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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF
IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP
The Secular Sacred

Emotions of Belonging and the
Perils of Nation and Religion
Edited by Markus Balkenhol
Ernst van den Hemel · Irene Stengs
Palgrave Politics of Identity
and Citizenship Series
Series Editors
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Brunel University London
London, UK
Nasar Meer
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
Tariq Modood
University of Bristol
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The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing impor-
tance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically
and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philoso-
phers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions
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Markus Balkenhol
Ernst van den Hemel • Irene Stengs
Editors
The Secular Sacred

Emotions of Belonging and the Perils
of Nation and Religion
Editors
Markus Balkenhol Ernst van den Hemel
Meertens Institute Meertens Institute
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Irene Stengs
Meertens Institute
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

ISBN 978-3-030-38049-6 ISBN 978-3-030-38050-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Contents
1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and

Secularity—Engaging the Paradox 1
Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel, and Irene Stengs
Part I Culture 19
2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The

Impact of the Populist Radical Right on Confessional
Politics in the Netherlands 21
Ernst van den Hemel
3 ‘We’ and ‘The Others’ as Constituents of Symbolic

Politics: On the Populist Exploitation of Long-lasting
Nationalist Sentiments and Resentments Regarding
Citizenship in Germany 43
Irene Götz
v
vi Contents
Part II Public Space 67
4 Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the

Visibility and Erasure of a Muslim Minority in India 69
Stefan Binder
5 Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics

of Contestation of Public Space in Northern Nigeria 89
Murtala Ibrahim
6 Samba Struggles: Carnaval Parades, Race and Religious

Nationalism in Brazil107
Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Santos Godoy
Part III Tolerance 127
7 Homo Sanctus: Religious Contestations and the

Sanctification of Heritage and Human Rights in Vietnam129
Oscar Salemink
8 Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious

Other in the Netherlands155
Josip Kešić and Jan Willem Duyvendak
9 Dutch Tolerance in Black and White: From Religious

Pragmatism to Racialized Ideology173
Alex van Stipriaan
Contents vii
Part IV Images 193
10 Colonial Heritage and the Sacred: Contesting the Statue

of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in the Netherlands195
Markus Balkenhol
11 Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing,

and Enargeia217
Herman Roodenburg
Part V Bodies 235
12 Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the

Sacred237
Jojada Verrips
13 United in Competitive Mourning: Commemorative

Spectacle in Tribute to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of
Thailand263
Irene Stengs
Afterword285
Birgit Meyer
Index291
List of Contributors
Markus Balkenhol Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Stefan Binder University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Jan Willem Duyvendak University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
Adriano Santos Godoy University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
Irene Götz Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany
Ernst van den Hemel Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Murtala Ibrahim Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Josip Kešić University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Birgit Meyer Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Martijn Oosterbaan Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Herman Roodenburg Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Oscar Salemink University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
ix
x List of Contributors
Irene Stengs Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Alex van Stipriaan Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The
Netherlands
Jojada Verrips University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Cover of the German weekly Der Spiegel, No. 2, 1999/1/11:
Wer darf Deutscher werden? Operation Doppelpass (Who is
allowed to become German? Operation dual passport) 53
Fig. 3.2 Campaign of a local conservative party with German-Turks
refusing the Social Democrats’ offer of a dual citizenship,
Rheinland-Pfalz, March 1999; source: Süddeutsche Zeitung,
1999/03/05, p. 5 55
Fig. 3.3 Article Einbürgerungshemmnis Frau. In: die tageszeitung
(taz): 13./14.2.1999, VII, picture by Birgitta Kowsky/
Buenos Dias 56
Fig. 3.4 Campaign of the German government promoting the new
German Nationality Law: Einbürgerung: Fair. Gerecht.
Tolerant (Naturalization: fair, just, tolerant.) (2000),
photograph I.G., placard on a house wall, Berlin 62
Fig. 7.1 Preparing for a spirit medium possession ‘performance’ at
the conference in Nam Đi.nh 2016 140
Fig. 7.2 Spirit procession during Nam Đi.nh conference 2016 142
Fig. 7.3 Spirit medium during procession ritual, Nam Đi.nh 2016 144
Fig. 7.4 Spirit medium in front of the altar with sacrificial effigies,
Nam Đi.nh 2016 145
Fig. 7.5 Petition of spirit mediums to Vietnamese authorities 147
Fig. 10.1 Announcement of the unveiling of the statue of Jan
Pieterszoon Coen, 1893 200
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 10.2 Empty pedestal of the Coen statue, 2011. © Vereniging

