Journal of
Religion in
Europe
Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
brill.nl/jre
Contested Secularities: Religious Minorities and
Secular Progressivism in the Netherlands
Cora Schuh
Universität Osnabrück, Fachgebiet Pflegewissenschaft
[email protected]
Marian Burchardt
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen
[email protected]
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr
University of Leipzig
[email protected]
Abstract
In this paper, we propose to analyze ideas, practices, institutionalizations, and
public controversies related to the religious-secular divide in the Netherlands in
terms of contested formations of secularity. We introduce the concept of ‘multiple
secularities’ and use it as an interpretive device for an analysis of the historical
emergence and transformation of Dutch secularity. After that we show how historically shaped notions of secularity operated within the parliamentary debates
on blasphemy, freedom of speech, and religion that unfolded between 2004 and
2009. We argue that long-standing notions of secularity as a means for balancing
religious and ideological diversity are challenged by and give way to a new preponderance of secular progressivism. By secular progressivism we mean the idea that
within an ‘immanent frame’ in which the secular ontologically embodies the ‘real’
and constitutes the ground for normative universalism, religion turns into a historical vestige whose protection must be subordinated to universalistic notions of
civic liberties. However, this development is still contested in the Netherlands.
Keywords
secularity; modernity; Netherlands; religion; Islam
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012
DOI 10.1163/18748929-00503002
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1. Introduction
For two decades the Netherlands have witnessed on-going and very heated
debates about immigration and integration policies, the alleged ‘failures of
multiculturalism,’ and the complex spectrum of public religious diversity.
As in many other European countries, these debates largely focused on
Islam. Starting already in the early 1990s, these issues came to a head in the
aftermath of the murders of Pim Fortuyn, a decidedly liberal as well as antiIslamic politician, in 2002 and of the artist and Islam critic Theo van Gogh
in 2004.1 In these discussions multi-culturalist approaches to integration
were fundamentally questioned. As within some strands of populist discourse Islam was increasingly constructed as the ‘other’ of Dutch national
culture and its paramount value of tolerance, Islam’s adaptability to
European secular modernity and to its values of individual freedom and
equality was put to scrutiny and sometimes fully denied. Controversies
over Islam, however, were paralleled by controversies over the inherited
rights of other religious minorities, especially orthodox Protestants, resulting in attempts to clarify the relationships between religious rights and
other basic liberties. Eventually, this gave rise to and manifested broader
concerns with the place of religion in the public sphere, legitimate and
desirable scopes of religious expression and authority, and the cultural
adequacy of specifically Dutch forms of religious corporatism.
In this article, we situate these developments within broader reconfigurations of the religious-secular divide currently taking place in countries
across Europe and examine how in these discourses in the Netherlands
notions of the secular are unsettled, contested, and recomposed. We do so
by tracing the historical emergence and transformation of a dominant
interpretation of Dutch secularity, by analysing how competing ideas of
secularity operated and shifted within parliamentary debates on freedom
of speech following the murder of van Gogh, and by demonstrating how the
new assertiveness of ‘secular progressivism’ becomes tangible in recent
conflicts over ritual slaughtering and gay rights. By ‘secular progressivism’
1) As Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist and Pim Fortuyn by an environmental activist, their contexts of interpretation certainly differ. The two murders however,
despite their difference in background, were both incidents in which verbal provokers were
subjected to brutal violence. The entanglement of the murder of Fortuyn with the debate on
Islam and public speech became clear when Muslims responded with relief to the announcement that the murder was not linked to Islamist extremism.
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we mean the idea that within an “immanent frame”2 in which the secular
ontologically embodies the ‘real’ and constitutes the ground for normative
universalism, religion turns into a historical vestige whose protection must
be subordinated to universalistic notions of civic liberties.
A new wave of social science scholarship on secularism has divorced
the notion of the secular from linear narratives of modernity and pointed
to the diverse genealogies, historical national trajectories, and changing
expressions of secularity.3 In Europe, these expressions are bound to change
as their main point of reference shifts from previously ‘indigenous’ dynamics and power struggles over the social place of Christianity to Islam.4
Nevertheless, the social role of Christianity is affected by Islam debates
inasmuch as historically shaped institutional arrangements specifying the
place of religion in public and institutional spheres are under pressure of
adaptation. This may happen either in terms of an opening up of institutional arrangements to newcomer religions, or in terms of new legitimizations of its privileged position that depict Christianity as cultural heritage,
‘civil religion,’ or ‘national culture.’
Our analysis of the Dutch case is based on the concept of ‘multiple secularities,’5 which we introduce below. The concept entertains multiple
relationships with the new literature on secularism while departing from
it through an emphasis on the cultural meanings of religious-secular
distinctions. Importantly, this implies a focus that differs from two other
2) Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007).
3) Linell E. Cady & Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Comparative Secularisms and the Politics
of Modernity: An Introduction,” in: Linell E. Cady & Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds.),
Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3–24. See
also Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, & Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds.), Rethinking
Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4) Nilifer Göle, “Manifestations of the Religious-Secular Divide: Self, State, and the Public
Sphere,” in: Linell E. Cady & Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (eds.), Comparative Secularisms in a
Global Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 41–53.
5) This paper is based on the research project “Multiple Secularities” at the University of
Leipzig. For more information see www.multiple-secularities.de and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr
& Marian Burchardt, “Vielfältige Säkularitäten: Vorschlag zu einer vergleichenden Analyse
religiös-säkularer Grenzziehungen,” Denkströme. Journal der Sächsischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Leipzig 7 (2011), 53–71, as well as Cora Schuh, Secularity in the Netherlands:
Freedom of Speech and the Integration of Religious Minorities, Magister thesis (Leipzig:
University of Leipzig, 2010).
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perspectives on similar sets of issues: sociologists of multiculturalism6 have
addressed political and popular opposition to Islam as a turn to assimilationist models of citizenship and struggles for recognition and inclusion of
cultural communities where religion is rendered a subcategory of culture.
Theories of secularization,7 by contrast, stress the effects that religious
decline has amongst native Dutch, the privatization of religion and cultural
liberalization have on native perceptions of Islamic religiosity, as well as
the resulting polarization and fissures in the cultural landscape. While producing highly important insights, both perspectives have shortcomings
when it comes to addressing secularity. Sociologies of multiculturalism pay
little attention to the power of institutionalizations of the religious-secular
divide in shaping the conditions under which Islam as a religion becomes
implicated in the politics of multiculturalism, while theories of secularization sometimes put too little emphasis on the cultural content of secularity,
or ignore the cultural specificity and historical contingency of the religioussecular distinction in different settings. We think that the concept of
multiple secularities better captures these specificities and contingencies.
The paper proceeds as follows: we begin with a concise summary of
recent social science debates on multiculturalism and integration in the
Netherlands. After that we introduce the concept of ‘multiple secularities’
as historically and culturally contingent forms of religious-secular distinctions, arguing that Dutch discourses on Islam and religious minorities not
only articulate a turn towards assimilationist models of national identity
but also a shift in the dominant interpretation of secularity that is in need
of historical contextualization. In the main part of the paper, we trace this
shift in three steps: starting from the founding of the Dutch Republic in the
sixteenth century, we offer a selective reading of Dutch history to describe
the emergence of a model of secularity for the sake of accommodating religious diversity.
6) Willem Schinkel, “The Virtualization of Citizenship,” Critical Sociology 36/2 (2010), 265–
283. See also P.J.H. Mepschen, J.W. Duyvendak, & E.H. Tonkens, “Sexual politics, Orientalism,
and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands DOI:dx.doi.org ,” Sociology 44/5 (2010),
962–979 and J.W. Duyvendak & P.W.A. Scholten, “Beyond the Dutch Multicultural Model:
The Coproduction of Integration Policy Frames in The Netherlands,” Journal of International
Migration and Integration 12/3 (2011), 331–348.
7) Hans Knippenberg, “The Changing Relationship Between State and Church/Religion in
the Netherlands,” GeoJounal 67/4 (2006), 317–330. See also Hans Knippenberg, “Secularization
in the Netherlands in its Historical and Geographical Dimensions,” GeoJounal 45/3 (1998),
209–220.
