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The Netherlands are a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with its capital at Amsterdam. Before the 20th century, the country was predominantly Christian. However, in recent years, religious adherence has declined. Currently, about 67% of the Dutch report no religious affiliation with the number expected to hit 72% in the year 2020.

The first mentions of the Bahai Faith in the Netherlands were in Dutch newspapers which in 1852 covered some of the events relating to the Babi movement which the Bahai Faithregards as a precursor religion. Circa 1904 Algemeen Handelsblad, an Amsterdam newspaper, sent a correspondent to investigate the Bahais in Persia. The first Bahais to settle in the Netherlands were a couple of families — the Tijssens and Greevens, both of whom left Germany for the Netherlands in 1937 as business practices were affected by Nazi policies¹. Following World War II the Bahais established a committee to oversee introducing the religion across Europe and so the permanent growth of the community in the Netherlands begins with Bahai pioneers arriving in 1946. Following their arrival and conversions of some citizens the first Bahai Local piritual Assembly of Amsterdam was elected in 1948. In 1997 there were about 1500 Bahais in the Netherlands. In 2005 the Netherlands had 34 local spiritual assemblies.

Currently, Roman Catholicism is the single largest religion of the Netherlands, forming some 11.7% of the Dutch people in 2015, based on indepth interviewing. After 1970 the emphasis on catholic concepts like hell, the devil, sinning, the taboo on divorce and remarrying of widows and catholic traditions like confession, kneeling, the teaching of catechism and having the hostia placed on the tongue by the priest rapidly disappeared and these concepts are nowadays seldom or not at all found within contemporary Dutch Catholicism. In the 1980s and 1990s the church became polarized between conservatives, whose main organization was the Contact Roman Catholics, and liberals, whose main organization was the Eighth of May Movement, which was founded in 1985. The organization had a difficult relationship with the bishops and was disbanded in 2003. As of 2014 cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, the Archbishop of Utrecht, is the highest Catholic authority.

In December 2011 a report was published by Wim Deetman, a former Dutch minister, detailing widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church in the Netherlands. 1,800 instances of abuse "by clergy or volunteers within Dutch Catholic dioceses" were reported to have occurred since 1945². According to the report "The risk of experiencing unwanted sexual advances was twice as great for minors in institutions as the national average of 9.7%. This finding reveals no significant difference between Roman Catholic institutions and other institutions." In March 2012, however, it was revealed that cases of 10 children being chemically castrated after reporting being sexually abused to the police had been left out. It also emerged that in 1956 former prime minister Victor Marijnen, then chairman of a children's home in Gelderland, had covered up the sexual abuse of children. According to the De Telegraaf newspaper, he "intervened to have prison sentences dropped against several priests convicted of abusing children." The factuality of these claims is unclear, though. The Commission rejected all the claims.

The number of Catholics is not only declining, but many people who identify themselves as Roman Catholics also do not regularly attend Sunday Mass. Fewer than 200,000 people, or 1.2% of the Dutch population, attends Mass on a given Sunday, according to information by the Catholic Institute for Ecclesiastical Statistics in their 2007 statistical update of the Dutch Catholic Church, Most Catholics live in the southern provinces of North Brabant and Limburg, where they comprise a majority of the population in the diocese of Roermond in the province of Limburg, based on self reported information by the Catholic Church³. According to the church administration in 2010 the population of two dioceses s-Hertogenbosch and Roermond had still a majority Roman Catholic. It is notable that SILA published precisely for these two dioceses a significantly lower number of Catholics in 2005. Based on the SILA-numbers, in the diocese of Hertogenbosch in 2010 the population has no longer a Catholic majority, according to the church administration Catholics became a minority in the diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch since 2014. The number of parishes in the Netherlands has dropped between 2003 and 2015 from 1525 to 726.

