Amsterdam

Amsterdam, the capital of The Netherlands from the beginning of the 19th century onward, is renowned for its religious diversity and tolerance, which date back as far as the Eighty Years’ War, the Dutch revolt against Spanish and Roman Catholic rule (1568–1648). The revolt was largely a reaction to the Counter-Reformation, the persecution of the Protestant sects that had firmly established themselves in the northern lowlands, including Amsterdam, during the Reformation. In 1588, these territories united to form the Dutch Republic and managed to liberate themselves from Spanish and Roman Catholic rule.

Although the population of the Dutch Republic was primarily Calvinist, the revolt spawned a deeply felt urge for religious tolerance. As a result, Amsterdam, in particular, soon became a safe haven for religious dissidents from all over Europe, including the French Huguenots and Sephardic Jews who had fled the Iberian Peninsula and were unwelcome virtually everywhere else in Europe. Before World War II, no less than 10% of the city's population was Jewish, but only 20% of these survived the war.

In the 1960s, Amsterdam became the center of the Dutch counterculture, and the city has retained much of the latter's secular permissiveness (as seen in its coffee shops, its red light district, its gay [Page 31]scene, and its openness to leftist political activism and alternative lifestyles). The cultural changes associated with the 1960s’ counterculture contributed substantially to the decline of the mainline Christian churches, but they also sparked an interest in inner spirituality. Amsterdam has remained the major hub of the Dutch holistic milieu, hosting more New Age centers than any other Dutch city. Despite the bankruptcy in 2000 of Ronald-Jan Hein's center Oibibio, an icon of Amsterdam's shift from utopian idealism and social criticism to commercialized business spirituality, neither the milieu's size and vitality nor the interest in spirituality has declined since.

The period since the 1960s has also witnessed an influx of Muslim immigrants from Turkey and particularly Morocco, which has made Islam a major player in the city's religious landscape. Christian immigrants from Southeast Asia, Latin and South America (from the former colony of Surinam), and sub-Saharan Africa have meanwhile established a wide range of so-called immigrant churches in Amsterdam. Particularly thriving are the African churches in the southeastern part of the city (the “Bijlmer”), many of them of the evangelical or Pentecostal strain.

Although strikingly secular in many respects, Amsterdam hence also boasts an immense religious and spiritual diversity. Its traditional religious and multicultural tolerance has been severely put to the test since the rise of the late populist politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Declining secular tolerance vis-à-vis Islam, the increased salience of (sometimes orthodox) Islamic identities, and instances of anti-Semitism and gay bashing by Islamic youngsters have culminated in the assassination of the playwright Theo van Gogh by a young Islamic militant, Mohammed Bouyeri, in 2004. In this increasingly heated climate, the city's mayor Job Cohen, Jewish like many of his predecessors, is blamed by some and admired by others for his defense of the city's age-old tradition of multicultural and religious tolerance.

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