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353
This model comes under pressure due to two processes: first, the process
of secularization after the Second World War and the rise of a native, postChristian secular majority8 with a strong focus on individual liberties,
especially in the realm of gender relations, sexuality, and abortion; and
second, the strengthening of modernist secularism based on the rejection
of confessional and ideological divides. From the perspective of ‘multiple
secularities’ we interpret this as a shift towards the foregrounding of
models of secularity for the sake of individual liberties and secularity for the
sake of national integration and development as two parallel fault-lines.
Importantly, secularity acquired a more progressivist notion, which created
certain tensions with the hitherto dominant model. The developments
especially after the murders of Fortuyn and van Gogh indicate an escalation of these tensions, inasmuch as religious minority rights are seen in
contradiction with the individual liberties of the secular majority, which
comes to engage with Islam and other religious minorities on very different
terms. Next, we examine these terms through an analysis of parliamentary
debates on issues of religion, immigration, integration, and freedom of
speech occurring in the wake of the murder of Theo van Gogh, and demonstrate how contestations over Muslims and Orthodox Christians are entangled in a general dynamic of reassessing Dutch secularity. We show the
emerging preponderance of a new type of secularity for the sake of national
integration and development, in short: secular progressivism. Finally, we
shortly pinpoint how the new assertiveness of secularity plays out in legal
debates on gender equality, same-sex marriage, and ritual slaughtering.
Both the parliamentary and the legal debates document the contradictions
between secular progressivism as a cultural force on the one hand, and the
commitment to minority rights on the other.
2. Multiculturalism, Islam, and Integration
The terminologies to describe the Dutch situation vary. Scholars talk about
the end of multiculturalism, the rise of a new nationalism, the growth of
8) James C. Kennedy, “Oude en nieuwe vormen van tolerantie in Nederland en Amerika:
To1erantie als ideologie maakt verdraagzaamheid kwetsbaar,” in: Marcel ten Hooven (ed.),
De lege tolerantie: Over vrijheid en vrijblijvendheid in Nederland (Amsterdam: Boom 2001),
244–255.
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populism, and of the culturalization and virtualization of citizenship.9
Central to all these notions is the observation of contestations over cultural
definitions of national identity that emerged from efforts to integrate immigrants of Muslim background. Muslims account for 5.8% of the Dutch population; about half of them are Dutch citizens.10 As in other European
countries, Muslim presence is mainly the result of government-sponsored
labour migration beginning in the 1960s. It is interesting to note that well
into the 1980s, when the idea of a return to the first generation’s country of
origin was already abandoned, migrants were officially encouraged to preserve their cultural identities as an avenue to integration through ‘emancipation’; shadows here of the Dutch religious corporatism known as the
“pillar model.”11
In the 1990s, however, integration discourse shifted towards emphasizing
individual responsibility for integration.12 Public demands for migrants to
culturally assimilate became more powerful, and critiques (of the alleged
failures) of multiculturalism eventually became the hallmark of Pim
Fortuyn’s LPF13 and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV).14 Public attention
to Islam strongly increased with the publication of Paul Scheffer’s “The
Multicultural Drama”15 in 2000, and peaked with the national elections
in 2010 in which the PVV became the third largest parliamentary fraction,
and with Wilders’ trial on charges of group defamation and hate speech.
Importantly, both Fortuyn and Wilders underpinned their arguments
9) Frank J. Lechner, The Netherlands: Globalization and National Identity (New York:
Routledge, 2008). See also Peter van der Veer, “Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the
Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands,” Public Culture 18 (2006), 111–124 and Schinkel,
“Virtualization.” Furthermore, see Friso van Houdt, Semin Suvarierol & Willem Schinkel,
“Neoliberal Communitarian Citizenship: Current Trends Towards ‘Earned Citizenship’ in
the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands,” International Sociology 26/3 (2011), 408–
432, and Sipco Vellenga, “The Dutch and British Public Debate on Islam: Responses to the
Killing of Theo van Gogh and the London Bombings Compared,” DOI:dx.doi.org Islam and
Christian-Muslim Relation 19/4 (2008), 449–471.
10) Froukje Demant, Marcel Maussen, & Jan Rath, “Muslims in the EU: Cities Report: The
Netherlands: Preliminary Research Report and Literature Survey,” Open Society Institute, EU
Monitoring and Advocacy Program (2007), 9, 13.
11) Ibid, 43.
12) Ibid, 45; Schinkel, “Virtualization.”
13) Lijst Pim Fortuyn.
14) Partij Voor de Vrijheid.
15) Paul Scheffer, “Het Multiculturele Drama,” in: Rob Rutgers & Gelijn Molier (eds.), Het
Multiculturele debat: Integratie of assimilatie? (Den Haag: Boom Juridische Uitgevers, 2004).
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about Islam with temporal progressivist narratives in which the “dominant
humanist culture” was associated with Judeo-Christian heritage.16
A number of political theorists have suggested diverse models for reassessing the place of religion in society. Paul Cliteur, for example, promotes
a stronger emphasis on secularism as the basis for politics and public morals.17 Afshin Ellian, similarly, sees a lack of shared fundamental values. He
views open public debates on multiculturalism in combination with a constitutional patriotism as productive in terms of promoting national integration.18 In contrast to that, Bart Labuschagne and Hans-Martien ten Napel
envision a more active role of the state in fostering the emergence of minority elites and emphasize interreligious dialogue as an avenue toward a
shared public sphere.19
Han Entzinger et al. on the contrary, analysed the interface of social position and identity of migrants and show that while during the 2000s socioeconomic and also cultural integration has indeed improved, this is not
reflected in the subjective views of immigrants.20 In their view the polarized public debate in fact inhibits integration. Authors such as Ruud
Koopmans et al. argue that it is less the public debate than the Dutch model
of multiculturalism that creates obstacles for integration.21
Jan Willem Duivendak, however, questions the very assumption of the
Netherlands as a multicultural society and sees a rising “culturalization”
of citizenship, which is reflected in growing political emphasis on the
adherence to cultural values at the expense of socioeconomic issues such
16) Frank J. Lechner, The Netherlands: Globalization and National Identity (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 75, 79.
17) Paul Cliteur, “De noodzaak van moreel en politiek secularisme,” in: Hans Verboven (ed.),
Continent op drift? Europese waarde in de schaduwen van morgen (Kapellen: Uitgeverij
Pelckmans, 2010), 110–120.
18) Afshin Ellian, “Emancipation and Integration of Dutch Muslims in Light of a Process
Polarization and the Threat of Political Islam,” Middle East Program, Occasional Paper Series
(Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Summer 2009), 15–23.
19) B.C. Labuschagne & H.M.Th.D. ten Napel, “De verhouding tussen staat en godsdienst:
Enkele stellingen ter heroriëntatie op een actueel thema,” in: M. Kroes, J.P. Loof, & H.M.Th.D.
ten Napel (eds.), Gelijkheid en rechtvaardigheid: Staatsrechtelijke vraagstukken rondom 'minderheden,' Staatsrechtconferenties 2001 (Deventer: Kluwer, 2002), 147–159.
20) Han Entzinger & Edith Dourleijn, De lat steeds hoger: de leefwereld van jongeren in een
multi-etnische stad (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2008).
21) Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, & Florence Passy, Contested Citizenship:
Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005).
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as access to labour markets.22 This culturalization acquired particular
public visibility with the recent discursive employment of tolerance against
sexual liberalism and homosexuality as markers of cultural membership
in the Dutch national community.23 “The culturalization of citizenship,”
Paul Mepschen et al. argue, “denotes the increasing importance attached to
culture and morality in shaping citizenship and immigration policy […]
Implicated in this process is a temporal narrative framing European modernity against Muslim tradition, where sexual freedom has come to stand,
metonamically, for secularism and rational, liberal subjectivity.”24
By and large, the idea of culturalization entails a shift of scholarly perspectives away from Muslims or other immigrant communities and their
cultural attributes, towards the cultural landscape of Dutch society itself
and its native populations.25 Friso van Houdt et al. place such trends toward
culturalization in the context of ideologies and practices of neo-liberal
communitarianism, in which citizenship is turned into an entitlement to
be “earned” through moral achievements.26 We agree that understanding
contemporary debates about Islam in the Netherlands requires a shift
toward the cultural parameters of Dutch mainstream society. We argue,
however, that within these parameters the changing interpretation of secularity, religion and its place in the public sphere are as important as discourses on national culture and citizenship. We suggest that recent
scholarship on secularism, and the concept of multiple secularities in particular, are analytically helpful for grasping these changes and their historical sources.
