Abstract
It might seem that validations of the secularisation of the United Kingdom are both vindicated but also exhausted. Famously, the 2011 Census of England and Wales found that 14.1 million, or nearly a quarter of the population, declared ‘no religion’. The dominance of identity politics and its declaration of the sacredness of the ultimate value of inclusiveness was aided in the policing of this ideal by a consortium of new atheists and a vigilante group against religion: the National Secular Society. Despite these efforts, the postsecular emerged, conceiving of morality after the victory of secularisation but sabotaged by the return, or rather entry of Islam into European consciousness. Against this background, European Christianity fractured and disintegrated. Why it fell apart so spectacularly is a matter of puzzlement, for as de Groot observes, ‘renewal and decline went hand in hand’ (p. 31). Against this background, de Groot’s study of the liquidation of Catholicism in the Netherlands is both rare and peculiarly timely. A question is begged as to how Catholicism seemed incompatible with modernity whereas Islam could find a compatibility. Not surprisingly, de Groot asks ‘what’s going on?’ in his introduction.
The parochial cast of many debates on secularisation, commencing in the sociology of religion in the 1960s, obscured the need for the process to have a complementary concept to connect to the peculiar and wider properties of an unfolding modernity. By linking the metaphor of the liquid of modernity to the ecclesial liquidation of Dutch Catholicism, de Groot opens out new horizons. The metaphor of the liquid introduces the idea of something leaking which reflects the melting of the solid form of modernity. In ways without precedent, it might seem that the strategy of Vatican II, to be open to modernity, had caused the unsinkable to sink. Or to deploy another metaphor: Dutch and much of European Catholicism has unravelled. The issue arises as to who, or what, is to blame? Perhaps an inquest on this precipitate decline awaits much further study. For his study, de Groot declines to give a verdict as to who was culpable: progressive liberals or hidebound conservatives.
With 1000 church buildings predicted to close by 2025, and a mass attendance collapsing to about 150,000 from the millions three decades ago, Holland’s largest religious group has emerged as a shell, with a kernel of the pious and elderly. They are surrounded in rims of disengagement by an estranged, non-committed Catholic body for whom the claims of their religion are irrelevant, most especially to those aged between 18 and 25. Even to the most optimistic, it is clear that Catholicism in Holland is not reproducing and, indeed, if trends continue, it faces extinction.
Such prospects cannot but be of sociological interest, hence the importance of de Groot’s study. Drawing on a notable set of publications, and well shored up with extensive bibliographical sources attached to each chapter, de Groot is well qualified to reflect on the decline and fall of Dutch Catholicism. His study is remarkably concise and penetrating, going far beyond the hackneyed properties of the usual debates on secularisation.
In three parts, de Groot follows a straightforward narrative for the study. Part 1 deals with a solid church melting in liquid modernity leading to the way parishes face intractable choices made all the more hazardous by the need to confront ambiguities as expressed in various movements which he explores. Part 2 moves on to issues of authority and of loss of control, in this instance, of televised masses, and then on to the particular outcomes of liquid modernity, notably the individualised forms of spirituality it facilitates which enable escape from the obligations of the hitherto solid religion. An elective endeavour, a form of individualised seeking, is part of the licence to disengage from religion. Finally, in Part 3, an excellent chapter on the secularisation of the care of souls, as related to mental health, is followed by an interesting Chapter 9 on the efforts of a museum to stage a multi-faith exhibition whose impact de Groot surveyed. Less pleasing is Chapter 10 on attempts to transfer liturgical performances into the theatre. These experiments emerge as woodenly transgressive, involving inversions of the sacred where no boundaries to blasphemy are to be found. The implication of this chapter is that the Dutch cannot consume the solids of modernity but can, with self-ordained impunity, sup the toxic versions proffered by liquid modernity. Much of the study is written against the background of what de Groot terms a broken church from whom its affiliates are deeply alienated, hence permitting its spiritual capital to be capriciously re-appropriated (p. 32).
If the study were an account of ecclesial sinking with no prospects of salvage, it would join many others. But what marks it out is the sense of pushing analysis to some unknown boundary. This effort might reflect the use of Bauman. His notion of the liquid applied to distinctly theological areas of love and fear, even if these were not extended directly into the realm of theology. A weakness of de Groot’s study is that he gives far too little attention to fleshing out Bauman’s notion of solid modernity in ecclesial settings. This might account for the brief inconclusive conclusion. Although he wrote little on religion, de Groot mentions Bauman’s surprisingly sympathetic attitude to fundamentalism, which he conceived of as coping with the strange configurations of modernity and the tests they generated. There is a more intriguing facet to de Groot’s deployment of Bauman which could be explored further. As with Goffman and Simmel, and even though, of course, he writes on the Holocaust, Bauman’s Judaism is oddly veiled. His heart is not in it. Instead, what is to be noticed is an unexpected sympathy towards Catholicism. This might reflect his Polish background, hence his suitability for deployment of one of his major concepts to understand the present plight of Dutch Catholicism.
De Groot’s study of dispossession, displacement and decline provides an unusual and important application of Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity to a case study: Dutch Catholicism. What emerges is well-focused. There is nothing elegiac in the study. Rather it is a dispassionate chronicling of dispersal and loss, where repairs are refused for the authority to search for holes. Admittedly, the narrative for a full inquest is missing, but what does appear is an account of dispersal partly due to the lamentable misjudgements of liberal theologians over what to endorse. For them to be savaged in sociology almost seems a sociological tradition. The value of the study to a wider sociological audience is the sense of connection made to wider social forces, notably flowing through modernity and into Catholicism. In an era of ‘post-truth’ and disbelief in any institution, the fate of Catholicism generates enormous questions for culture, politics, but above all European identity. Its social glue too has melted.
There are enough cracks exposed in this account to permit new boundaries to be opened out, perhaps expressed as back to the future, hence the need for further exploration of the residues of solid modernity to discover fodder fit for the re-inventions of tradition. It is placed too easily against liquid modernity, where fluidity rules without judgement and leaks without plumbers, perhaps sociologists, to repair. It is often forgotten that Prospero foretold of spirits melting in the air; but then on the floods of liquid modernity their power to walk back on water is not to be underestimated, even when the dikes of Dutch secularisation preclude the prospects of such returns.