The Netherlands, as some of you may know, came into being during the 80-year war that Dutch Protestant rebels fought under the leadership of William of Orange against Spain, a war that lasted from 1568 to 1648. The war, which is the centerpiece of history lessons in Dutch schools, was essentially a revolt of Protestant nobility against their Catholic monarch. After gaining independence as a republic (a federal one, think about it: today the country is a highly centralized monarchy) the various religious groups continued to live under one national umbrella and tensions between them were pretty much neutralized. Over the centuries a system crystallized that came to be known as “pillarization”, where society was built on certain pillars, where each pillar represented certain religious or non-religious beliefs.

By the middle of the twentieth century Dutch society consisted of four key pillars, a Catholic one, a Protestant one, a Liberal one and a Socialist one. There were a few smaller pillars (Jewish) as well as a few sub-pillars, especially the Protestant one was known for having a few sub-groups that were not exactly tolerant of one another. The pillar was not a formal organization; it was rather a construct covering a multitude of organizations that were built around the same set of beliefs. As an example, if you were born a Catholic you would go to a Catholic kindergarten, school and college; play football at the Catholic football club; read the Volksrant, a Catholic newspaper; watch the Catholic broadcaster, KRO; workout at a Catholic athletics club; vote for the Catholic political party, the KVP; and yes, attend a specific Catholic church. In short you could spend your entire life in one pillar without even coming close to life in any of the other pillars. The pillar in this way neutralized likely tensions between the various groups, but at the same time they provided an excellent tool to control and mold the members of a specific designation. Indeed, cross-pillar traffic was very limited and right up to the 1970s marriages between Catholics and Protestants were frowned upon. Note that religious education in the Netherlands is a constitutional right and the government therefore funds all schools, including those based on a certain faith.

Things changed in the 1960s when the post-war boom created an affluent and educated middle class that started to look critically at the status quo. Student demonstrations and a liberalization of sexual mores contributed to a soft revolution that in turn helped the secularization of society. In the Dutch situation that meant a dismantling of the pillars, or “depillarization”. Institutions and media started a process of reform whereby most of them remained Protestant or Catholic only in name, although some bastions of the old remained. Some of them became more flexible in terms of membership and new ones not based on faith or creed emerged and grew rapidly. As the pillars disappeared, traffic between the various former components increased. I was born in a very secular, liberal household but my parents did not hesitate sending me to a Protestant school which had a good reputation as they felt that was a lot more important than the faith-based nature of that school. If anything, I would learn more about religion which was something I had completely missed out on. In politics the two major Protestant parties and the major Catholic party amalgamated in order to survive the storm of secularization. The latter was actually quite successful with the longest serving Dutch Prime-Minister, Ruud Lubbers (1982-94), being a Catholic. Even the Protestant royal family, blasted when in the 1960s one of the princesses married a Catholic Spaniard, is now largely exempt from religious interference. Crown Prince Willem-Alexander found little objections of a religious nature when he married a Catholic girl last year in a service where both a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister conducted the ceremony.

Yet, the process that formed the Netherlands is now being reversed in more than one way. While depillarization has opened up society and set it on a course of rapid social progress and liberalization, the abandonment of the national identity for the sake of becoming part of the European superstate seems to have unhinged Dutch society. Secularization combined with a fraying national identity is a pretty lethal mix, especially in the Dutch case when you consider how the country came into being in the first place. The secularization process is similar for other European countries as numbers today show it has reached unprecedented levels in Western Europe as opposed to North America where church attendance levels actually have increased over recent years. The Dutch often speak in derogatory terms about the US President’s claim that America is “One Nation, Under God”, forgetting that many European nation states came into being under a religious banner and that the separation between church and state is not as institutionalized as it is in the US (the Queen of England remains the Head of the Church of England, whereas the largest party in Holland still is the Christian-Democrat Union). By continuously invoking God and the nation, Bush is supporting the necessary fluids that gel a nation together and help keep it together for the longer term, especially in times of adversity. As a secular European it was something I was not used to, but it never struck me as strange or reprehensible, in a way it made sense in that it provided a message of social and national cohesion clearly absent in Europe. Given the state of secularization in the US, Americans are more receptive to these ideas and probably see the benefit of them in times of hardship. The Europeans (with the Dutch as the vanguard) however see their independence from God as an achievement of rationality over deity without fully realizing that together with the slow erosion of national identity they may have set themselves on a course into uncharted waters at a time when cohesion, sense of purpose and unity seem crucial for survival.