3. Secularisms and ‘Multiple Secularities’
Ongoing religious vitality in many parts of the world, the emergence
of new religious movements, and particularly the political and cultural
22) Duyvendak, “Multicultural Model.”
23) Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” British Journal of Sociology 59
(2008), 1–23.
24) Mepschen, “Sexual Politics,” 964.
25) Van der Veer put this succinctly by saying “The main issue in the murder of van Gogh is
not Islam but Dutch culture.” See Peter Van der Veer, “Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the
Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands,” Public Culture 18 (2006), 111–124, here 120.
26) Van Houdt, “Citizenship.”
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complexities arising from the need to accommodate immigrant or ‘newcomer’ religions, have all led to fundamental critiques of secularization
theories and engendered productive debates on secularism. In the European
context, the recent literature on secularism has unsettled the dominant
equation of Europe as a unified secular political space.27 In many ways
building on David Martin’s work,28 scholars pointed to the specific Christian
genealogy and historicity of concepts of the secular29 and to the inextricable links between specific secular trajectories and histories of stateformation and nation-building within Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox
scenarios.30 European modernity accommodates a host of different models, ranging from French laícité, also termed “radical secularism”31 or “assertive secularism”32 to various forms of institutional cooperation (e.g. in the
Netherlands and Germany) or state-churches (e.g. in Denmark and Greece).
In many studies, however, the usage of the term secularism tends to
conflate the social practices and institutions whereby religion and secular
spheres or spaces are differentiated and the political ideologies that serve
to legitimate such practices and institutionalizations. For reasons of
analytical clarity, in what follows we use the notion of ‘secularity’ to
capture the institutionally, culturally, and symbolically anchored forms
and arrangements of differentiation between religion and other social
spheres. Secularity is therefore more encompassing than secularism in that
it also captures the at times latent, taken-for-granted, and implicit forms of
demarcating religion. Often, however, secularity is socially legitimized
through guiding ideas that set the basic terms for practices of distinction.
The idea of culturally grounded distinctions defining the conditions as
well as appropriate scopes, spaces and times of religious expression, is obviously associated with sociological theories of differentiation. However,
27) José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in: Craig Calhoun, Mark
Juergensmeyer, & Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds.), Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 54–74.
28) David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
29) Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003). See also José Casanova, “Public Religions Revisited,” in: Hent de Vries
(ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 101–119.
30) Casanova, “The Secular.”
31) Tariq Modood, “Moderate Secularism, Religion as Identity, and Respect for Religion,”
The Political Quarterly 81 (2010), 4–14.
32) Ahmed Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France,
and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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in contrast to some of these theories we see differentiation and symbolic
boundary drawing as inevitably contested, historically and culturally contingent, and reversible. This historical and cultural contingency is expressed
in the idea of multiple secularities.33 It seems to us that that similar to how
Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of “multiple modernities”34 offered a way out
of the crisis of modernization theories, the concept of multiple secularities
could stimulate new ways of thinking about the relationships between religion and secularity in modernity beyond secularization theories.
We assume that secularities acquire different shapes in different countries or regions; they function according to different cultural logics that
document specific social histories of conflict as well as characteristic configurations of competing notions of the secular. Such ambivalent configuration may be consequences of colonial encounters or immigration. We
assume further that secularities ‘respond’ to specific societal problems as
their reference problems and offer ‘solutions’ to them. Obviously, these
problems arise with different degrees of urgency and at different points
in time.
Based on both theoretical and empirical considerations, we identify four
such reference problems: (1) the problem of individual freedom vis-à-vis
dominant social units, be they groups or the state; (2) the problem of religious heterogeneity and the resulting potential or actual conflict; (3) the
problem of social or national integration and development; and (4) the
problem of the independent development of institutional domains. These
four problems constitute motives and provide motifs for institutionalizing
distinctions between religious and non-religious social spheres. As latent
motives and practices, they can certainly coexist; as overt motives and
motifs they may compete with each other. It seems, however, that under
specific circumstances one of them can become dominant by being associated with a guiding idea thereby pushing other motifs, at least temporarily,
to the background. Undoubtedly, these motifs are often highly contested.
We use the formula “secularity for the sake of …” to designate such basic
types. Articulating the societal problems we distinguish between the
following forms: (1) secularity for the sake of individual rights and liberties;
(2) secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity; (3) secularity
33) For a detailed discussion of the concept see Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt,
“Vielfältige Säkularitäten.”
34) Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129 (2000), 1–29.
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359
for the sake of societal integration and national development; and (4) secularity for the sake of the independence of institutional domains. The
four forms are associated with different guiding ideas: (1) the ideas of freedom and individuality; (2) of tolerance and respect; (3) of progress and
enlighten­ment; and, finally, (4) of rationality, efficiency, and institutional
autonomy.
The distinction between basic types of secularity is an ideal-typical construction in the Weberian sense. This implies that in empirical cases we will
often find more than one of these motifs, intermingling with or contesting
each other. Only under very specific circumstances will one of them become
dominant. It is also not taken for granted that secular-religious divides are
associated with strong guiding ideas. It seems likely that during “settled
periods”35 cultural understandings of secularity will remain latent and that
they become manifest in periods of conflict. Such conflicts can become
“critical junctures” in Ahmed Kuru’s36 sense and trigger shifts in historical
orientations.
In the literature on secularism distinctions are made between passive
and assertive,37 or moderate and radical38 secularism. When applied to
contemporary contestations over the integration of European Muslims, the
general impression is one of a shift towards assertive versions of secularism
in some European countries, and the Netherlands appear to be a case in
point. Beyond identifying variations in secularism’s assertiveness however,
we see a need to explore the historically contingent meanings of secularity.
The condensed forms of these meanings can be retrieved through the constant comparison of cases and through typological reconstruction. It is
clear that this methodological approach cannot substitute detailed historical analysis and is in certain tension with such analysis. When using terms
such as ‘models’ however, we do not suggest that the dominant forms are
uncontested; we rather assume multiple and constant tensions between
different logics of secularity. The intellectual merit of such typological work
is to understand in which ways the Netherlands are similar to or different
from, say Germany, France, or India.
35) Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review
51 (1986), 273–286, 378–379.
36) Kuru, “Secularism.”
37) Ibid.
38) Modood, “Moderate Secularism.”
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The argument we develop in the following sections is that the Dutch trajectory is marked by a version of secularity for the sake of accommodating
religious diversity that developed early in Dutch history but remained dominant well into the second half of the twentieth century. Since the 1960s, this
understanding has been challenged by the rise of liberal individualism as a
part of the “expressive revolution,”39 which is itself a product of Protestant
piety. We interpret this as a shift towards a notion of secularity for the sake
of individual liberties, which was paralleled by modernist concerns over
progress through unity. In the recent past, however, we see a clear new
emphasis on national integration underpinned by neo-enlightenment, secular progressivist discourses on individual liberty, and equality.40 This shift
has been made possible by the hollowing out of the corporatist structures
of the pillar system through the secularization process and the post-war
expansion of the welfare state. It follows the rise of expressive liberal individualism, which after a transitional period spanning from the 1960s to the
early 1990s now increasingly centres secular normativity on liberal individual autonomy as the basic societal ideology.
4. The Historical Emergence of Dutch Secularity
The reference problem that gave rise to Dutch secularity can be traced to
the reign of the Spanish crown in the territory that is now the Netherlands,
marked by confessional plurality as an early centre of the Protestant
Reformation. The power claims of the Spanish monarchs as well as the
Catholic inquisition provoked anger amongst urban elites and Dutch nobility as a consequence of which Prince Willem organized a rebellion that led
to political independence and the founding of the Dutch Republic. In the
wake of the rebellion, bridging confessional divides was seen as imperative,
and religious diversity as well as the emergence of new controversial strands
of radical philosophy constituted enduring points of conflicts over competing notions of tolerance. Many authors have pointed to the ambivalences
in factual tolerance highlighting the gap between legislation and local
39) Lechner, “Netherlands,” 107.
