History of religion in the Netherlands
[1] Associated with immigration from Arab world (North Africa and the Middle east) of the 20th century, Muslims and other minority religions were concentrated in ethnic neighborhoods in the cities.
Germans settled south of it (Germani Cisrhenani), and many place names and archaeological finds indicate the presence of Celts north of the Rhine.
An adaptation of polytheistic religions and other myths occurred among the various tribes, absorbing influences from Germanic, Celtic and later Roman mythology.
The Celts and Germans in the Low Countries were also most likely to have had tree shrines, following the example of the Old Norse Yggdrasil and the Saxon Irminsul and Donar's oak.
From the late 7th century, missionaries coming from England and Ireland, such as Boniface, Lebuinus, Ludger, Plechelm, Willehad and especially Willibrord, sought to convert the inhabitants of the areas north of the Meuse and Rhine rivers to Christianity.
At the end of the Middle Ages, the Devotio Moderna (among others Geert Groote and Thomas à Kempis) created a spiritual innovation.
It began its spread in the Westhoek and the County of Flanders, where secret sermons in Dutch, called hagenpreken ("hedgerow orations"), were held outdoors.
[4] The 16th and 17th century were characterized by the Protestant Reformation, which greatly influenced the history of the Netherlands, especially in western and northern areas of the country.
Also in 1566 William the Silent, Prince of Orange, a convert to Calvinism, started the Eighty Years' War to liberate the Calvinist Dutch from the Catholic Spaniards.
Because the Netherlands had gained independence from Spain over both political and religious issues, it chose to practice certain forms of tolerance toward people of certain other religions.
[5] In the Calvinist-controlled northern counties, many of the remaining Catholics were tending toward converting to Protestantism for temporal gain, to survive in the changed society.
Strict Calvinists converted a belt of land from the southwest (the province of Zeeland), via the Veluwe, to the north of the Netherlands (to the city of Staphorst) during the 17th and even as late as the 18th centuries.
The Synod of Dort tried to bring an end to an internal theological conflict within the Calvinist church between two tendencies of Calvinism: the liberal Arminians or Remonstrants and the strict Gomarists or Contra-Remonstrants.
The strict Calvinist side won (Prince Maurice of Orange and the other provinces) and Johan van Oldebarnevelt, the official head of state of the County of Holland, was executed.
It was permitted only on the condition of the congregations maintaining Calvinist church interior styles, without having crucifixes, as were still displayed in Scandinavian Lutheran cathedrals.
The Netherlands became known among dissenting Anglicans (such as Puritans), many Protestants, and Jews for its relative religious tolerance; it became a refuge for the persecuted and a home for many of these immigrants.
The Netherlands hosted religious refugees, including Puritans from England (the most famous of the latter were the Pilgrims, who in the early 17th century emigrated to what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony in North America).
Protestant Huguenots from France fled to Amsterdam after repeal in 1689 of the Edict of Nantes and renewed persecution and attacks from Catholics.
Following the invasion of forces of Revolutionary France in 1795, the Batavian Republic was established for a time, creating equal rights for all religious groups in the Netherlands.
A liberal Calvinist elite dominated the Netherlands for a period, including the national bureaucracy and the Dutch Reformed Church.
Roughly fifty years later, in 1886, another group of orthodox Calvinists, led by Abraham Kuyper, split from the Dutch Reformed Church.
Most Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries became later become aligned within the socialist pillar, many became highly secularized and adopted mainstream dress rather than that associated with Orthodox Judaism.
In February 1941 after Nazi occupation, a general strike took place in Amsterdam and the surrounding areas against the first razzia, a raid to collect Jews.
[12] In 2007, the Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (Social and Cultural Planning Agency, SCP) expected the number of non-affiliated Dutch to be at 72% in 2020.
[18] They reported a higher number of church members than what was found by independent in-depth interviewing by Radboud University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
During the late 20th century, in keeping with changes in their society, the Dutch liberalized their policies on abortion, drug use, euthanasia, homosexuality, and prostitution.
The main Islamic immigrants came from Surinam and Indonesia, as a result of decolonization; Turkey and Morocco, as migrant workers; and Iraq, Iran, Bosnia and Afghanistan as political refugees.
The popular politician Pim Fortuyn provoked controversy by defending the Dutch liberal culture against what he considered a "backward religion", conservative Islam.
[2] In the 21st century, a large majority of the Dutch population believes in the separation of church and state, that is, that religion should not play a decisive role in politics or public education.
[11] According to the CBS in 2018, 53% of the Dutch were religiously unaffiliated, 37% were Christians (out of whom 22% registered Catholics, 15% Protestants – 6% PKN + 6% hervormd + 3% gereformeerd), 5% were Muslims, and 5% adherents of other religions.
