Samenvatting

The Netherlands has witnessed a strong process of secularization, the rapid decline of institutionalized Christianity, i.e. the churches. An important explanation for this process is educational expansion: the increase in the number of highly educated people in the Netherlands contributes to the decline of religion. Other instances of modernization, such as individualization, provide additional explanations for secularization. As modernization continues, secularization will do so too with consequences for the churches themselves, but also for related social and cultural structures in the area of, for example, the media or education, for the tolerance between religious and secular Dutch and for citizen participation.