Buiten kerk en moskee

One striking finding is that respondents who are not affiliates of a traditional religion regularly
stated during the interviews that they do not see the absence of a faith and a framework
of meaningfulness outside and above the individual as problematic: ‘My life has no
point at all, but I still enjoy it’. Yet for many agnostics, atheists and modern-day spirituals,
life is more than a collection of individual impressions and experiences, and they not
uncommonly feel a form of progression which has and gives meaning. For the religious
nones, as for the spirituals, this appears to be an important element of meaningfulness,
though they appear to interpret this more as something collectivist (‘as a society we are
becoming ever more intelligent and ever better’), whereas progress for modern-day spirituals
is in the first instance above all a question of self-improvement and personal growth.
Placing the findings of this trilogy in a broader context
In the conclusion to chapter 7 we briefly drew out the main findings from this ideological
trilogy. The overarching finding is of course the rapid demise of the Christian faith during
the past decade. The percentage of Dutch citizens who have never been brought up in a
particular religion rose from 25% to 36% between 1975 and 2018, while the percentage
who are not affiliated to a church community rose from 42% to 76%. 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. The percentage who believe
in a God who is concerned about each and every one of us personally has shrunk by twothirds
since the mid-1960s. Initially, in the 1960s and 70s, the percentage of ‘ietsists’
(‘somethingists’) rose rapidly, followed in the 1980s and 90s by the percentage of agnostics,
while since the turn of the millennium it is the percentage of atheists that has been
rising strongly.
The surrounding culture is developing in an areligious direction. Church ceremonies are
becoming less and less a (prominent) part of national public life, and trust in the Church is
also crumbling. 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. ‘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 this, 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 church-based organisation,
is gradually disappearing in the Netherlands. The main bastions of traditional reli-
170 s u m m a r y