Since the provinces North Brabant and Limburg are in the Netherlands historically mostly Roman Catholic, and some of their people still use the term and some traditions as a base for their cultural identity rather than as a religious identity. A planned visit of Pope Francis to the Netherlands was blocked by cardinal Wim Eijk in 2014, allegedly because of the feared lack of interest for the Pope among the Dutch public. The vast majority of the Catholic population in the Netherlands is now largely irreligious in practice⁴. Research among Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, shows that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics can be regarded as a theist, 55% as deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. In 2015 only 13% of Dutch Catholics believe in the existence of heaven, 17% in a personal God and fewer than half believe that Jesus was the Son of God or sent by God.Notable Dutch Catholics include Pope Adrian VI, Ruud Lubbers, Henry of Gorkum, Cornelius Loos, Jakob Middendorp, Hadewijch, Hieronymus Bosch, Piet de Jong, Jan Harmenszoon Krul, Dries van Agt, Jan Steen, Casimir Ubaghs, Maxime Verhagen, and Joan Albert Ban.

The Protestant Church of the Netherlands forms the largest Protestant denomination, with 8.6% of the population in 2015, based on in-depth interviewing, down from 60% in the early 20th century. It was formed in 2004 as a merger of the two major strands of Calvinism: the Dutch Reformed Church (which then represented roughly 8.5% of the population) and the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (at that time 3.7% of the population) and a smaller Lutheran Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (0.1%). Since the 1970s these three churches had seen a major decline in adherents and had begun to work together. The Protestant Church itself claims that 10% of the Dutch population is a member in 2014. About 4% of newborns were baptized within the Protestant Church in 2014. The Church embraces religious pluralism. Research shows that 42% of the members of the Protestant Church are non-theist⁵. Furthermore, in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands and several other smaller denominations of the Netherlands, 1 in 6 clergy are either agnostic or atheist. The number of members falls on average by about 2.5% per year. This is caused primarily by the death of older members and little growth among the younger population. A large number of Protestant churches, mostly orthodox Calvinist splits and liberal churches, stayed out of the Protestant Church. They represented some 4% of the population in 2004. Calvinism is the traditional faith of the Dutch Royal Family – a remnant of the church's historical dominance.

Islam is a relatively new religion in the Netherlands, as per most recent statistics about 825.000, or 4.5% of the Dutch population were Muslims in 2012. In-depth interviewing in 2015 shows about 5% to be Muslim. Until some years earlier, the number of Muslims was estimated based on the religious makeup of the country of origin of the parents of citizens. Through this method the number of Muslims was greatly overestimated. For instance, in 2004, estimated there were 944,000 Muslims in the Netherlands (almost 6% of the total Dutch population). The official count of Muslims in the Netherlands has been decreasing every year since 2004.

Majority of Muslims in the Netherlands belong to Sunni denomination, with a sizeable Shia minority. Approximately 1,500 belong to the Ahmadiyya sect in Islam. Muslim numbers began to rise after the 1970s as the result of immigration. Some migrants from former Dutch colonies, such as Surinam and Indonesia, were sometimes Muslim, but migrant workers from Turkey and Morocco are the biggest part, as well as their children. During the 1990s, the Netherlands opened its borders for Muslim refugees from countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Of the immigrant ethnic groups, 100% of Bosniaks; 99% of Moroccans; 90% of Turks; 69% of Asians; 64% of other Africans, and 12% of Surinamese were Muslims. Muslims form a diverse group. Social tensions between native Dutch and migrant Muslims began to rise in the early 21st century, with the murder of politician Pim Fortuyn by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf.

Because of its social tolerance, the Dutch Republic formed a haven for Jews that were persecuted because of their beliefs throughout Europe. Prominent Dutch Jews include Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher, Aletta Jacobs, a 19th-century feminist, and Henri Polak, who founded both the socialist party and the labor union. The majority of Jews lived in Amsterdam, where they formed an eighth (90,000) of the population. During the Second World War about 75% of Dutch Jews were deported and murdered in The Holocaust⁶. Cults, sects, and new religious movements have the same legal rights as larger and more mainstream religious movements. The Dutch government chose not to make special laws regarding cults, sects or new religious movements (generally all informally called "sekten" in Dutch). This decision was based on reports made after the 1978 Jonestown mass murder and suicide. Nor is there any officially assigned institute that provides information to the public about these movements and organizations.