40) Vellenga describes this process in terms of attempts to construct a monocultural public
sphere. Sipco Vellenga, “The Dutch and British Public Debate on Islam: Responses to the
Killing of Theo van Gogh and the London Bombings Compared,” DOI:dx.doi.org Islam and
Christian-Muslim Relation 19/4 (2008), 449–471.
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361
practices as well as regional and group-based differences.41 Pragmatic dealings with diversity were reflected in theological and intellectual debates on
tolerance, for example between Pierre Bayle and Pierre Jurieu. The Dutch
concept of toleration arising from there certainly competed with the concept of “libertas” as it was employed by Spinoza and lent currency by dissident groups such as the Collegiants. Early on, however, cultural diversity
implied not only the Christian confessions and Judaism, but also various
strands of freethinker movements.
From the perspective of secularity two things are important here. First,
the construal and codification of religious freedom in terms of individual
freedom of conscience, and the ban of religious persecution in the Union of
Utrecht in 1579 drew boundaries between church claims to truth and the
spaces of the individual. Second, the management of confessional diversity
was inextricably bound up with the balancing of group privileges with a
view toward maintaining public order. Dutch secularity then meant, first
and foremost, individual liberties and the pacification of group conflicts,
principles that stood in mutual tension from the beginning. After the victory over the Catholic kings, the Reformed Church acquired a greater public role without the emergence of a secularist ideology as would later
happen in France.
Particularly important for the history of secularity were the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, which is the period of conflict between liberal elites and anti-revolutionary religious movements that emerged in
opposition to tendencies of secularization and liberalization. Dutch liberalism as manifest in the constitution of 1848 was far from anti-religious, but
it rejected exclusivist confessional notions, particularly those developed
by religious agitators such as Kuyper in the second half of the nineteenth
century. In the process, education turned into the major arena of conflict
between liberals and orthodox. Despite being granted equal rights for the
first time, the Catholic minority decided to side with orthodox Protestants
when confronted with liberal education policies. The conflict was eventually contained through the granting of suffrage, for liberals and social
41) See Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Jonathan Israel, & G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes
(eds.), The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, New York & Köln: Brill,
1997); Hsia Po-Chia & Henk van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch
Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Ernestine van der Wall &
Leo Wessels (eds.), Een Veelzijdige verstandhouding: Religie en Verlichting en Nederland
1650–1850 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2007).
362
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democrats and state-sponsored education for Catholics and Orthodox,
giving rise to the much-debated ‘pillarization’ model of Dutch society. It has
been questioned to what extent stability in the Netherlands had really been
threatened by religious diversity before pillarization, as Arendt Lijphart42
argued, or whether the formation of ideological blocs has been the consequence of the historic compromise as Hans Daalder43 suggested, or whether
elites even fostered ideological divides in order to dampen social conflict.44
Importantly, however, the resolution of the conflict between liberals and
orthodox pinpoints the insistence on a passive model of secularity in a historical situation that was—on any account—a “critical juncture”45 and it
gave manifest expression to what we call secularity for the sake of accommodating religious-ideological diversity.46
Struggles over schooling, however, also point to some analytical problems associated with objectivist descriptive categories of passive and assertive secularism in Kuru’s concept. In his analysis of the pillar system
Lijphart47 shows that liberals were willing to construe schools as a “neutral
space” which was not anti-religious but committed to a nationally unified
culture. The explicit confessionalization of schooling, however, thwarted
these commitments. The liberal project acquired its assertive and secular
nature only in confrontation with religious movements with similarly
potent ambitions to shape society. Lijphart48 quotes from the debate:
We build our public schools, also to your benefit, in a way that whenever your
religion is not honoured, and you turn to us in order to complain, you can be
assured to be granted justice. But we cannot go one step further and allow
worldly power to become the servant of the extension of your churchly power.
42) Arendt Lijphart, Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlands politiek (Haarlem:
Netherlands, 1992).
43) Hans Daalder, “Ancient and Modern Pluralism in the Netherlands: The 1989 Erasmus
Lectures at Harvard University,” Harvard University Working Paper Nr. 22 (1989–1990), 33.
44) M.P.C.M. van Schendelen, “Verzuiling en Restauratie in de Nederlandse Politiek,” Beleid
en Maatschappij 5 (1978), 42–64.
45) Kuru, “Secularism.”
46) This interpretation fits with Daalder’s hint at the number of books published from various ideological camps in the 1920s and 1930s that praised pillarization as liberation of their
own group (Daalder 1989, 35). This also meant that in contrast to liberal ideas the scope of
the secular became smaller.
47) Lijphart “Verzuiling.”
48) Lijphart, “Verzuiling,” 102 (our translation).
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
363
In 1913 the election manifest of the liberal parties’ union stated that confessional parties threatened the principles of freedom and rights essential to
Dutch society: “The differences of faith are being sharpened and introduced
in every aspect of societal life; the feeling of national unity is lost.”49 Two
points must be noted here: first, the very assertiveness or passiveness of
secular orders is not something that genuinely inheres in specific imaginaries of secularity or that can in a descriptive fashion merely be read from the
concrete space religion is afforded in public life; it rather emerges and must
be explained from the internal dynamics of conflicts. And second, the
model of secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity is expressly
perceived as a lack of concern with national integration. Instead of creating
a unified nationalism, the liberal project helped to sharpen the divide
between liberals and religious groups as well as the confessional divide. On
the one hand, Catholics and Protestants were unified during the liberal
period against a common enemy. On the other hand, the mobilization of
confessional movements fostered the exclusiveness of confessional identities, while the emancipation of Dutch Catholics gave new impetus to old
inter-confessional tensions.50
Pillarization thus emerged as the characteristic way of dealing with
religious and ideological diversity.51 As a response to nineteenth century
liberal secularism, this was not primarily a move towards the creation of
a social space shared by all religious groups, but toward narrowing the
secular space in order to expand religious spheres of autonomy. Although
pillarization did not create parallel structures in a legal sense,52 it did
produce forms of institutional recognition and simultaneous differentiation between religious and secularly oriented factions of society in the
domains of education, the press, party politics, and associations. One could
argue that pillarization became, in the course of history, an institutional
49) Ibid.
50) Friso Wielenga, Die Niederlande: Politik und politische Kultur im 20. Jahrhundert (Münster:
Waxmann, 2008).
51) Van Dam (2011) has recently criticized the concept of pillarization as a myth that paints
an overly static picture of Dutch society. We partially agree but deem it justified using the
concept with regard to the dominant mode of organizing diversity. Peter van Dam, Staat van
verzuiling: Over een Nederlandse mythe (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 2011).
52) This is the case in India whose model of secularity is also considered as one motivated
by the need to accommodate and pacify religious differences (Bhargava 2010).
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expression of the principle of toleration and is in some way continued
within contemporary multiculturalism.53 Originating in the politics of tolerance, but primarily being justified in terms of the recognition of diversity,
pillarization engenders paths of “segmented” integration and in the process
simultaneously defines zones of non-interference.54
After the Second World War and especially from the 1960s onward the
twin processes of depillarization and secularization dramatically changed
the role of religion in Dutch society. Both occurred in the context of an
expanding welfare state that incorporated pillar organizations but eventually also reduced people’s dependence on confessional support structures.
Depillarization was manifest for instance in the realm of electoral politics.
While in 1963, the Katholieke Volkspartij (KVP) still obtained 78% of
Catholic votes, this number dwindled to 37% within only one decade.55 In
1977 the main confessional parties (Anti-Revolutionaire Partij, Christelijke
Historische Unie, KVP) responded to the new situation by joining the
Christen Democratisch Appèl (CDA). Even if the CDA remained the strongest party in most elections, after 1981 it never gained more than one third of
all votes. Declining support for the segmentation of Dutch society had predated the factual breakdown of the pillars. In the direct aftermath of the
Second World War, the Social Democrats (Partij van der Arbeid, PvdA), as
part of the former ‘neutral’ pillar fostered a politics of ‘breaking through’
the old confessional divides. The call for overcoming pillarization was also
promoted by the liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD), the
Reformed Church, and later by small new left parties (e.g. Democraten 66
or D66) and political fractions as well.56 Despite the intermittent strengthening of the confessional pillar organizations in the early post-war years,
even among confessional ranks pillarization had been questioned ever
53) This is not to indicate that integration policies aimed at establishing new pillars, but
refers to early integration policies’ support of the self organization and cultural identity of
ethnic-religious groups as opposed to more recent assertions of individual forms of cultural
integration
54) Van der Veer, “Pim Fortuyn,” 118.
