Flushing Remonstrance

The Flushing Remonstrance was a 1657 petition to Director-General of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant, in which some thirty residents of the small settlement at Flushing requested an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. It is considered a precursor to the United States Constitution's provision on freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights. Its 350th anniversary was celebrated in 2007 in ceremonies throughout Queens, New York.

According to Kenneth T. Jackson, the Flushing Remonstrance was remarkable for four reasons:

The community then known as Vlissengen, also then referred to as "Vlissing" or "Vlishing", now Flushing, in Queens, New York, had been part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. It was originally settled by English people operating under a patent, issued by Governor Willem Kieft in 1645, granting them the same state of religious freedom existing in Holland, then the most tolerant of European countries.

Stuyvesant, however, with his 1656 ordinance against illegal religious meetings, had formally banned the practice of all religions outside of the Dutch Reformed Church, the established church of the Netherlands, in the colony. His often-derided decision flew against the approximate hundred-year evolution of religious tolerance in the Netherlands. During this time the country was revolting against Spanish rule, rebelling against an imposed Inquisition, attempting to form a national identity, and trying to unify Calvinist and Catholic provinces. The Dutch toleration debates were lengthy, bumpy, heated, and full of political intrigue and even assassination. The writer Thomas Broderick states, "I believe the true Dutch legacy is not one of toleration but of discussion. New Amsterdam and the Republic show us that a robust, open public discourse is the surest way to eventual social improvement. Toleration and acceptance are political and moral imperatives, and the Flushing remonstrance and great Dutch toleration debates in Europe and North America teach us that social change takes time, open dialogue, disagreement, and failure before progress is to be made."

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