In this study the reader will learn about the origins of the Holdeman Church, beginning in the Dutch Lowlands of the sixteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. This narrative history delves into the culture of the Holdeman people and how John Holdeman created a religion in the nineteenth-century United States that attracted a small group of German immigrants from Russia. The book addresses the question of whether the Holdeman people, numbering about twenty-five thousand members in the United States, can resist the temptations of modernity and not only survive but thrive in the twenty-first century. The story is a tribute to their effectiveness in defining themselves and drawing the boundaries of separation in a world of social instability and the breakdown of many traditional norms and values.