55) Lechner, “Netherlands,” 103–105.
56) James C. Kennedy, “Building New Babylon: Cultural change in the Netherlands during
the 1960s,” published as: Ibid., Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig
(Amsterdam, Boom, 1995), 32–39. See also Bram Mellink, Prille polarisatie: De PvdA en haar
strijd voor politieke ontzuiling (1946–1966) (Amsterdam: UvA, Master’s thesis, 2008). See also
Daalder, “Pluralism,” 54, 61–62.
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365
since the 1930s.57 In the light of global challenges like economic recessions,
German occupation, the Cold War, and the poverty of the ‘Third World,’ the
old divides seemed out of date.58
The process of depillarization was reinforced through the decline in
church membership and participation, which already began in the early
twentieth century. Between 1889 and 1930 the number of unaffiliated people had risen from 1.5% to 14%.59 It remained stable during the height of
the pillar model from the 1930s through the 1960s, but began to accelerate
again with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, rising from 24% to 36%
between 1958 and 196660 and reaching 61% in 2006.61 Within a few decades
the Netherlands transformed from one of the most churched to one of the
least churched countries in Europe, while a majority of 62% still claims to
be religious in one way or another.62 There is thus an enormous middle
ground of people who neither actively reject religion per se nor actively
participate in organized religion, but seem to agree on the privatization of
religion. As we demonstrate below, this creates tensions not only with
Islam, seen as it is within post-Christian liberal European cultural landscapes as a public religion par excellence, but also with Christian groups, in
particular orthodox Protestant minorities.
Significantly, this process of secularization went hand in hand with an
accentuated liberalization in terms of cultural values and lifestyles, most
strongly expressed in attitudes toward sexuality, abortion, drugs, and euthanasia. Mepschen et al. note that “after an initial period of cultural polarization, large segments of the Dutch population have distanced themselves
from moral traditionalism”;63 with regard to homosexuality and Islam they
add: “[…] the performative power and scope of the entanglement of gay
rights with Orientalist discourse—as well as with Occidentalist responses
(Buruma and Margalith 2004)—is remarkably salient in the Netherlands.”64
57) Kennedy, “Babylon,” 45–53.
58) Daalder, “Pluralism,” 54–55; Mellink “polarisatie,” 27–29.
59) Walter Goddijn, “Some Religious Developments in the Netherlands (1947–1979) as
Documented by a Few Surveys and Census Data,” Social Compass 30/4 (1983), 409–424, 415.
60) J.W. Becker & R. Vink, Secularisatie in Nederland 1966–1991: De verandering van opvattingen en enkele gedragingen (Rijswijk: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, 1994), 49.
61) Tom Bernts, Gerard Dekker, & Joep de Hart, God in Nederland 1996–2006 (Kampen: Ten
Have, 2007), 14.
62) Bernts, “God,” 52.
63) Mepschen, “Sexual politics,” 967.
64) Mepschen, “Sexual politics,” 970.
366
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Since in the initial period cultural liberalism was indeed construed and
defended, first and foremost, over and against Christian conservatism in
the same way as it is now over and against the perceived moral conservatism of a ‘foreign religion,’ it must also be situated within the context of the
dynamics of secularity. Ostentatious cultural liberalism seems to express
two things. On the one hand, a fusion of the rights-based institutionalization of the individual65 with expressive cultural individualism, reflected in
the fact that in all areas of conflict liberalization is justified in terms of the
autonomy and self-determination of individuals (as opposed to traditional
authority). On the other hand, a secular progressivism that thrives on the
temporal narratives of (radicalized) modernity as a “stadial consciousness”66 and turns self-confident secularity into a secularist ideology with
cultural benchmarks to which all individuals, regardless of their religious
convictions, should adhere. It seems to us that secularity for the sake of
individual freedom followed on the heels of the pillar system from the 1960s
onwards while the insistence on individual freedom, often associated with
consumerist hedonism, is now invoked in terms of an ideology of national
integration and societal progress.
We thus note specific reconfigurations and shifts in secular positions,
which were in fact developed earlier in Dutch history whereby the notion
of secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity has come under tremendous pressure. We agree with Peter van Rooden that the breaking apart
of the pillarized structures in the 1960s points to “radical discontinuity.”67
Yet at once there is a need to conceptualize the longue durée of the history
of secularity for understanding the cultural meanings of current religioussecular controversies and reconfigurations.68
In order to show how these reconfigurations and shifts have played out
in recent debates, we now turn to an analysis of the ways in which views
on secularity that emerged from the history of religious-secular struggles,
65) George M. Thomas, John W. Meyer, & Francisco O. Ramirez, Institutional Structure:
Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1987).
66) Casanova, “The Secular.”
67) Peter van Rooden, “Dutch Way of Dealing with Religious Differences,” in: Erik Sengers &
Thijl Sunier, Religious Newcomers and the Nation-State: Political Culture and Organized
Religion in France and the Netherlands (Delft: Eburon, 2010), 59–75.
68) Wayne te Brake, “Accommodating Difference: Historical Processes and Political Cul­
tures,” in: Erik Sengers & Thijl Sunier, Religious Newcomers and the Nation-State: Political
Culture and Organized Religion in France and the Netherlands (Delft: Eburon, 2010), 25–45.
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
367
which we described above, were articulated, contested and negotiated in
parliamentary debates following the murder of Theo van Gogh. We contend that these parliamentary debates acquire their cultural meanings
against the backdrop of contestations over secularities.
Centred on concerns over freedom of speech and Islam, these debates
revived longstanding preoccupations with tolerance but they also revealed
the enormous complexities of delineating and organizing equitable access
to the public sphere for religious and non-religious citizens within a society,
which has developed an expressly secular self-understanding. This implies
far-reaching dislocations in the discourse and object of tolerance, which no
longer refers to tolerance between people of different religious convictions,
but to the, sometimes ritualized, claims that religious minorities must
accept liberal credos.
5. Contesting Secularity: Free Speech, Islam, and the Murder of
Theo van Gogh
With the killing of Dutch filmmaker and publicist Theo van Gogh in 2004,
the debate on religion and free speech that had concerned Dutch public life
for years reached another peak.69 Three dimensions of the relationship
between freedom of speech and religion are central to this debate: first, the
threat posed by radical Islam to the freedom of speech both as an individual right and a constitutive feature of democratic society; second, the limits
of acceptable speech toward Muslims; and third, the question whether or
not religious discourses should be curtailed if they violate the liberal principles of Dutch society. In respect of Islam this was discussed for instance
when Moroccan Imam Khalil el-Moumni in 2001 declared on national
television that homosexuality was a dangerous and contagious disease.70
A similar argument was deployed by Wilders who demanded the banning
of the Qur’an as a “fascist book.”71
69) Public concern over the relationship between freedom of expression and other basic
rights had already been expressed in the Nota Grondrechten en een pluriforme samenleving
(TK 29614 No. 2) before the murder of van Gogh.
70) Gert Hekma, “Imams and Homosexuality: A Post-gay Debate in the Netherlands,”
Sexualities 5/2 (2002), 237–248.
71) Geert Wilders, “Genoeg is Genoeg: Verbied de Koran,” Volkskrant 8.8.2007. http://
www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2686/Binnenland/article/detail/870859/2007/08/08/Genoeg-is
-genoeg-verbied-de-Koran.dhtml (accessed 27 October 2010).
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The debate on freedom of speech can be seen as the quintessential manifestation of contestations over the meanings of secularity and over the
ways in which the cultural majority and religious minorities are able to
define the bottom-line of their coexistence in the public sphere. It acquired
particular momentum through the ways in which it crystallized and displayed the fault-lines between religious and secular parties.
