Buiten kerk en moskee

Christian elements or adjusting the old meaning to create new content that is more relevant
for them. The optimistic elements of religion would seem to be those that stand the
test of time best. For example, the belief that miracles happen, that praying helps, that
there is life after death and even that heaven exists, that good or the potential for good is
latent in everyone and is waiting to be awoken by God’s love. Less popular, by contrast, are
the devil and sin, a vision of man as a fragile reed, a restless plodder who continually
comes up against personal limits, groping around in the dark, at God’s mercy.
8.2.4 The number of atheists and agnostics continues to grow
The percentage who never attend a church service rose from 53% in 1983 to 69% in 2018,
while the percentage of avowed atheists increased from 16% in 1991 to 29% in 2018. In
2018, 22% of Dutch citizens described themselves as barely religious and 37% as definitely
not religious. The figures from Chapter 3 do not suggest that this situation will change any
time soon. In this research, the percentage of non-church goers was 73%, the percentage
of atheists 32% (more than half of the Dutch population now see themselves as atheists or
agnostics) and the percentage of people that definitely do not see themselves as religious
45%. The initial fading away and later disappearance of the Supreme Being is easy to follow
via population surveys. The percentage who believe in a God who is concerned about
each and every one of us personally has shrunk by two-thirds since the mid-1960s. Initially,
in the 1960s and 1970s, the percentage of ‘ietsists’ (‘somethingists’) rose rapidly, followed
in the 1980s and 1990s by the percentage of agnostics, while since the turn of the millennium
it is the percentage of atheists that has been rising strongly.
Culture is developing in an areligious direction too, which is another indicator of secularisation.
Church ceremonies are becoming a less and less prominent part of national public life,
and trust in the Church is also crumbling. 7 It must be borne in mind here that the chance is
vanishingly small that someone who picks up almost nothing about the Christian tradition
from their upbringing, little from other socialisation settings and only indirect and small
impulses from the surrounding culture will ever develop into a committed church member,
for example. Compared with church milieus, the success of non-church milieus in terms of
socialisation is enormous. 8 Thus, given network effects like this, there is little reason to
suppose that the growth in the percentage of non-believers is a development that will correct
itself in the near future. ‘God in the Netherlands’, a series of surveys that have been
held since 1966, traces the collapse in the belief in the Christian doctrine. If we limit ourselves
to the four fundamental pillars of the Christian faith, each of them – the belief in a
God who is personally concerned about each and every human being, the status of Christ
as his son or sent into the world by him, the view that the Bible is the word of God and the
belief in life after death – are now supported by only a minority of the population (ranging
from 14% to 28%).
In the light of all of the above, it is difficult to argue with the premise that the Christian
religion, both in terms of belief and in the form of collective participation and churchbased
organisation, is gradually disappearing in the Netherlands (and elsewhere; see Chap-
156 c o n c l u d i n g r e m a r k s o n t h r e e r e p o r t s