This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
In his 1970 classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman explored three ways people can respond to institutional failure: by standing by the institution anyway, by speaking up to agitate for change within the institution, or by leaving the institution in protest. The European wars of religion, and persistent attempts by the victors in those conflicts to hem in the losers, produced manifold examples of all three.
In 1834, a Calvinist minister in the Netherlands named Hendrik de Cock—fed up with theological liberalization within the official Dutch Reformed Church and especially with the church hierarchy's decision to prohibit him from speaking against what he saw as errors being preached by his fellow clergymen—led some 120 congregations in breaking away to form the rival Reformed Churches in the Netherlands.
