Buiten kerk en moskee

etween 2015 and 2020. A quarter of agnostics and atheists now have no problem with
government support for maintaining church buildings. Roughly one in ten people in the
Netherlands are characterised as ‘cultural Christians’: while they are not themselves practising
Christians, they acknowledge the value of religion and the Church for society.
This study developed a new (for the Netherlands) instrument to measure and test meaningfulness,
and deployed it for the first time. This measurement instrument comprises
three sub-dimensions which together offer a measure of meaningfulness: coherence, life
purpose and meaning. On a scale running from 1 to 7, the Dutch score an average of
around 5. The differences by various background characteristics (such as sex, age and education)
are small, but (traditional or spiritual) believers do generally score higher on meaningfulness
than agnostics or atheists. As expected, there is a positive correlation between
meaningfulness and happiness, but our measurement instrument is also able to distinguish
between these two concepts. People who feel they derive (a lot) of meaning from
their lives compared with their degree of happiness are generally younger and unmarried,
less likely to have a high income and more likely to follow traditional or spiritual ideas.
Meaningfulness as (self-)development and ‘enjoying life’
Chapter 5 is based on interviews with modern-day spirituals, agnostics and atheists, all
non-affiliates of (traditional) religions, in which the central question was what gives their
lives meaning. We also described the landscape in which these groups live their lives. For
modern-day spirituals, the most important thing is to develop and detach in order to come
closer to their authentic core, whereas agnostics and atheists would rather ‘enjoy life’.
Agnostics and atheists do (of course) also experience meaningfulness, and associate it
more with giving than taking and in connecting with the greater whole. Compared with
affiliates of traditional religions, both groups appear to be individualistic, saying they build
their own meaningfulness framework rather than taking a lead from, say, religious authorities.
There is a degree of tension here: on the one hand modern-day spirituals, agnostics
and atheists stress the importance of building their own framework of meaningfulness,
whilst on the other they also want to be part of a greater whole.
Agnostics and atheists are slightly more often men, while women are overrepresented
among modern-day spirituals. Another difference between the two groups is that modernday
spirituals generally feel they are part of a larger, connected whole which extends
beyond the grave, whereas agnostics and atheists see themselves more as individual
atoms in a large universe – atoms which disappear forever when they die.
Both modern-day spirituals and agnostics and atheists associate happiness more with
‘something in yourself’ and with ‘positive things’, while meaningfulness is related to others
and can also incorporate negative experiences, such as sadness. Where modern-day spirituals
generally (may) experience setbacks as meaningful, agnostics and atheists see suffering
more as something that has to be borne stoically. Both groups regard happiness as a
privilege, something that happens to you, that is ephemeral, and that cannot be fully controlled.
By contrast, the interviewed respondents see meaningfulness as something that
can be controlled to a greater degree and that is longer-lasting and can be permanent.
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