Since November 2012, there has been an official complaint website about cults, sects, new religious movements, spiritual courses, philosophy courses, and therapy groups. The website was initiated by the Ministry of Security and Justice. The website can also refer people to psychological counselors. The immediate reason for this website was an undercover documentary by the commercial TV station about the Miracle of Love movement. As of 2004, the Netherlands did not have an anti-cult movement of any significance⁷.

Almost all Christian groups show a decrease in the number of members or less stable membership. However, in particular the loss of members of the two major churches is noticeable, namely the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands, with a membership loss of approximately 589,500 members between 2003 (4,532,000 people, or 27.9% of the population) and 2013 (3,943,000 people, or 23.3%), and the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, with a membership loss of 737,174 members between 2003 (1,823,085 people, or 11.2% of the population, for the Dutch Reformed Church; 623,100 people or 3.8% for the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands; and 11,989 people or 0.07% for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands; total for these churches of 2,458,174 people, or 15.15% of the population) and 2012 (Protestant Church in the Netherlands, 1,721,000 people or 10.2% of the population). Smaller churches (Mennonite Church in the Netherlands, Remonstrants, and the Old Catholic Church) had a total number of 22,489 members (0.13% of the population) in 2003, which dropped to 17,852 members (0.10% of the population) in 2012. In total, the number of members of Christian groups in the Netherlands decreased from 7,013,163 (43.22% of the population) in 2003 to 5,730,852 (34.15% of the population) in 2013. This accounts for a total member loss of 1,282,311 (9.7% overall population) of all churches in the Netherlands within these 10 years. These numbers are based on information by Catholic Social-Ecclesiastical Institute, which in turn bases its numbers on information provided by the churches themselves. It must be noted that independent research in 2015 by the VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University shows significantly lower numbers concerning the percentage of the Dutch population that adheres to almost all the churches named here.

The freedom of religion is a fundamental right in Netherlands.

References:

1. Мирошникова Е.М. Свобода совести в контексте отделения церкви от государства: вопросы реализации в современной Европе.// Свобода совести в России: исторический и современный аспекты. М.,2005.

2."Katholieken". KASKI. Retrieved 21 April 2015.

3. C. van den Hoonaard, Will (1993-11-08). "Netherlands". draft of A Short Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith. Baha'i Library Online. Retrieved 2008-12-25.

4. Dutch Roman Catholic Church 'castrated at least 10 boys'". Telegraph. Retrieved March 19, 2012.

5. God in Nederland' (1996-2006), by Ronald Meester, G. Dekker, ISBN 9789025957407

6. Singelenberg, Richard Foredoomed to Failure: the Anti-Cult Movement in the Netherlands in Regulating religion: case studies from around the globe, redacted by James T. Richardson, Springer, 2004, ISBN 0-306-47887-0, ISBN 978-0-306-47887-1, page 213 6. JCH Blom (July 1989). "The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands: A Comparative Western European Perspective". European History Quarterly. 19 (3): 333–351.

1^ C. van den Hoonaard, Will (1993-11-08). "Netherlands". draft of A Short Encyclopedia of the Baha'i Faith. Baha'i Library Online. Retrieved 2008-12-25.

2^ Dutch Roman Catholic Church 'castrated at least 10 boys'". Telegraph. Retrieved March 19, 2012.

3^"Katholieken". KASKI. Retrieved 21 April 2015.

4^ Мирошникова Е.М. Свобода совести в контексте отделения церкви от государства: вопросы реализации в современной Европе.// Свобода совести в России: исторический и современный аспекты. М.,2005.

5^ God in Nederland' (1996-2006), by Ronald Meester, G. Dekker, ISBN 9789025957407

6^ JCH Blom (July 1989). "The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands: A Comparative Western European Perspective". European History Quarterly. 19 (3): 333–351.

7^ Singelenberg, Richard Foredoomed to Failure: the Anti-Cult Movement in the Netherlands in Regulating religion: case studies from around the globe, redacted by James T. Richardson, Springer, 2004, ISBN 0-306-47887-0, ISBN 978-0-306-47887-1, page 213

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