The Divided Church: Faith and Fracture in Hackensack

The First Dutch Reformed Church of Hackensack stood at the center of everything. It was where baptisms were recorded and marriages sanctified, where funerals brought the community together and sermons shaped the moral landscape of the town. For generations, the Dutch Reformed congregation had been the institutional heart of Hackensack, its rhythms marking the passage of seasons and the milestones of life in a way that bound families together across time.

When Reverend Dirck Romeyn arrived in 1775, the church was already under strain. The question of independence had split the congregation along lines that no amount of theological reasoning could bridge. The Dutch Reformed tradition, with its emphasis on congregational self-governance and its historical resistance to centralized authority, provided natural support for the patriot argument. But not everyone in the pews agreed. Some members had commercial ties to New York that depended on British stability. Others had intermarried with Anglican families whose loyalties lay with the Crown. And some simply feared what revolution would bring — the violence, the uncertainty, the destruction of the orderly world they had built.

Romeyn did not try to paper over the divisions. He preached in support of independence, grounding his arguments in the Reformed theological tradition that held government accountable to divine law and asserted the right of communities to resist tyranny. His sermons were acts of political organizing as much as spiritual ministry. He named the cause of liberty as a moral imperative and the duty of every Christian to support it. For those in the congregation who shared his convictions, Romeyn's words were a source of strength and clarity. For those who disagreed, they were a provocation that made the church itself feel hostile.

The breaking point came with the British occupation. When Cornwallis's forces entered Hackensack in late November 1776, the church was seized and converted to military use. Pews were torn out. The interior was defaced. British and Hessian soldiers used the sacred space as a prison and hospital, housing captured patriots and treating wounded soldiers in a building that had, weeks before, rung with hymns and prayers. The church records — baptisms, marriages, deaths, the documentary tissue of the community's existence — were scattered and partially destroyed.

Romeyn fled. He had no choice. As the most visible patriot leader in Hackensack, he would have been arrested or worse if he had stayed. He spent the remaining war years ministering to scattered patriot families across Bergen County, holding services in homes and barns, keeping the congregation alive in spirit even as its physical home was desecrated. It was itinerant, dangerous work. Loyalist partisans operated throughout the county, and a patriot minister was a target.

The Loyalist members of the congregation, meanwhile, found themselves in an ambiguous position. Some had genuinely supported the British cause and welcomed the occupation. Others had simply been unable to leave and now found themselves cooperating with the occupying forces out of necessity rather than conviction. The social bonds that the church had maintained — the bonds of shared worship, shared language, shared heritage — strained and snapped under the pressure of conflicting loyalties.

When the war ended and Romeyn returned to Hackensack, the work of rebuilding was as much emotional as physical. The church building could be repaired — new pews installed, the interior restored, the records reconstructed where possible. But the congregation itself bore wounds that could not be fixed with lumber and plaster. Families that had worshipped side by side for decades now regarded each other with suspicion or open hostility. Loyalist members who had not fled faced ostracism. Patriot members who had suffered through the occupation carried bitterness that no sermon could dissolve.

Romeyn understood that the church had to serve as a bridge back to some kind of community life, even if the old unity was gone forever. He presided over the restoration of the building and the gradual reconstitution of the congregation, welcoming those who returned while acknowledging that the community had been permanently changed. The First Dutch Reformed Church survived the Revolution, but it survived as something different from what it had been — a congregation that had learned, through bitter experience, that faith alone could not prevent a community from tearing itself apart.

The church that stands in Hackensack today is not the building that Romeyn knew, but it occupies the same ground and carries the same name. Its history is a reminder that the Revolution was fought not only on battlefields but in the institutions that held communities together — churches, town meetings, families — and that the cost of independence was measured not only in lives lost but in bonds broken.