davidsevera:

Amsterdam provides a prime example of a deliberately tolerant civic elite, facing a notoriously hardline Calvinist parish clergy and determined to keep them in their place. When the Amsterdam Regents rebuilt their city hall in the 1640s and 50s, the most prominent artistic theme in the Chamber of Magistrates was the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, ready to rebuke the Israelites for the idolatrous worship of the golden calf set up in his absence by Aaron. To the highly biblically literate Dutch, the message would be clear: Moses the secular magistrate knew better than Aaron the priest, who had been foolish enough to indulge the religious passions of the Children of Israel, with disastrous consequences.

The result was Europe’s first established Church where in normal times it was possible to opt in or opt out without any great penalty, even though the Reformed had a monopoly on the parish church buildings and on public worship. The States of Holland, with predictable grudging efficiency, set a lead for other provinces by paying for their pastors from consolidated public funds, mostly confiscated from the pre-Reformation Church. This gave the pastors of the province a certain independence from their parishioners, but it also made them beholden to their secular masters in a way which would not have pleased Calvin. Parish ministers right across the northern Netherlands discovered to their dismay the problem which would later become the common lot of established Churches in the modern western world: they had to provide convenient spiritual amenities like baptisms, weddings and funerals for a religiously amorphous public, while simultaneously looking after the minority of pious souls. In remote rural areas they might achieve something like a monopoly of ministry, but they were consistently hampered from doing so in the numerous towns and cities in the United Provinces.

The Church’s problem was especially revealed in its relation to that key Reformed preoccupation, discipline (chapter 14, pp. 591-600). In the Netherlands, consistory discipline became much more a matter of persuasion than in Calvinist societies like Scotland where the whole weight of community opinion could be brought to bear on an offender. Some Dutch people who initially admired the Reformed faith for its strict discipline found this lack of comprehensive authority intolerably worldly, and left their parish churches for radical sects where a more stringent community discipline could be exercised, in particular among the Mennonites. The Mennonites were at their strongest in the far north, especially in the Province of West Friesland: here their roots in the preaching of the local boy Menno Simons and their readiness to communicate like him in Frisian rather than Dutch meant that they penetrated a largely rural society more quickly than the urban-based ministry of the Calvinist ministers. It is significant that in those parts of Europe – Poland, Transylvania and the Netherlands – where it was possible to make free choices in religion, a substantial minority of the population chose radical groups: perhaps 12-14 per cent in West Friesland. And such people also cherished their intellectual independence: the Mennonites were among the most disciplined of radical groups – they took pride in that – but that did not stop many of them finding spiritual profit in the writings of David Joris, that ecstatic wayward genius who had abhorred any form of communal discipline.

Bolding mine. In the footnotes MacCulloch says “There have been estimates as high as 20-30 per cent for the northern Netherlands”.

Yeah the Low Countries were the first polities to be totally dominated by modernity, it’s kind of a shame they don’t have a place in our political imagination. I know back before the election when NRx was still relevant I thought the Compromise of Nobles and the Dutch Revolt were worth more attention as a rare example of “elite rule” and “national identity” pulling in the same direction