Interestingly, the Dutch landscape of political parties in many ways
reflects the historic shifts and ironies of Dutch secularity. There are three
Christian parties: the CDA, as mentioned, resulted from the merger of older
confessional parties in response to a loss of voters in times of pillarization
and thus remained one of the most important parties in the Netherlands.
The two other Christian parties, SGP and ChristenUnie have an Orthodox
profile; the former has been subject to criticism for many years on grounds
of gender discrimination. The PvdA, D66, and VVD are intimately linked to
the history of depillarization. In 2006, prominent party member and former mayor of Amsterdam Job Cohen72 initiated a debate about a ‘reversed
breakthrough’ that would grant more public space to Islam as an immigrant
religion. The populist LPF and Wilders’ PVV are to a large extent not only
promoters but also direct expressions of the new preponderance of secular
progressivism.
The debate was opened by minister of Justice Piet Donner through a letter to parliament in which he condemned the tyranny of radical Islam as a
threat to Dutch traditions of tolerance and spoke out against the violation
of rights but also the violence against Muslims occurring after the murder.73
Clearly, Donner’s concern was about social cohesion. Amongst numerous
suggestions on how to combat Muslim radicalization he mentioned possible legal action to counter anti-Islamic insulting speech, especially the laws
on insult and blasphemy. The fact that he refrained from solely defending
free speech but also mentioned its potentially disruptive power resulted in
strong criticism by those who argued for a tougher handling of the ‘Islamic
threat.’ His suggestion to review the law on blasphemy left secular parliamentarians bewildered and angered. One immediate response was the suggestion to abolish the law on blasphemy for good. While it soon became
72) Job Cohen, “Sociaal-democratie en religie: de omgekeerde Doorbraak,” Socialisme en
Democratie 7/8 (2006), 49–53.
73) TK 29854, Nr. 3, “De moord op de heer Th. van Gogh. Brief van de ministers van justitie
en van binnenlandse zaken en koninkrijksrelaties,” (Den Haag 10 november 2004).
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
369
obvious that a parliamentary majority clearly opposed any use of the blasphemy law, its immediate abolition was also deemed risky because of tensions between Muslim and non-Muslims after the murder. In another
attempt to solve the issue the new Minister of Justice Ernst Hirsch Ballin
suggested to include the meaning of blasphemy law in the already existing
ban on insulting speech by expanding the ban to cover insult on religious
grounds. Again, the claim was rejected and a Second Chamber majority
decided for the abolition of the law, although later the ruling liberal party
withdrew its support for the decision.
We have analyzed the parliament debates on blasphemy in the aftermath of the van Gogh murder through 2009, the transcripts of which are
provided by Dutch parliament. This analysis is part of a broader research
project, which—next to research in three other countries—included focus
group and expert interviews carried out during two field research periods
in the Netherlands. The thematic focus of our interpretation was on implicit
and explicit notions of secularity as they are, for example, deployed or
negotiated, rejected or defended in the discursive arena of parliament. We
have identified three discursive frames: a pluralist frame, a secular frame,
and secular progressivist frame. The selection of the documents we analyzed reflects a specific part of the debate on free speech and religion, in
which the conflict between secular and pluralist frames was most dominant. Other empirical material such as the focus group interviews, which
we do not draw on in this paper, suggests that notions of secular progressivism are even more explicit, variegated, and elaborated than our limited
concern with free speech and blasphemy allows us to show. The documents
are in Dutch and all quotes are translated by the authors.
5.1. Creating Room for Religion in a Secular Society: The Pluralist Frame
Donner’s letter introduced a pluralist frame, which was later taken over and
emphasized by orthodox Christian parliamentarians. Situated in a tradition of tolerance and ‘peaceableness’ (verdraagzaamheid), this perspective
views free speech as potentially disruptive and therefore in need of being
tamed in a harmonious and respectful dialogue. Consequently, it posits
that the arena of public speech requires zones of respect for religious
feelings:
An open debate is necessary in order to prevent a ‘we against them confron­
tation.’ […] Islam is a given in the Netherlands and Muslims ought to be
370
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
protected on equal basis with others practicing their belief, enjoying legal protection and the societal respect for their deepest convictions.74
In many ways, this frame resonates with inherited concerns with social harmony and tolerance as they were institutionalized in the pillar system and
thus with secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity. This is
reflected in the fact that the value of equality is endorsed through the putting on par of Muslims with other religious groups whose “deepest convictions” are in the first place religious ones—as opposed to secular civic
virtues.
This corresponds to invocations of national history that stress the religious and ideological diversity which gave rise to the institutionalized pluralism of the pillar system: “Taboos, norms and common decencies are the
dikes through which we in the Netherlands for centuries have built a polder
of verdraagzaamheid in a world of turmoil.”75 While moderate Christians
such as Donner did not connect their call for social harmony with a criticism of van Gogh’s anti-Islamic statements, orthodox Christians from the
SGP were more outspoken in this regard: “This has nothing to do with freedom of speech anymore. Quite the opposite, with such an understanding of
this right, divides are sharpened and this freedom is put at risk.”76
Orthodox Protestant investment in free speech over the same period was
also manifest in the SGP’s request to ban a concert by pop star Madonna on
the grounds of blasphemy law, which the government refused. However, it
should be noted that the pluralist frame can also articulate multiculturalist
perspectives. An example is the claim by Green party member Femke
Halsema that restrictions of naturalization policies must be accompanied
by the reinforcement of culpability for insult and blasphemy.77
At the same time, however, the stress on respect for religious sensibilities
goes along with attempts to redefine the kind of religion that is required for
tolerance to flourish, that is, forms of religion that are compatible with the
basic modern liberties such as the freedom of speech: “Religious zeal, idealism, and the courage to have an own opinion we consider a virtue, up to
that moment that it tries to impose its opinion on others by force and forces
74) TK 29854, Nr. 3, 12.
75) TK 22 (29854), 1278–1332, “Tweede Kamer, Moord op de heer Th. Van Gogh,” (November
11th 2004), 1299.
76) TK 22, 1285.
77) TK 22, 1289.
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371
respect for it.”78 There is perhaps no better illustration of the paradox of
religious tolerance than this last quote: Religious tolerance seems to depend
on specific limitations of tolerance against those who do not observe such
limitations themselves.
5.2. Secularizing the Murder: The Secular Frame
A secular discursive frame is most clearly expressed in the contributions by
Wouter Bos (PvdA). Importantly, when describing the incidents and context of the murder he refrained from using any religious references, thus
distancing himself from both pluralist and secular-progressivist discourses.
For Bos, the murder was a case of “political terrorism,” essentially opposed
to the “free world.” The religious factor is not ignored here, but it is treated
as a contingent aspect in the quest for power:
Political Islam and the related violent extremism […] and international, well
organized and substantially financed political movement […] which […] kills
Dutch people in the Netherlands as well as Moroccans in Casablanca […]
which just as easily recruits a straying young man in the Netherlands as it
makes young Moroccans change their Armani jeans […] for beards and
jalabias.79
While within this discursive frame freedom of religion is recognized as a
right, the secular impetus is manifest in the opposition to a special protection of religion against discrimination, which blasphemy law embodies:
The underlying question of course is why insulting someone with a different
skin colour or handicaps should be punished different from insulting a
Christian or a Muslim. Do we want a society where believers have more rights
and duties than atheists or agnostics? […] We think it is time to abolish the law
on blasphemy.80
The very idea that religion is sufficiently protected through general laws
protecting citizens against insult and discrimination reveals a universalistic
ethos that is squarely at odds with pluralist positions.
78) TK 29854, Nr. 3, 9.
79) TK 22, 1294–5.
80) Van der Laan, TK 23, 1335–42, “Tweede Kamer, vergadering,” (16 November 2004), 1336.
372
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5.3. The Secular Progressivist Frame
What we call the ‘secular progressivist frame’ in some ways overlaps with
the liberalist populist discourse promoted by Geert Wilders but it also
sustains emancipatory socialist secularisms that are critical of religion.
