THE POLITICS OF TOLERANCEThe Collapse of the Pillars and the Rise of Liberty
The 1960s were a turning point in Dutch history, as in Europe and the United States
more generally. In Holland, that turning point was deeply connected to a shift in the
social location of religion. A popular narrative among the Dutch is that during this decade
they finally liberated themselves from the constraints of religion. Declines in church mem-
bership and church attendance were very steep during the 1960s, and in a relatively short
period Holland was transformed from a highly religious to a highly secular society. Until
the 1960s, political scientists defined Holland as a pillarized, consociational society di-
vided into tightly integrated communities (i.e., pillars) formed on the basis of religion or
ideology. The most important of these pillars emerged as a result of political mobilization
in the nineteenth century and centered on Protestantism, Catholicism, socialism, and
liberalism. This goes back as far as the days of the Dutch Republic (1568–1795), which
was a particularistic and highly fragmented socio-political infrastructure. At the end of
the previous century, attempts to modernize and integrate Dutch political, social, and
administrative institutions took the form of a pillarized, and subsequently corporative
and consensual, system. When I was growing up during the 1950s and 1960s, I was raised
as a Protestant, and we had our own church, political party, sports teams, schools, shops,
and welfare organization, as if we formed an ethnic community. Everything in society was
organized according to these pillars. The Dutch pride themselves on their long tradition
of tolerance, but this was part of a broader system of noninterference with other pillars.
Marriage patterns in the Netherlands also followed such divisions. This is well expressed
in the Dutch proverb ‘‘When you have two beliefs on one pillow, the devil will sleep in
between.’’ Much of this well-organized system collapsed at the end of the 1960s under
the pressures of the sexual revolution, the student revolt, and the rise to power of the
postwar baby boomers. The elements that remained, such as a political orientation toward
consensus and corporatism, came under constant pressure from a volatile electorate. Po-
litical parties continued to be based on the old ideological divisions, but voters were now
motivated by issues primed and framed by the media.
The silent revolution of the 1960s is celebrated in the Netherlands as a liberation,
especially from obstacles to enjoyment. Although Catholics were a majority in the country
before the 1960s, the Calvinist ethos of frugality and moral strictness had spread to the
entire population, including Catholics, socialists, and communists. It is always striking,
for instance, to see how closely Dutch communists resemble Dutch Calvinists. This ethos
portrayed enjoyment as something potentially sinful. As in other Western European na-
tions, Christian life was more or less bourgeois life, and the lower classes were targeted in
a whole range of missionary activities to improve their habits, and especially to keep them
from drinking and abandoning their families. The power of religious organizations in a
pillarized society was in this respect quite formidable, since low morals might mean loss
of one’s job with a Christian employer or loss of welfare. In the 1950s, the Catholic
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