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Netherlands

Also Known As Dutch
Europe

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The Netherlands was split for centuries between a Calvinist north, where the Dutch Reformed Church held public status after the revolt against Spain, and a Catholic south that regained legal equality only in 1853. From the late nineteenth century the country organised itself into pillars, separate Catholic, Protestant, socialist and liberal networks of schools, unions, newspapers and broadcasters, a system called verzuiling that structured daily life until it dissolved in the 1960s. Dutch religious decline since then has been among the fastest in Europe, and a majority now report no religious affiliation. The state funds religious schools on equal terms with public ones under Article 23 of the constitution, a settlement inherited from the pillarised era. Muslim communities of Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese origin form the largest minority faith.

Facts
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 3
No established church; Article 23 of the constitution funds religious schools on the same terms as public ones, a settlement inherited from the pillarised era.
State Funding Mechanism
Article 23 of the constitution funds religious schools on the same terms as public schools, a settlement inherited from the pillarised era of Dutch politics. 3
Apostasy or Blasphemy Law
The Netherlands has no live blasphemy law. Article 147 of the Penal Code, on the books since 1932, criminalized publicly, orally or in writing, expressing oneself in a manner offensive to religious sensibilities; it was invoked only rarely and had last been used to prosecute in 1968. On 1 March 2014 the Dutch parliament repealed Article 147 along with the related Articles 147a and 429bis, the Senate voting 49 to 21 in favor after roughly a decade of periodic reform attempts. The Netherlands has no apostasy law. A separate provision, Article 137c of the Penal Code, punishing intentional public insult of a group of persons on grounds including religion, remained in force after the repeal and is a general group-insult law rather than a blasphemy provision, since it protects believers as a group rather than religious doctrine itself. 4
Registration or Recognition Regime
Churches carry legal personality of their own under article 2 of the Dutch Civil Code, a status the law grants automatically rather than through any registration process, and the constitution's guarantee of religious freedom extends to exempting a church's own governing statutes, unlike an ordinary nonprofit's, from the notarization otherwise required to found or amend them. 3
Ban or Official Watchlist
The Netherlands can declare a foreign national undesirable, a status called ongewenstverklaring, barring entry on grounds including a threat to public order, with the declaration entered into the Schengen Information System so it operates across the whole Schengen area. The government applied it in February 2025 to bar three Islamic preachers, Mohammed Hijab, Ali Hammuda and Abu Bakr Zoud, from a Ramadan exposition in Utrecht over remarks the government characterized as hate speech. 3
Geography
Latitude
52.1 degrees north 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Longitude
5.3 degrees east 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Status
Legal Status
Freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed and Article 23 funds religious schools on the same terms as public ones, a settlement inherited from the pillarised era; ritual slaughter has been repeatedly contested in parliament. 3
Demographics
Religious Composition
A majority now report no religious affiliation, with Catholics around 20 per cent, Protestants including the Protestant Church in the Netherlands around 15 per cent, and Muslims about 5 per cent (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020; Statistics Netherlands). 1
Government
Capital
Amsterdam 2
Government Type
parliamentary constitutional monarchy; part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands 2
Sovereignty Status
Sovereign UN member state 2
Established Year
1581 2
26 July 1581
Location
Location of Netherlands Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Federated States of Micronesia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Guam Guatemala Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Laos Latvia Lebanon Libya Lithuania Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Mali Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
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Religion and History in the Netherlands

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.

Pillarisation and the Funding of Religious Schools

The most durable legacy of the pillarised era is Article 23 of the Dutch constitution, which guarantees freedom of education and requires the state to fund private schools on the same footing as public ones. It was the settlement of the school struggle, a political conflict that ran from the 1870s to 1917 and was resolved by giving confessional parties the funding they wanted in exchange for universal male suffrage and proportional representation. The effect is that a substantial majority of Dutch pupils attend schools that are formally Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish or humanist, all paid for out of taxation, in a country where most people no longer practise any religion. That combination now produces the sharpest arguments in Dutch religious policy.

Schools founded on a religious basis may set an admissions and staffing policy consistent with that basis, which sits awkwardly against equal treatment law, and the small number of Islamic schools has attracted inspection and funding disputes disproportionate to its size. Attempts to amend Article 23 have failed repeatedly because amendment requires a two thirds majority in both chambers after an intervening election. The other continuing dispute concerns ritual slaughter without prior stunning: a bill to ban it passed the lower house in 2011, was rejected by the senate, and was replaced by a covenant setting conditions instead.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Netherlands directly: "Anne Hutchinson emigrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634 with her husband and children, following the Puritan minister John Cotton."

This source names Netherlands directly: "teaching back out across France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England."

Source CalvinBruce Gordon

Historically a Calvinist north and a Catholic south, organised into rival pillars until the 1960s; both have declined faster than almost anywhere in Europe.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Netherlands directly: "Van Klinken is a Research Fellow at KITLV, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies."

