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Summaries
Joris van Eijnatten, Orthodoxy, heresy and consensus, 1670-1850. Three historical discourses on religion and the public sphere
The idea of a ‘religious consensus’ hardly seems applicable to the religious history of the Netherlands during the ‘long’ eighteenth century (1670-1850). It appears to contradict such religious phenomena as ‘tolerance’ and ‘pillarization’, which are considered to be typical features of Dutch history. Consequently, church historical accounts tend to project a form of confessional apartheid on the Dutch religious past. Religious history is rarely interpreted in terms or concepts that are not derived from the Christian church or from Christianity. Moreover, Dutch church history has a strong tendency to focus on biographical, archival or philological research. This article contains a sketch of three interconnected intellectual discourses on orthodoxy, heresy and consensus. Together, they provide a conceptual framework which allows us to interpret religious ideas in a light not informed by religious ideology. During the long eighteenth century, a period that marks the transition from the ancien regime to the nation state, each of the three discourses contributed to the formation of a religious public sphere. Focusing respectively on politics, history and culture, the three discourses fit into the more general development of the religious public sphere from ‘confessional’ to ‘pedagogical’.
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Jan Bank, Protestantism and World War II The Dutch case and the French case
This paper on the Protestant churches of France and the Netherlands during the Second World War is the preliminary result of a research project on religion in Europe in the 1940s. The project is part of a larger European Science Foundation programme on The Impact of National Socialist and Fascist Occupations in Europe (INSFO). Three main themes are discussed. The first looks at the institutional relations between the Churches and the new regimes in 1940: the Nazi regime in occupied Holland and the government of Vichy France. The second covers the confrontation between theology and the National Socialist ideology, looking at the influence of the radical theology of Karl Barth on the younger generation of ministers in both countries in particular. The third theme explores the types of resistance that resulted from Protestant ideologies, such as the duty to help refugees based on historical arguments. In this respect, special attention is given to Lutheranism in the Alsace under the German Reich, and to the effect of a particularly pious brand of Dutch Calvinism on its followers' attitudes to resistance and suffering.
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Peter van Rooden, Oral history and the strange demise of Dutch Christianity
During the last forty years, Dutch society has gone through a sudden and far-reaching dechristianisation process. Sociologists specialising in religion have monitored this development and explained it using the secularist theory. However, an exploratory oral history approach, based on 43 interviews, and using the modern social history of West European religion, propels us in another direction. The vibrant Dutch Christianity of the 1950s was based on collective rituals and discursive practices that were taken for granted. Although it was possible for individuals to become well-versed in this religion, they did not use the religious rites and rituals in order to think about their own situation. This peculiar nature of Dutch Christianity made it very vulnerable to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, interpreted here as the rise within mass-culture of the practices and ideals of the expressive and reflexive self. People did not choose to leave the churches, but instead drifted away, almost without realising it, as the religious practices from their youth gradually became less important within their lives. The churches were unable to create a form of Christianity that could adapt itself to the new ideal and practices of the self and effectively compete in the cultural marketplace.
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Thijl Sunier, The school funding controversy revisited
Since the mid 1970s, there has been an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about Islam's place in society. When following this debate, one might easily get the impression that we are dealing with a completely new and unprecedented phenomenon. A more thorough analysis, however, shows that this is only partly the case. When we put the debate about Islam into a historical perspective, focussing on the relationship between state and religion, the way in which Dutch society has dealt with issues of religious diversity, and how religious newcomers have been treated in the past, we are able to see that there are remarkable parallels with previous cases of religious emancipation and integration. In this article, the current debate about education and Islamic schools will be compared with aspects of the so-called school funding controversy that took place around the beginning of the 20th century.
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Hein A.M. Klemann, The economy and full-scale war
Meihuizen concludes that the interests of the reconstruction had to take precedence over those of an honourable judicial process, as a result of which cases of economic collaboration seldom reached the courts. This essay argues that Dutch firms could not avoid manufacturing goods for the occupying forces because they were often relatively small-scale in nature and organised along the lines of a family business. If this type of firm refused to fulfil a German order and its competitor was willing to | |
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accept it, then it ran the risk of being squeezed out by the competition. This is why, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, as soon as a firm made the transition from a smallscale to a medium-sized family business it was inclined to work all-out for the occupying forces. This had nothing to do with free choice, but rather the will to survive. In addition to this, non-military production, even that which was geared towards keeping the people at home alive and healthy, supported the German war effort. In an economy where all military production is systematically maximized and manufacturing geared towards producing civilian goods is pushed back to a level where it can just about survive, all manufacturing becomes economic collaboration, thereby making the notion redundant. Consequently, the question that should have resounded throughout this study ought to have been whether a legal case could have been made against economic collaboration at all or whether this was doomed to fail from the start.
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Sjoerd Faber, A successful failure?
Melhuizen's powerful dissertation focuses on one section of the Special Judicial Procedure: settling cases of economic collaboration, particularly the more serious ones. He also examines the Special Judicial Procedure as a whole. First of all with figures, which are less reliable than suggested as is argued in this contribution. Secondly, he used these figures to bolster up his conclusion that we have failed to punish economic collaboration. This is questionable, because the element of punishment was more important in those days than can be deducted from Melhuizen's views.
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Joggli Meihuizen, In response to Klemann and Faber
The investigation and prosecution of economic collaborators in the Netherlands was arbitrary; there were no clear-cut guidelines. Some cases were prosecuted while other similar cases were dismissed. The distribution of cases among the special courts, tribunals and investigative committees was also arbitrary. Compared to their political and military counterparts, economic collaborators were given milder sentences, and collaborators in the civil services were seldom, or hardly, punished at all. In this sense, there was inequality before the law. A similar inequality existed, moreover, with respect to the economic collaborators themselves; petty economic collaborators were generally arrested, whereas the ‘big shots’ were rarely detained. The recovery of the Dutch social structure, and particularly the interests of post-war economic reconstruction largely determined the proceedings. Klemann's arguments are riddled with highly moral judgements. This is remarkable, since he criticises me for employing such judgements, which in his view should have no place in an historical work. Although I have consistently sought to avoid moral judgements, Klemann obviously | |
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confuses the judgements of officials of the special administration of criminal justice with mine. It is true that I have repeatedly reproduced these in the book, without intending to present them as my own. In his contribution Faber stresses, in my view correctly, that precise information about the number of dossiers in the Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging (CABR) is missing. For future research, clear answers are indeed needed to answer the question on how many dossiers and suspects we are dealing with here. It is clearly in society's best interest for more work to be carried out at the CABR and for the data that is found there to be stored in a database. The authorities should accept their responsibility in this matter and be prepared to fund the project.
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