Relevant to a previous post, and a post I referred to by Clive Davis at the Daily Dish, there is this article by Joshua Livestro (again from the new Weekly Standard) on the seeds of a Christian religious revival in Holland.

Take the almost unnoticed reintroduction of crucifixes and other religious artifacts into the classrooms of Catholic schools throughout the country. Years of gradual but seemingly unstoppable secularization have given way to a reaffirmation of old religious identities. The change is also starting to affect the attitudes of pupils at these schools. In a recent newspaper interview, a head teacher at a Catholic secondary school in Rotterdam observed, “For years, pupils were embarrassed about attending Mass. Now, they volunteer to read poems or prayers, and the auditorium is packed.”

There’s also the remarkable critical and commercial success of a number of openly Christian writers. Holland’s most prestigious literary prizes were awarded in 2005 to books dealing in a sympathetic way with Christian issues of faith and redemption. The Libris Literatuur Prize went to the Catholic author Willem Jan Otten for his Specht en zoon (Specht and son) while the AKO Literature Prize was awarded to Calvinist Jan Siebelink’s Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets). Siebelink’s novel sold nearly 350,000 copies in its first year, making it the single bestselling Dutch-language book of the past decade–apart, that is, from a new Bible translation published in 2004, which sold more than half a million copies (in a population of 16 million people).

The gist of the story is that while attendance at the mainstream (and now hopelessly liberal) churches has fallen drastically over the years, there is a building hunger in the populace for what someone quoted in the article calls “a new orthodoxy.” (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In a good way.)

And for those who say that demographics equals destiny, and then just slam the book shut, there is also this interesting factoid:

Analysts usually focus on the one million Muslim immigrants and their offspring who have made the Netherlands their home since the early 1950s. But in the past decade, Muslim immigration has been overtaken by a larger stream of immigrants, namely Christians from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. An SCP estimate puts the number of Christian immigrants in Holland at around 700,000– and rising fast. Recent immigration reports suggest that for every new Muslim moving to Holland, there are at least two new Christian immigrants.

Read it all. We all should have reason to hope that these things are not just aberrations but rather the beginnings of a trend.

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