Oud Hoorn 204
Fig. 11.1 Rothko Chapel, 1970–1971. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, photograph by G.E. Kidder Smith 218
Fig. 11.2 Aelbert Bouts, The Man of Sorrows (oil on oak,
37.9 × 26.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum,
The Kate, Maurice R. and Melvin R. Seiden Special
Purchase Fund in honor of Seymour and Zoya Slive 225
Fig. 11.3 Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint Bartholomew, 1657 (oil on
canvas, 122.7 × 99.7 cm, detail). Putnam Foundation,
Timken Museum of Art 230
Fig. 12.1 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016 238
Fig. 12.2 Dominicusstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016 239
Fig. 12.11 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 14 December
2016248
Fig. 12.12 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 26 November
2017248
Fig. 12.13 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, December
2018249
Fig. 13.1 Identification and dress code check point at the entrance
of Sanam Luang, Bangkok July 2017 265
Fig. 13.2 Billboard commemorating King Bhumibol, Bangkok 2018 266
Fig. 13.3 Food counter with mourning stickers, Bangkok July 2017 266
Fig. 13.4 Street art ‘we were born in the reign of King Rama 9’,
Bangkok July 2017 272
Fig. 13.5 Building-to-let-advertisement-cum-mourning board,
Chiang May July 2017 273
Fig. 13.6 Queuing mourners in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha,
Bangkok 7 July 2017 277
Fig. 13.7 Screen shot of a figure 9 rituals compilation 280
1
Introduction: Emotional Entanglements
of Sacrality and Secularity—Engaging
the Paradox
Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel,
and Irene Stengs
How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and

national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book
focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil,
the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturaliza-
tion of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in
this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity
mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies
offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are
M. Balkenhol • E. van den Hemel

Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: markus.balkenhol@meertens.knaw.nl;
Ernst.van.den.hemel2@meertens.knaw.nl
I. Stengs (*)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: Irene.stengs@meertens.knaw.nl
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity
and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_1
2 M. Balkenhol et al.
wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms.

At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to
criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of
a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested,
reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the
postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work
are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and
‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investi-
gation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things,
and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entangle-
ments of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis,
we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in
Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning
rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
The Thai King as Secular and Sacred

