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Dutch Political Developments and Religious Reform
- Leuven University Press
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Dutch Political Developments and Religious Reform 117 2 Dorsman, “C.W. Opzoomer”, 227. 3 Beyen and Majerus, “Weak and Strong Nations”. Dutch Political Developments and Religious Reform James C. Kennedy The relation between church and state has seldom commanded much political interest in the Netherlands. One might argue that the Netherlands, arguably the least ‘confessionalised’ state of continental Europe in the early modern period, had the least distance to go towards a church-state relationship most people would regard as ‘modern’, that is, an arrangement in which there is no privileged or established church. Already a relatively religiously plural country in 1780, it is not surprising that the Netherlands had developed a system of ‘principled pluralism’ by 1920, in which religious and non-religious organisations alike enjoyed equal access both to the public sphere and to public goods.1 Moreover, the transition may be characterised as at once far-reaching and at the same time relatively free of violence and conflict. The Netherlands knew no religious civil war as Belgium or France experienced in the 1790s and avoided the hard confrontations of the Wilhelmine Kulturkampf, however much some Dutch liberals appreciated Bismarck’s hard-line stance toward the Catholic Church.2 Disestablishment did not come in the wake of either a violent revolution or a lost war, but in the bloodless liberal revolution of 1848, and in the gradual implementation of church-state separation in ensuing decades. More generally, the country knew little of the explosive confrontation between anticlericalism and clericalism that wracked Catholic Europe, where the contests were typically more fierce than the Catholic-Protestant altercations evident in the confessionally mixed countries of Western Europe.3 Historically lacking a powerful state and confessionally divided from the outset, Dutch political and religious actors were compelled by the limits of their own power to seek a moderate, pragmatic religious settlement that best suited the religious pluriformity of the nation. 1 Carlson-Thiess, Democracy in the Netherlands, 109-132. James C. Kennedy 118 4 Van den Berg, In vrijheid gebonden, 7-23, 502. There was in fact much on which the Dutch were agreed. Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, most Dutch political and religious leaders continued to be informed by the dualism of Western Christendom, which saw church and state as connected and complementary.4 Even the most important proponent of the free church, Abraham Kuyper, thought that the church ought to be recognised as a public body and enjoy structured contact with the state. And many liberals (and not a few socialists) maintained a respect for churches as necessary moral arbiters in the public sphere, and were not eager to eliminate the ecclesiastical presence in society. In general religious outlook, the Netherlands more closely resembled Britain and the Scandinavian states than Catholic-dominant countries or Germany. None of these considerations, however, should obscure the fact that the political path toward greater religious pluralism was a history of sometimes tortuous twists and turns. There was no linear path of religious reform that led to the pluralist religious arrangements the Dutch had made by 1920. In the first half of the nineteenth century, for instance, the Dutch state, in following other continental examples, was hardly interested in freeing religious denominations entirely from state control. Even after 1848, disestablishment reforms took many years to implement, and there were important actors, from conservatives in the Dutch Reformed Church to (in a different way) Catholic ultramontanists, who did not see an unregulated religious sphere as necessarily in the best interests of either church or state. Indeed, one might argue that the reform of 1848 did not ‘solve’ the church-state issue but broke open existing arrangements, thus intensifying disagreements about the religious settlement, and raising new and difficult issues of how the public sphere should be ordered. Whatever the case, the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, and later between religious and secular parties, were serious, and they would determine, right up to the present day, the contours of Dutch politics and the organisation of Dutch society. In looking at Dutch political developments in the long nineteenth century, it might be most helpful to think of two arenas of conflict in which opposing reforming forces came to confront each other. The first contested field of reform, evident in public debate from the 1780s until the 1850s or 1860s - focused on the task of establishing the proper relationship between the institutional church(es) and a state that, after 1795 at least, had foresworn its confessional identity...