Contrary to other observers,81 we are less interested in the emergence of
populist politics per se than in the secular progressivist narrative underpinning it. This focus reveals that—in spite of some differences—both secularist positions depend on the same progressivist narrative. First, there is the
defensive secular progressivism expressed by Wilders and representatives
of LPF and VVD, which thrives on the Manichean dualism of enlightenment, achieved in a history of progress, on the one side, and the dark realm
of religion on the other, and fashions itself as the defender of secularity.
Central to this defence is the unconditional support for freedom of speech,
in which a possible trespassing of limits by van Gogh, which pluralists were
concerned about, was beyond dispute. On the contrary, Jozias van Aartsen
(VVD) claimed that “the attack on van Gogh touches the heart of our
national identity, the freedom of speech,” which van Gogh used in considerable measure to ridicule religion. By turning van Gogh into an icon of secular Dutchness, the murder was framed as a “religious war” by Muslim
extremists,82 with the central idea that this declaration of war was not an
aberration of Islam but rather revealed its extremist essence. This framing
in fact adopted the spin attached to the murder by the killer himself spawning a performative dynamic in which Wilders would repeatedly depict the
killer as representative of Islam. In other instances, however, Wilders
argued that there are moderate Muslims while there is no moderate Islam,
presumably as a strategy not to collide with hate speech regulations.
Constitutive for this version of the secular progressivist frame is an invocation of history that is entirely different from that of pluralists. While
pluralists see a need to restore ‘Dutch values’ of tolerance and verdraagzaamheid, Wilders claims that precisely these values lured the Dutch into
their multicultural dream from which they now have woken up. As a consequence, there is a constitutive ambivalence in the recourse to history in the
defensive version of this frame: on the one hand it aims to defend and
restore Dutch values, while at the same time regarding them as essentially
81) Van der Veer, “Pim Fortuyn.”
82) TK 22, 1282.
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373
flawed since they allowed for their own extinction. In this vein, Wilders
quipped:
Fair is fair: there is also a lot being achieved by this government. For instance,
integration goes very well … At least the integration of the Netherlands into
Dar-al-Islam, the Islamic world […] Good news for the CDA (Christen
Democratisch Appél, then the prime minister’s party): C-D-A, in the meantime stands for Christians Serve Allah.83
Second, there is a rationalist version of the secular progressivist frame,
which thrives on the same historical narrative without situating Islam, or
any other religion for that matter, outside historical progress. In a more or
less classical modernist rendition, this version claims that the main problem behind religious fanaticism and violence is irrationality. Exemplifying
this view, Jan Marijnissen from the Socialist Party remarked:
In true democracy, freedom goes with responsibility […] Emotion that is not
filtered through ratio is perilous […] The murderer of van Gogh is an example
of what can be caused by hatred in combination with his euphemistic idea of
religion.84
While addressing the problem of Muslim integration in a fundamentally
different way, rationalist secularism shares with Wilders’ defensive version
the idea that religion and enlightenment are in principle opposed to one
another. However, while according to Wilders Islam cannot be integrated
into Dutch society, rationalists demand greater efforts to educate Muslims
into enlightened citizenship. It should be obvious that these discursive
frames express significant levels of controversy over the public role of religion. Much of this controversy centres on questions regarding the “right to
83) Geert Wilders, “Speech by Geert Wilders on the first day of the General Debate in the
Dutch parliament,” Geert Wilders Weblog (18.9.2009). http://www.geertwilders.nl/index
.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1595 (accessed 1 December 2011). Importantly,
Wilders has managed to mobilize significant influence on public discourse through his
activity on Twitter, which has more than 160.000 followers. On the “Wilders case” see also
Lisanne Groen & Martijn Stronks, Entangled Rights of Freedom: Freedom of Speech, Freedom
of Religion, and the Non-Discrimination Principle in the Dutch Wilders Case (The Hague:
Eleven International Publishing, 2010).
84) TK 22, 1293.
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insult,” that is whether religious feelings set limits to acceptable public
speech.
In this respect, we note that only the radical (and some of the moderate)
pluralists from the Christian parties are ready to attach positive values to
religion in any meaningful sense and are thus prepared to defend the vestiges of the former ethos of the pillar system. Over the years, this has
become obvious with regard to blasphemy law: while proposals to scrap the
law have for complex reasons been halted, a stable majority of parliamentarians are as a matter of fact opposed to it. Again, recourse to history was
central to arguments against the law, which was sometimes seen as symbolizing Christianity’s establishment. In his claim for abolishing the law, Jan de
Witt (SP) recalled the blasphemy case of Dutch writer Gerard Reve from the
1960s85 who had been put to trial for depicting sexual intercourse with God
in the form of a donkey. Reve was eventually acquitted, and his defence
speech became iconic in discourses on religious, artistic, and intellectual
freedom. The case was also addressed in several group discussions that we
conducted as part of our field research, and seems an important marker in
the history of secularization.
In the section above we have argued, with focus on parliamentary
debates, that we see a shift towards assertive notions of secularity. The
secular frame and the secular progressivist frame in both their defensive
and rationalist versions insist on a notion of secularity and its conceptual
cognates as ontological givens and absolute values, which increasingly
centre on a universalistic and unified secular culture in terms of an ideology that is justified with recourse on national integration. Based on our
interest in the institutionalization of secular regimes and their historic
changes the question at hand is how this shift in public political discourse
resonates with legislation. Only some months ago it seemed that legal
changes would focus on laws regarding immigration and integration rather
than secularity. The recent months though have changed the picture and
we could observe how rights of religious self-organizations have been questioned for the sake of universalist renditions of individual freedom and
equality.
85) TK 32203, Nr. 3, “Tweede Kamer, Voorstel van Wet van de leden Van der Ham, De Wit en
Teeven tot wijziging van het Wetboek van Strafrecht in verband met het laten vervallen van
het verbod op godslastering” (Den Haag, Sdu Uitgevers, 2009).
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
375
6. Secularity in Legal Discourse
The Dutch constitution does not explicitly mention the separation of
church and state as is the case in the US or France. The idea of state neutrality is derived from article 6 of the Basic Law, which guarantees freedom of
religion, and from article 1 on non-discrimination.86 Together with article
23, which specifies religious rights in education, they formulate the most
relevant constitutional principles regarding secularity. Where basic rights
are in conflict, room for legal interpretation emerges, and in the recent past
there was an increasing endeavour to clarify the interrelation of the principles in question.87
Similar to the parliamentary debate, attempts to balance between equality, individual rights, and freedom of religion have spawned conflicts in a
number of cases. The most long-standing one is the ban on female candidates by the orthodox SGP. First filed in the 1990s by a Reformed Protestant
woman, the case was taken to court in 2005 by the Clara Wichman Fond, a
women’s rights organization hoping for a ruling that would place non-discrimination above religious freedom.88 Claims were made on the basis of
article one GR and the UN treaty of women’s rights. In 2010 the Dutch
Supreme Court finally ruled that the state is responsible for taking measures that forces the party to provide for the passive voting right for women
without infringing the party’s right to self-organization over proportion.89
The party has now taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights,
and with the current minority cabinet’s dependence on this party the state
has not yet taken action.90
A second central point of conflict is the question of whether mar­
riage registrars may refuse conducting same-sex marriages. In 2008 the
86) ReS-Factsheet no 1. “Scheiding kerk en staat – relevante wetgeving,” Expertisecentrum
religie en Samenleving (ReS), FORUM (March 2009).
87) For a comprehensive analysis of religion and legal debates in Europe see Astrid Reuter,
“Charting the Boundaries of the Religious Field: Legal Conflicts over Religion as Struggles
over Blurring Borders,” Journal of Religion in Europe 2/1 (2009), 1–20.
88) Barbara Oomen, Joost Guijt, & Matthias Ploeg, “CEDAW, the Bible and the State of
the Netherlands: The Struggle over Orthodox Women’s Political Participation and Their
Responses,” Utrecht Law Review 6/2 (2010), 158–174.
89) LJN:BK4549, Hoge Raad, 08/01394, 9.4.2010 http://zoeken.rechtspraak.nl/detailpage
.aspx?ljn=BK454909/04/10.
