page_title: History of religion in the Netherlands
section_title: Reformation in the Early Modern Period
hierarchical_section_title: History of religion in the Netherlands / Reformation in the Early Modern Period
caption_attribution_description: James Arminius (1560-1609), Pastor, Professor, and Theologian. Portrait of Jacobus Arminius; One of a pair with a portrait of his widow, Lijsbet Reaal by David Bailly (1620; pl. 4). Description of picture obtained from Arminius, Arminianism, and Europe: Jacobus Arminius (1559/60-1609), edited by Th. Marius van Leeuwen; Keith D. Stanglin; Marijke Tolsma (London: Brill, 2009), 256.
context_page_description: The history of religion in the Netherlands has been characterized by considerable diversity of religious thought and practice. From 1600 until the second half of the 20th century, the north and west had embraced the Protestant Reformation and were Calvinist. The southeast was predominately Catholic.
  Associated with immigration from North Africa and the Mideast of the 20th century, Muslims and other minority religions were concentrated in ethnic neighborhoods in the cities.
  Since the 1960s the Netherlands has become one of the most secular countries in the western world. In a December 2014 survey by VU Amsterdam, for the first time more atheists were reported than theists in the Netherlands. The majority of the remainder of the population identified as agnostic or ietsist.
context_section_description: Catholicism dominated Dutch religion until the early 16th century, when the Protestant Reformation began to develop. Lutheranism did not gain much support among the Dutch, but Calvinism, introduced two decades later, did. It began its spread in the Westhoek and the County of Flanders, where secret sermons in Dutch, called hagenpreken ("hedgerow orations"), were held outdoors. Gradually discontent among the Dutch grew, and erupted in 1566 with the so-called Beeldenstorm, a surge of iconoclasm. This quickly spread among all Dutch regions and finally resulted in what would become the Dutch revolt from Catholicism and Spanish control. During the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, an independent Dutch religious tradition began to take shape in the northern parts of the independent Netherlands.
  The most prominent Dutch theologian was the humanist Desiderius Erasmus. He was critical of the abuses within the Catholic Church and called for reform, but he kept his distance from Martin Luther and Philip Melancthon. He continued to recognise the authority of the Pope. Erasmus emphasized a middle way, with a deep respect for traditional faith, piety and grace, and rejected Luther's emphasis on faith alone. Erasmus therefore remained a Catholic all his life. In relation to clerical abuses in the Church, Erasmus remained committed to reforming the Church from within. He also held to Catholic doctrines such as that of free will, which some Calvinist Reformers rejected in favour of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps.
  The 16th and 17th century were characterized by the Protestant Reformation, which greatly influenced the history of the Netherlands, especially in western and northern areas of the country. They also had influence with the eastern English shires, with which they were in contact through trading across the North Sea. The first wave of Reformation, initiated by Luther, did not come to the Netherlands.
  The second wave of the Protestant Reformation, Anabaptism, became very popular in the counties of Holland and Friesland. Anabaptists were very radical and believed that the apocalypse was very near. They refused to live the old way, and began new communities, creating considerable chaos. A prominent Dutch Anabaptist was Menno Simons, who initiated the Mennonite church. Another Anabaptist, Jantje van Leyden became the ruler of a newly founded city, New Jerusalem. Anabaptists survived throughout the centuries and they were recognized by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1578. Institutionalized Dutch baptism was a model for both English and American Baptists.
  The third wave of the Reformation, Calvinism, arrived in the Netherlands in the 1540s. Part of both the elite and commoners, mostly in Flanders, adopted this influence. Then in control of the Low Countries, the Spanish government, under Philip II started harsh persecution campaigns, supported by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church, as Protestantism was seen as threatening the royal government. In reaction to this persecution, the Calvinists rebelled. In the Beeldenstorm in 1566, they conducted iconoclasm, destroying statues, paintings, and other religious depictions and artifacts in churches. Also in 1566 William the Silent, Prince of Orange, a convert to Calvinism, started the Eighty Years' War to liberate the Calvinist Dutch from the Catholic Spaniards.
  The counties of Holland and Zeeland were conquered by Calvinists in 1572. Numerous residents were already Calvinist in Holland and Zeeland at that time, but the other states were still almost entirely Catholic. The estates of Holland, led by Paulus Buys, decided to support William the Silent. All churches in the Calvinist territories became Calvinist and most of the population in these territories converted to or were forced to convert to Calvinism. Because the Netherlands had gained independence from Spain over both political and religious issues, it chose to practice certain forms of tolerance toward people of certain other religions
caption: Jacobus Arminius, the Reformed theologian and the father of Arminianism.
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