The Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century is renowned for funneling riches to the Netherlands, its chartered companies, and merchant families. One consequence of this economic boom time—memorably limned for the ages by the painter Frans Hals—is that the reputation of the early Dutch is often confined to commerce, profits, and shrewd trading practices. D. L. Noorlander begs to differ. His book, Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, challenges this conventional view by sacralizing the motives and expansionist urges of the state-chartered West India Company as it sought colonies and converts from the 1620s onward throughout the Atlantic region.

While Noorlander acknowledges that the West India Company was primarily a business, he asserts that it carried important state responsibilities, including economic, political, and religious aspirations. A major element of its religious mission was a fierce anti-Catholicism. The Dutch provinces, finally in process of ousting Catholic Spain from its eighty-year rule of the Netherlands, established the Dutch Reformed Church as their official religion. Directors of the company, many of whom came from the more pietistic southern Netherlands, were often devout members of that faith. Thus did a newly energized Reformed Protestantism accompany Dutch expansion into Brazil, West Africa, such Caribbean islands as Curaçao, Bonaire, and St. Eustatius, and to New Netherland on the North American mainland.

Noorlander's method is comparative, as befits the Atlantic world turn of early American history. He contrasts Dutch imperialism with that of its European rivals, while also exploring the similarities and differences between Dutch colonies within the Americas. This approach casts light on the dynamics of the West India Company's successes—or more often its failures—as an instrument of Atlantic-wide imperial power.

The first third of the book, set primarily in the Netherlands and wider Europe, describes the rise of Dutch Calvinism in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, as the Low Countries shook off the repressive grip of Spain and Catholicism. Dutch entry into its Golden Age was propelled by overseas expansion in ships that resounded with sermons, daily prayers, and hymns led by Reformed domines, or more often by lay ziekentroosters (comforters of the sick) given the chronic shortage of ordained clergy. Thus did the company sail forth as warriors for both Protestantism and profits.

After probing the west coast of South America, the company turned to Brazil, ruled for over one hundred years by Catholic Portugal. Starting around 1624 the Dutch gained territory stretching from Salvador some nine hundred miles north along the coast, with Recife as its capital. By the mid-1630s the colony was populated by almost thirty thousand Europeans, multiple indigenous tribes, and a growing number of African slaves, with a broad diversity of cultural and religious traditions. The Dutch Reformed Church, with strong support from the West India Company, strove mightily to extend its doctrine into Brazil, aided at its peak by twenty-one Reformed clergy, numerous ziekentroosters, and schoolmaster-catechists. Yet it remained a minority church given Brazil's initial and continuing Catholic dominance. That the Portuguese regained the colony in 1654 leads Noorlander to characterize the Dutch era as an occupation rather than a conquest.

In New Netherland he sees a firmer foundation for the church than was possible in Brazil, or certainly in Africa where Dutch forts were mainly trading stations populated by single men rather than resident families. Even in Caribbean colonies like Curaçao the Reformed mission was in constant tension with the Catholic majority. New Netherland however, located between the Chesapeake and New England with only a few scattered English hamlets by the mid-1620s, had no previously established religion, opening a way for the Dutch Reformed Church. Noorlander marks 1638 as a watershed date for the struggling colony, when the West India Company granted to its settlers free land and entry to the fur and sugar trades previously monopolized by the company. This allowed the company to impose a tithe on residents for clergy and schoolmasters, to build a large stone church in New Amsterdam, and to found a number of congregations throughout the territory.

Peter Stuyvesant, appointed governor general of New Netherland in 1647, tightened the rules against private meetings, or conventicles, of Jews, Quakers, and Lutherans, as the colony became in Noorlander's view “a model of Calvinist governance” (163). This solid start led gradually to a white population of perhaps ten thousand Europeans, assuring the permanent impress of Dutch religion and culture on the future province of New York—one that is visible to this day—despite the English takeover of New Netherland in 1664.

Regarding Dutch Reformed outreach to indigenous groups in the Americas and to captive Africans—efforts encouraged by the West India Company—Noorlander reports mixed results. Missionaries enjoyed considerable success among the native Tupi of Brazil, but fewer converts among blacks, before the colony's recapture by Portugal brought all to an end. We get a detailed look at missions among Native Americans in the Islands and New Netherland, although most of these failed. As for New Netherland blacks, slave and free—some likely baptized by the Portuguese—Noorlander joins the consensus that their frequent marriages and baptisms in the Reformed Church during the tenure of the Reverend Everardus Bogardus mark a zenith of black Christianization. As bondage tightened in the second half of the seventeenth century, the listing of blacks in church records declined.

Noorlander, fluent in Dutch, exploits both English and Dutch sources to good effect. Although a stronger chronology would have helped order the tangle of events, he shines a bright light on how churchmen forged a moral edge to the commercial ambitions of the West India Company. Indeed, the company gave so generously to finance clerics, build churches and schools, and provide poor relief that Noorlander points to these costs as a major contributor to the company's bankruptcy in 1674.

With “God and Mammon” cast as “partners” (193) in the era of Dutch Atlantic expansion—and near equal partners at that—Noorlander presents a significant correction to the popular view that only New England Puritans can claim the mantle of sublime religious motivation for their colonial conquests.