really wasn't a bad idea to create the anti-America of Draka, culture-wise. Geography-wise is a whole different story.

But the Draka are like a mishmash of reactionary exiles, they totally swamped the local Boers. So it wasn't even capitalizing the intense beliefs of the Boers. Stirling fail.

Who are the Draka?
 
Who are the Draka?

S.M. Stirling wanted to come up with a society that was the total opposite of American enlightenment democratic ideals so he came up with a scenario where confederate exiles emigrate to the Cape and somehow turn it into a totalitarian superpower with a caste system that somehow conquers the rest of the world.
 
S.M. Stirling wanted to come up with a society that was the total opposite of American enlightenment democratic ideals so he came up with a scenario where confederate exiles emigrate to the Cape and somehow turn it into a totalitarian superpower with a caste system that somehow conquers the rest of the world.
Loyalist exiles, actually.
 
I'm a descendant of the Free Church settlers in Otago, who were rather Presbyterian but they don't seem to have had either quite the extremism or the stickability of the DRC. Rural Otago now not being known for being very religious at all.
 
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