90) CW 2010, “Clara Wichmannproefprocessenfonds wil procespartij worden in rechtszaak
SGP voor Europees Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens,” Proefprocessenfonds Clara Wichmann
376
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
Commission on Equal Treatment (CGB) gave a recommendation that the
state should provide measures to stop marriage registrars from discriminating against homosexuals.91 Interestingly, only six years earlier a similar case
has been decided in favour of the “freedom of conscience” of municipal
officials. Parliament has asked the Supreme Court for advice and has temporarily postponed action.92 Interestingly, comparative research shows
that other countries that recognize same-sex marriage such as South Africa
for instance, allow for such discrimination. For that matter, we interpret the
fact that in the Netherlands non-discrimination tends to be weighed higher
than religious freedom or freedom of conscience for that matter, as a sign of
the particular assertiveness of Dutch secularity.
Another case at hand is the recent proposal to ban Islamic and Jewish
non-stunned slaughtering. The aim to reduce animal suffering was held
against traditional special rights of religious groups. The ban was initiated
by a small animal rights party but found support of a broad majority of
political parties (VVD, PvdA, PVV, SP,93 D66, GroenLinks) and deputies
(one hundred and sixteen in favour, thirty against) in a vote in Dutch parliament in June 2011. In December 2011, however, the First Chamber rejected
the ban in the proposed form94 and postponed further debates on reducing
animal suffering.95 Weighing the potential reduction of animals suffering
against the freedom of religion, the senators criticized the focus on slaughtering animals while neglecting farming conditions. Moreover, the senators
objected that only religious slaughtering was considered while no mention
(14.10.2010)
http://www.clara-wichmann.nl/actueel.php?item_id=63&list_type=search
&type_content=sgp (accessed 1 December 2011).
CW 2011, “Donner passeert de Hoge Raad voor SGP” Proefprocessenfonds Clara Wichmann
(20.4.2011).
http://www.clara-wichmann.nl/actueel.php?item_id=69&list_type=search
&type_content=sgp (accessed 1 December 2011).
91) CGB 2008, “Advies Commissie Gelijke Behandeling inzake gewetensbezwaarde ambtenaren van de burgerlijke stand: Trouwen? Geen bezwaar!” Commissie Gelijke Behandeling
(CGB) (April 2004). http://www.trouwambtenaar.nl/adviescgb.pdf.
92) TK 30420 Nr. 159, “Emancipatiebeleid Nr. 159 Brief van de minister van binnenlandse
zaken en koninkrijksrelaties en de minister van onderwijs, cultuur en wetenschap aan de
voorzitter van de tweede kamer der staten-generaal,” (Den Haag: 8 November 2011).
93) Socialistische Partij.
94) “Eerste Kamer tegen verbod op ritueel slachten,” nrc (14.12.2011). http://www.nrc.nl/
nieuws/2011/12/14/eerste-kamer-tegen-verbod-op-ritueel-slachten/ (accessed 1 December
2011).
95) “Debat rituele slacht verder in januari,” DePers (15.12.2011) http://www.depers.nl/
binnenland/617363/Debat-rituele-slacht-verder-in-januari.html (accessed 1 December 2011).
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
377
of ordinary meat production was made in the proposal.96 Similar controversies are also reflected in occurrences that gained only minor media
coverage. In September 2011, for example, the Dutch newspaper Trouw
reported on the Association of Dutch Physicians, which had issued a critique on religious male circumcision, so far a common practice in Dutch
hospitals. Here, circumcision was criticized as a serious violation of children rights.97 In interesting ways, such criticisms resonate with calls by
some politicians such as VVD member Jeanine Hennis that rights to freedom of religion might be unnecessary, since religious people were already
sufficiently protected by general freedom of speech.98 Both incidents suggest that the preponderance of secular progressivism reveals itself not only
in legal changes and arguments but already in the very questioning of religious rights and the opening of new arenas of contention.
In pointing to these cases we do not want to suggest that religion or religious believers are discriminated in the Netherlands. What we do note,
however, is a rising problematization of religion in legal and political discourse, which points to serious changes in the ways in which secularity is
imagined and constructed.
7. Conclusions
In many European societies, issues like the social integration of Muslims
and of the place of Islam within given institutional arrangements are generally interpreted in terms of the politics of multiculturalism. In many cases,
Muslim struggles for recognition have challenged pre-existing arrangements and understandings of the place of religion in society, which has
simultaneously affected mainstream religions and other religious minorities. As a consequence, we observe a rising concern with issues of secularism within the European sociology of religion. In general, this literature
96) “Verbod op onverdoofd ritueel slachten onder vuur in Eerste Kamer,” Trouw (13.12.2011)
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/5948/Dierenwelzijn/article/detail/3075018/2011/12/13/Verbod
-op-onverdoofd-ritueel-slachten-onder-vuur-in-Eerste-Kamer.dhtml (accessed 1 December
2011).
97) “Tijd om het besnijden van jongens de wereld uit te helpen,” Trouw (14.9.2011) http://
www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4328/Opinie/article/detail/2906400/2011/09/14/Tijd-om-het-besnijden
-van-jongens-de-wereld-uit-te-helpen.dhtml (accessed 1 December 2011).
98) “‘Doe niet zo hysterisch,’” DePers (15.3.2011) http://www.depers.nl/binnenland/551962/
Doe-niet-zo-hysterisch.html (accessed 1 December 2011).
378
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
focuses on the relationships between organized religion and the state,
especially on issues of state neutrality and equal treatment of religious
communities.
In this paper, we have taken a different approach. By drawing on the concept of multiple secularities we do not focus mainly on the separation
between state and religion, but rather on the cultural meanings that are
attached to issues of secularity and on the divergent historical contexts in
which these meanings emerge and are shaped. The decision to use the term
secularity instead of secularism mirrors this different focus. While the
term secularism refers to the politics of separations between religion and
other social spheres, and their accompanying ideology, secularity—as we
use it—points to the question of what is at stake in these separations and in
the social struggles from which they result. We have approached these
stakes by identifying different ideal-types (in the Weberian sense of the
term) and have used them to offer a reading of the Dutch case. Our argument is that the primary reference problem from which Dutch secularity
emerged was to balance religious diversity, which was intimately related to
the confessional situation after the Reformation. This idea, however, coexisted with other, more individually inflected notions of secularity, which is
documented in tensions between individual liberties and group or state
authority in different moments of history. After the Second World War we
see an intermittent period of secular modernity in which motifs of individual liberties that throve on subjective secularization and cultural emancipation and national unity compete and fluctuate. These models and their key
ideas are currently reformulated in terms of secularity for the sake of national
integration and development in which secularity and liberty are turned into
icons of progress and enlightenment. However, this conceptualization—as
we have seen in the parliamentary debate—is not uncontested. There are
still lively references to the notion of tolerance, and personal liberties can
be upheld without questioning religious liberties.
Our selective reading of Dutch history shows how secularity becomes
problematic in the context of immigration into a largely post-Christian
society. In an analysis of parliamentary debates, we have distinguished
three discursive frames through which secularity is addressed: a pluralist,
a secular, and a secular progressivist frame. While differences between
them are not carved in stone, and especially the line between the ‘secular’
and the ‘secular progressivist’ frame is somewhat fluid, we have noted a
new preponderance of secular progressivism in these debates, not least
reflected in the discussion on the blasphemy law, which a large majority of
C. Schuh et al. / Journal of Religion in Europe 5 (2012) 349–383
379
the parliament wanted to abolish. This majority certainly emerged from
different motivations, secular progressivism however, as it seems, was able
to take the lead.
It is noteworthy that the last blasphemy cases predating the one discussed here happened during the cultural revolution of the 1960s.99 It
seems that notions of secular progressivism, which gained strength in times
of depillarization, remained implicit as long as the taken-for-granted nature
of secular liberalism, or secularity for the sake of individual liberties, was
unchallenged. In the wake of a new visibility of immigrant religion, however, these notions are again made explicit. In the same context, older fissions between religious and secular groups acquire new strength. While
there are substantive shifts in Dutch secular order, it is certainly too early to
say conclusively whether they constitute a critical juncture100 that will lead
into a finally dominant type of progressivist secularity. At the moment,
there are still forces, which balance the thrusts of progressive secularism.
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