This source names Netherlands directly: "World Cultures (Wereldmuseum) in the Netherlands under accession number RV-360-4362, measuring 28.2 by 42 centimetres."

Source Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (the Deetman Commission report)Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (Wim Deetman, chair)

This source names Netherlands directly: "from meeting openly in the Habsburg Netherlands; and for the church ceasing to exist as a separate body in 2004, when it united with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the Evangelical..."

Source Dutch Reformed Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Netherlands directly: "Seventeen Provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands against the rule of King Philip II of Spain, beginning with the 1566 iconoclastic riots against Catholic church imagery and the 1568 executions of the..."

Source The Dutch Revolt (Parker)Geoffrey Parker

This source names Netherlands directly: "later becoming prime minister of the Netherlands."

Islam, Religions

About 5 per cent of the population, chiefly of Turkish, Moroccan and Surinamese origin.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

Jan van Riebeeck Establishes the Dutch Reformed Church at the Cape names Netherlands by its exact full name: maining an outpost of the church in the Netherlands.

Source Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) (South African History Online)South African History Online

This source names Netherlands directly: "the Christian Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, already recorded here."

This source names Netherlands directly: "Dutch Reformed communities outside the Netherlands itself."

This source names Netherlands directly: "Arrest, A Prospective Study in the Netherlands, by Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers and Ingrid Elfferich, published in The Lancet in 2001, is a peer reviewed prospective study following..."

Source Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the NetherlandsPim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, Ingrid Elfferich

This source names Netherlands directly: "into the Protestant Church in the Netherlands."

Willibrord sailed to Frisia in 690, and Tyndale's English New Testament was printed in the Low Countries and smuggled back across.

This source names Netherlands directly: "on JSTOR, tracing the full life of the Netherlands' blasphemy statute, Penal Code Article 147, from its 1932 enactment to its repeal on 1 March 2014."

This source names Netherlands directly: "article on the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, community-edited."

Source Protestant Church In The Netherlands (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Netherlands directly: "leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands."

This source names Netherlands directly: "and including Sweden's 2010 and the Netherlands' 2015 parliamentary resolutions, while the Turkish government rejects the characterization."

This source names Netherlands directly: "the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands from 1945 onward."

Source Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (the Deetman Commission report)Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Roman Catholic Church (Wim Deetman, chair)

Statenvertaling (1637) names Netherlands by its exact full name: inist Reformed churches of the Northern Netherlands for centuries afterward.

Source Statenvertaling (Wikipedia and Calvin University Meeter Center)Wikipedia contributors; Calvin University Meeter Center for Calvin Studies

This source names Netherlands directly: "of the revolt of the Habsburg Netherlands against Spanish rule, first published in 1977 and revised in 1985, drawing on Spanish and Netherlandish archival sources."

Source The Dutch Revolt (Parker)Geoffrey Parker

This source names Netherlands directly: "University Medical Center in the Netherlands, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Source Voluntary Activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System and Attenuation of the Innate Immune Response in HumansMatthijs Kox, Lucas T. van Eijk, Jelle Zwaag, Joanne van den Wildenberg, Fred C. G. J. Sweep, Johannes G. van der Hoeven, Peter Pickkers

This source names Netherlands directly: "born April 20, 1959 in Sittard, Netherlands, known as "the Iceman" for a series of Guinness-recognised cold endurance feats from the 1990s and 2000s onward, including prolonged ice water immersion..."

Source Voluntary Activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System and Attenuation of the Innate Immune Response in HumansMatthijs Kox, Lucas T. van Eijk, Jelle Zwaag, Joanne van den Wildenberg, Fred C. G. J. Sweep, Johannes G. van der Hoeven, Peter Pickkers

This source names Netherlands directly: "the UK, Canada, Georgia, India, the Netherlands, Pakistan and the United States, with objectives spanning poverty relief, education, sickness relief and the provision of burial grounds for the faith."

Source The World Zoroastrian Organisation Ltd: Charity Commission Filed Accounts, Year Ended 31 December 2024The World Zoroastrian Organisation Ltd (trustees' annual report and accounts, filed with the Charity Commission)

Contains

Amsterdam, Cities
Dordrecht, Cities

Dordrecht is the oldest city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands.

Source The Canons of the Synod of DortSynod of Dortthe holders' own account
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Spread Events Here

The 1571 founding synod met in exile at Emden, just across the border, since the Netherlands itself was not yet safe for an open Reformed synod; the Synod of Dort in 1618 to 1619 met at Dordrecht, inside the Dutch Republic.

The synod met in Emden, in what is now Germany, because the exiled congregations could not meet openly on Dutch soil. It is anchored here to the Netherlands as the country the church it founded went on to serve.

Source Dutch Reformed Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence AgencyView the Source
3. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source
4. On the Life and Times of the Dutch Blasphemy Law (1932-2014)
University of Wales Press, in The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy LawView the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
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