Again, thousands and thousands of people have come to the sacred heart of
the ‘City of Angels’ (khrungthep) to get as close as possible to the place
where King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand (r. 1946–2016) will be cre-
mated. One day earlier, at 5 AM, the gate had opened briefly to allow sev-
eral thousand people in, most of whom had been waiting for three days and
nights, enduring burning sun and heavy rains, in the hope of being among
the happy few to enter. The early morning television news interviews one
of them, a young woman in tears, overwhelmed by exhaustion and grate-
fulness: she will show her love, respect and gratitude to ‘father’ in the closest
proximity possible for an ordinary person. This Thursday, the day of the
actual cremation, people have been queuing since the early morning at
various replicas of the Royal Crematorium Stadium, to offer sandalwood
funeral flowers in commemoration of the king. It would take people up to
eight hours to reach the spaces in front of the cremation replicas to offer
their flowers. At the Royal Plaza, the square with the most important rep-
lica in terms of size and centrality, the crowd has grown to such a size that
even the streets leading to the actual beginning of the queue are completely
congested. What makes people want to endure such hardships?
1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality… 3
One possible answer lies in the specific figure and reign of the king
himself. The death of King Bhumibol on 13 October 2016 left many in
the kingdom in grief and confusion. With his seventy years’ reign, only a
few of his subjects had lived without him on the throne. In the general
perception, the king, working hard and suffering difficult circumstances,
had lived a life of self-sacrifice for the wellbeing of the nation and the
people. In tribute, people would be very much willing to endure their
one-day-only hardship.
Another possible answer lies in a specific entanglement of religion and
politics. The emotional mass pilgrimage to the mourning site and the
eventual cremation for one part attests to the sacred status of the Thai
king. This sacredness draws on Hindu-Buddhist notions of the ‘righteous
ruler’ whose charismatic royal merit and virtue (bun barami) are sup-
posed to protect and sustain the nation and its people. In this perception,
the monarch is regarded as a beneficial power above politics. In the course
of his long reign, King Bhumibol gained currency as ‘pillar of stability’ in
a country where politics are characterized by a seemingly endless sequence
of coups d’états, new constitutions and corruption scandals.
The sacrality of the king seems obvious in this context, yet it would be
wrong to suggest that people’s devotion to the king is owed exclusively to the
religiosity of the Thai people, to a kind of inherent magical thinking. It is
not uncommon for Western media outlets to present Thai royal rituals as
somewhat outlandish expressions of extreme religiosity. As orientalist per-
ceptions of Asian religiosity tend to do, such exoticism blinds our under-
standing of specific intricacies of religious–political entanglements. For
instance, when highlighting the religious dimension, one obscures the fact
that the Thai king is not only a religious figure, but also someone of political
presence in a secular state, if only as the single most important national symbol.
Within the legal framework of the Thai state, a nominally democratic
regime of popular sovereignty upholding a religiously pluriform society,
the king—the head of state—has no formal political authority, and his
tasks are limited to specific ceremonial executive duties. The Thai state—
whether governed by an elected government or by a military junta—fol-
lows a secular model. Yet, whatever the regime, the king is brought
forward as the symbol of sovereignty of a democracy. Hence, devotion to
the king implies devotion to the (secular) nation. This raises the issue
how this formally secular nation relates to the equally uncontested sacred-
ness of the king.1 In order to understand the political and religious impli-
cations of a shared mourning ritual such as that for the recently deceased
Thai king, we would need to unpack carefully the ways in which religion,
secularity, power and popular emotion are conjointly invested.
Such questions how secular and sacred authority is enmeshed make up
the central theme of this book. How, in various places across the world,
do religious emotions and national sentiments become entangled? The
Thai example resonates in many ways with other spectacles of religious-
secular belonging. Across the world religion and nationalism are re-
articulated in new modes that often challenge existing paradigms and
approaches. From the Brazilian carnaval, with its roots in religious festivi-
ties, its development into secular celebration, which in turn is embraced
by national politicians as hallmark of Brazilian national identity (see
Oosterbaan and Godoy in this volume), to the ways in which religious
diversity in Nigeria is performed and challenged by spatial practices such
as the Ashura ritual procession, performed by Shia Muslims (see Ibrahim),
from public transgressions and expressions of disgust through graffiti in
the streets of Berlin (see Verrips), to the magical power of colonial statues
in the Dutch national imagination (see Balkenhol), the role of religion
and secularity, sacrality and profanation in demarcating communities
increasingly demands our attention. Over the past decades, we have wit-
nessed a spectacular rise of often polarizing sentiments concerning reli-
gion and national identification across Europe and the globe. In Europe,
feelings of home, emotional appeals to community and even the ‘people’
(Volk) are entwined with and fueled by the increasing presence of religion
in European public spheres, long considered to have been thoroughly
secularized. For instance, new nationalists and the continent’s political
and cultural elites frame the presence of Islam as a threat to the ‘secular’
character of the nation. At the same time, religious, for example, ‘Judeo-
Christian’ roots of secular nations are increasingly mobilized (Hemel 2014).
In short, contrary to the commonly held view that nationalism offers
an alternative imagined community for the religious community
1
The political relevance of this question is demonstrated by a ruling of the constitutional court in
August 2019, that the Thai king is above the constitution.
(Cavanaugh 2011), this book is inspired both by recent developments in

