‘Staphorst Factor’--a Dutch Village Clings to Its Roots

Staphorst is a place Dutch people love to hate. It reminds them too much of their roots.

The modern Netherlands may be famed for its social welfare system and liberal attitude toward sex and drugs, but travel 80 miles northeast of Amsterdam and it’s another world.

Here people reject insurance and unemployment benefits as interference with divine fate. They shun television as ungodly.

This is Staphorst, a staunchly Protestant farming village of 14,000 inhabitants. It is also a symbol of the Netherlands’ Bible-thumping hinterlands.

Women can still be seen in traditional peasant costumes--long skirts and flower-patterned blouses and caps--walking en masse with their menfolk to one of the seven village churches on Sundays.

“Staphorst has an image which gives the rest of the Netherlands something to react against,” said village spokesman Jan Willem Stolk.

“The Dutch are very tolerant about homosexuality, euthanasia and abortion, but not about Staphorst.”

The Bible Belt comprises some 300,000 people who live in Dutch Reformed communities scattered from Urk in the north to Oostburg, about 120 miles to the southwest.

They live by the Heidelberg Catechism, a 1562 devotional guide that forged a middle ground between Lutheranism and Calvinism--accepting the idea of predestination but stressing that the faithful must suffer in order to be saved.

They are known as the “Staphorst factor” in Dutch politics, voters who support a collection of conservative religious parties that usually win about 5% of the seats in Parliament.

“A lot of Dutch rural areas were like Staphorst years ago. . . . Perhaps here traditions lasted longer because it was a fairly isolated community,” Stolk said.

The most traditional residents reject government welfare, paying for community services themselves. If someone’s home burns down, neighbors build a new one. If someone dies, relatives make the coffin.

Some residents also disapprove of medicine, including inoculations, in the belief that illness is God’s punishment and health is a reward.

During a polio epidemic in 1971, some opposed vaccination and 13 residents were handicapped by the disease.

But Staphorst, as well as other Bible Belt villages, is now a town in transition.

A discotheque nestles between picturesque farmhouses, and more and more young people are seeking work in urban industries because farmland is getting too scarce.

A nursing home opened two years ago, testament to a diminishing practice of taking care of elders at home.

Traditional dress is on the wane. Many Staphorsters discard their costumes in summer to avoid attracting tourists.

“In fact, we are a village like any other,” said Stolk.

Only about 40% of residents are still farmers, just 60% come from longstanding village families and less than a third of the population is ultrareligious.

But tradition still sets the tone.

“You’re not a Staphorster unless your parents and grandparents were born here,” said 19-year-old Carlo Spijk, who was born and raised in the village but is still considered an “import” by some traditionalist villagers.

His family moved 10 years ago to a farmhouse along the 7-mile strip where many of the village’s most religious residents live.

“I never had anything to do with the other kids in the neighborhood,” he said, noting that traditional Staphorsters stick very much to themselves.

His mother would not dream of sunbathing in the garden, or wearing slacks instead of a skirt. Such immodesty would be highly offensive.

One 54-year-old Staphorster, wearing traditional dark skirt and flowered cap as she prepared dinner for her family, noted that teen-age girls now go to cafes. She said she fears that family life is deteriorating.

The woman, who asked not to be identified by name, bemoaned the ever-increasing practice, even among some of the ultra religious, of watching television or listening to the radio.

She has neither.

“Change is coming. People go to church more out of habit than religious feeling. Family life is going away, relatives speak with each other less often and people help their neighbors less than they used to,” she said.

“I think it’s a pity.”