Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk is probably the country's most frequently visited church. Each year it welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors. They do not come to this fifteenth-century “new church” for worship, however. Neither do they come to admire the building, which oddly lacks a tower. Since the 1980s, it mainly serves for exhibitions, mostly of treasures from far away and long ago.

Christianity in the Netherlands seems doomed to share the lot of past civilizations on display at Nieuwe Kerk. Since the 1960s, a thousand church buildings have been closed down, and demolished or converted into museums, concert halls, schools, apartments, restaurants, clubs, bookshops, or mosques. Many citizens have given up church membership. In surveys, 40 to 60 percent – depending on how the question is phrased – say they do not belong to any denomination. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which emphasize conversion and establishing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, do grow, but mostly by recruiting members from more conventional Protestant denominations. This massive decline of religious affiliation, exceeded only by Sweden, Estonia, and the Czech Republic came unexpected. Well into the twentieth century, the Dutch went to church more frequently than any other European nation. Moreover, from 1918 until 1994, Christian political parties such as CDA participated in each and every government coalition and exerted their influence on society, for ex ample by prohibiting shops to open on Sundays or after 6 p.m.

It is not easy to say then whether Dutch society is secular or thoroughly religious. Many citizens themselves do not know what to make of it. Is it a hotbed of Calvinism or of secular humanism? Of Enlightenment or fundamentalism? Of merchants or ministers?

In the Beginning

As in other European cultures, the Dutch calendar testifies to a pre-Christian past. The first day of the week is not named after the Lord (domingo, domenica, dimanche), but after the Sun (zondag). Moreover, woensdag, donderdag and vrijdag refer to Germanic gods: Wodan, Donar (also known as Thor) and Freya. Little is known about their cults, because they left no texts, statues, or buildings. Public rituals took place in the open air, outside settlements. Germanic tribes, wrote the Roman historian Tacitus, “do not consider it consistent with the grandeur of celestial beings to confine the gods within walls, or to liken them to the form of any human countenance.