The Dutch Republic was born from a revolt against Habsburg Spain in which religion and politics could not be separated, and the settlement that emerged was unusual: the Reformed Church held public status and its ministers were paid from public funds, but no one was compelled to join it, and Catholics, Mennonites, Lutherans and Jews were tolerated in private worship. Amsterdam accordingly filled with hidden churches, buildings that were plainly churches inside and plainly houses outside, of which Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder survives as a museum. That partial tolerance made the Republic a refuge and a printing centre: Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia built the Portuguese Synagogue, Descartes wrote there, Spinoza was born into that community and was expelled from it, and books banned elsewhere in Europe were printed in Dutch cities and smuggled out.
Catholic emancipation came slowly, with the hierarchy restored only in 1853. From the 1880s Dutch society reorganised itself into pillars, parallel Catholic, Protestant, socialist and liberal worlds each with its own schools, unions, newspapers, hospitals and broadcasters, so that a person could pass an entire life inside one. The pillars dissolved with startling speed in the 1960s, and Dutch religious practice collapsed faster than almost anywhere in Europe.