Bringing home the dead : Ritualizing cremation in the Netherlands

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the religious landscape of the Netherlands has changed quickly from one of the most Christian countries of Europe to one of the most secularized countries. In 1909, 57% of the population were Protestant, 35% were Catholic and only 5% were not religiously affiliated (Knippenberg 1992). This image is in great contrast to the data from one century later. In 2006, 16% of the Dutch were Catholic, 14% were Protestant, 9% belonged to other denominations or religions and the biggest group of 61% was religiously unaffiliated (Bernts, et al. 2007). Until the 1960s, in the Netherlands most people were born as either Catholic, Protestant or Socialist and eventually went to school, made friends, married and died as such (Van Eijnatten and Van Lieburg 2006). This structure that divided society and in fact the whole of daily life into certain pillars of denomination is called ‘pillarization’. In the past sixty years, the all-encompassing influence of religious institutions decreased, crumbling the pillars of denomination, a process called ‘depillarization’. As a result, not only church attendance diminished, in fact the pillarized character of the whole of public life, varying from sports clubs to schools unsettled.