Faith & Spirit Quote by Peter Stuyvesant

Prayer is doing double duty here: it performs piety while laundering a political program into something that sounds inevitable, even holy. Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of New Netherland, isnat merely venting prejudice; he is drafting a gatekeeping policy with theological ink. By calling a group a "deceitful race" and "blasphemers", he shifts the issue from commerce or coexistence into moral contamination. Once your neighbors are framed as an infection, the only "responsible" action is quarantine: restriction, expulsion, denial of rights. The sentence is built to make exclusion feel like civic hygiene.

The phrase "this new colony" is doing quiet work, too. Newness is presented as fragility: a project that can be "troubled" or "infected" if the wrong people are tolerated. That anxiety reflects the colonial reality of the 1650s: a precarious outpost dependent on trade, constantly negotiating with Indigenous nations, and worried about internal cohesion. Religious uniformity becomes a substitute for real stability.

The subtext is also economic. New Amsterdam was a trading hub; diversity was bad for a Calvinist moral order but good for business. Stuyvesantas language tries to preempt that argument by portraying pluralism not as a competitive advantage but as spiritual sabotage. And by casting the request as a prayer rather than a decree, he dodges accountability: if exclusion is "Godas will", dissent becomes impiety.

Itas an early American blueprint for how intolerance sells itself: not as hate, but as protection.