How the Netherlands Stopped Being a Religious Country

The Netherlands has no majority religion. In the annual surveys run by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) through the early 2020s, well over half of people aged 15 and older said they belonged to no religious group at all. Roman Catholicism remains the largest single affiliation at under a fifth of the population, followed by the Protestant Church in the Netherlands and a Muslim minority of roughly five percent.

A Country Where Most People Now Tick None

CBS has asked a consistent affiliation question for decades, which makes the turn easy to date. As late as the 1960s the overwhelming majority of Dutch people named a church. The non-affiliated crossed the halfway mark in the 2010s, and by the most recent survey rounds the picture looked roughly like this:

• No religious affiliation - well over half of adults, and a clear majority among people under 35.
• Roman Catholic - under a fifth, heavily concentrated in the southern provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg.
• Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) - the merged mainline body, now a small single-digit share.
• Smaller Reformed and evangelical churches - a few percent, but with far higher attendance than the mainline.
• Islam - around five percent, mostly of Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese background.
• Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and others - together roughly one percent.

Affiliation flatters practice. CBS also tracks attendance, and the share of adults who go to a service at least monthly has fallen into the mid-teens or lower. Many who still write down Catholic have not been inside a church since a family funeral.

Verzuiling: How the Dutch Built Four Separate Societies

To understand the collapse you have to understand what collapsed. From roughly the 1880s to the 1960s, Dutch life was organised by verzuiling - pillarisation. The country was divided into vertical blocs: Catholic, orthodox Protestant, socialist and general liberal. Each pillar ran its own institutions from cradle to grave.

This was not a metaphor. A Catholic child attended a Catholic school, read a Catholic newspaper, listened to a Catholic broadcaster on the shared public airwaves, was treated in a Catholic hospital, belonged to a Catholic trade union, played for a Catholic football club and voted for a Catholic party. A Reformed neighbour did the parallel thing without ever meeting them.

The system had an architect on the Protestant side: Abraham Kuyper, theologian, newspaper editor, founder of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, leader of a major secession from the national Reformed church in 1886, and Dutch prime minister from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper argued that each community held sovereignty within its own sphere. The long-running schoolstrijd over whether the state should fund religious schools on equal terms with public ones was settled in 1917 in favour of the confessional camps - which is why the Netherlands still funds religious schools from the public purse.

Ontzuiling: A Collapse That Took About Twenty Years

Then, quickly, it fell apart. Ontzuiling - depillarisation - runs roughly from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, and few religious transformations anywhere in the modern world have been so fast.

Several forces hit at once. Television broke the information monopoly of the pillar press. Rising incomes and mobility mixed populations that neighbourhood and marriage had kept apart. The Second Vatican Council raised expectations among Dutch Catholics that Rome then declined to meet, and the Dutch church, which had been among the most enthusiastic reformers in the world, emptied faster than almost any other. The pill and the sexual revolution made church teaching feel remote to a generation already disinclined to defer to authority.

The political tell came in 1980, when the three big confessional parties merged into a single Christian Democratic Appeal because none could survive alone. The broadcasting associations, unions and newspapers either secularised their identity or disappeared.

The Bijbelgordel, Where Sunday Still Stops the Traffic

Where it runs

Dutch secularisation is not evenly spread. A band of orthodox Reformed communities known as the Bijbelgordel, or Bible Belt, runs diagonally across the country from Zeeland through the Alblasserwaard and the province of Utrecht, up over the Veluwe in Gelderland and into Overijssel, taking in towns such as Staphorst, Urk, Rijssen and Barneveld. Here church membership and attendance are high, families are larger than the national average, and Sunday observance is genuinely restrictive - shops shut, shopping and cycling frowned upon, and in the strictest villages a visible dress code.

How it shows up in national politics

The belt has its own party, the Reformed Political Party (SGP), founded in 1918 and one of the oldest continuously existing parties in the Netherlands. It has never joined a government and reliably wins a small handful of seats drawn almost entirely from these towns. The Bible Belt also produced the country's sharpest public health arguments: vaccination refusal on theological grounds has repeatedly seeded measles and polio outbreaks in the same identifiable municipalities.

Catholics, Calvinists and the Long Shadow of the Dutch Revolt

The modern map has deep roots. During the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg Spain the northern provinces threw in with the Reformation while the south stayed Catholic. The Union of Utrecht in 1579 bound the rebel provinces together, and the Reformed Church became the privileged public church of the Dutch Republic. Catholics were not persecuted on the scale seen elsewhere in Europe, but they lost public office and public worship, and instead built schuilkerken - clandestine churches hidden inside ordinary houses. The best preserved of them, Our Lord in the Attic in Amsterdam, is now a museum with its full chapel still tucked under the roof.

Calvinism itself split repeatedly. The Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619 expelled the Remonstrants over predestination, and nineteenth-century secessions still shape the smaller Reformed denominations. Catholic emancipation arrived with the liberal constitution of 1848 and the restoration of the Catholic bishops in 1853, which set off a wave of church-building in the south and created the Catholic pillar that would dominate Dutch politics for a century.

What Happens to a Church When Nobody Comes

Empty pews leave large stone buildings behind, and the Dutch have become unusually pragmatic about reusing them. Hundreds have closed since the 1970s; some are demolished, more are converted. In Maastricht, a thirteenth-century Dominican church has spent two decades as one of the most photographed bookshops in Europe, and Zwolle's Broerenkerk does the same job. Elsewhere churches have become apartments, concert halls, restaurants, offices, libraries and, in one much-reported case, a skate park.

Many of these buildings are protected national monuments and cannot be altered freely, and congregations that hand over a church often attach conditions about what may happen inside. But the sight of a Gothic nave lined with bookshelves is now a normal part of the Dutch townscape, and the most visible physical evidence of what secularisation actually did.

Islam, Judaism and the New Religious Map

Islam arrived mainly through labour recruitment agreements with Turkey and Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s, and through migration from Suriname around its independence in 1975. Muslims are concentrated in the four big cities - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht - and Rotterdam's Essalam Mosque is among the largest in western Europe. Islam has been the focus of intense Dutch political argument since the early 2000s, in a country that simultaneously guarantees state funding for religious schools of every denomination.

The Jewish community tells a far darker story. Amsterdam was one of the great Jewish cities of Europe, home to the Portuguese Synagogue completed in 1675 and a Sephardic community descended from refugees of the Iberian Inquisitions. Roughly three quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, among the highest proportions in occupied western Europe. The community today numbers in the tens of thousands, and the National Holocaust Names Memorial, opened in 2021, records over a hundred thousand names in brick.