which religion, secularity and nationalism are interconnected in new
ways, as well as by recent scholarly approaches that are sensitive to the
interconnections of nationalism and religion. Generally, scholars have
traditionally identified nationalism as religion, nationalism or religion,
and nationalism and religion (Anderson 1983; Safran 2002). Instead of
focusing on the creation of meta-categories, we argue that religion and
secular nationalism can both partake in processes of sacralization and de-
sacralization. This book focuses, not on the separation of categories, but
on the interconnections and the new forms of sacrality that arise as a
result of new connections (Meyer and de Witte 2013). As the mourning
rituals for the Thai king demonstrate, the emotions involved are con-
nected simultaneously with the secular Thai state, with the king as its
religious figurehead, and with the modes of belonging that are produced
by its interconnections (see Stengs, this volume). Secular nationalism and
religious dimensions are connected in many ways and we need to unpack
the many folds carefully and according to the context in which they arise.
A focus on emotions, we propose, allows us to bring together practices,
both religious and secular, that are often studied in isolation. We propose
to approach the way in which emotions are implicated, performed and
become legible by using a concept we call ‘the secular sacred’.
The Secular Sacred: A Praxeological Approach

The Thai king, ‘Upholder of the Buddhist Religion, and Defender of the
Faith’ and head of a religiously diverse secular state, but also the sanctifi-
cation of tolerance as a ‘Judeo-Christian value’, and the human right of
religious freedom, used as a global value to define and defend religious
practices (see Salemink in this volume) are all examples of what we call a
‘secular sacred’: a person, object, image, representation or place in which
secular and sacred ideas, feelings, emotions, motivations, experiences,
perceptions, intertwine, conflate and conflict. We take the secular sacred
to denote the intertwining processes of secularization and sacralization.
This entanglement works both ways: sacred objects can take on new func-
tions in secular imaginations, gazes and practices, thereby potentially
losing or at least transforming their sacredness in the process. Inversely,

secular practices and values can take on well-nigh sacred dimensions as
they become the subject of worship or interdiction. All of these entangle-
ments are objects of study in what we call the secular sacred.
We deliberately use the articulation of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ to distin-
guish the ‘secular’ from the ‘profane’. Whereas the profane, in the words
of Roger Caillois (1959), the sphere of common usage, is opposed to the
sacred (an ambiguous domain of fear and hope and characterized by dan-
ger), the secular is not. Following scholars like Talal Asad, we argue that
the secular contains or even emerges through processes of sacralization.
In Asad’s words, the secular:
(…) is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it

(that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from
it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred).
(2003: 25)
Instead of the opposite of religion, Asad understands the secular to be

an ordering principle that brings together certain ‘behaviors, knowledges,
and sensibilities in modern life’ (ibid: 24). Saba Mahmood goes a step
further by pointing out that the notion of ‘the secular’ is far from a neu-
tral separation of religion and state, but should be seen as an extension of
an ideological view, secularism, in which a normative bias toward
Christianity is palpable:
As much of recent scholarship suggests, contrary to the ideological self-

understanding of secularism (as the doctrinal separation of religion and
state), secularism has historically entailed the regulation and reformation
of religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices to yield a particular normative
conception of religion (that is largely Protestant Christian in its contours).
(2009: 87)
In Mahmood’s understanding, to portray secularism as opposed to

religion is itself an operation of secularist ideology, in which the secular
conceals its quintessentially Protestant foundations. These considerations
are of importance to this book not because we want to repeat a critique
of secularity. We want to take our cue from the insight that such critical
investigations of secularity mean we have to start in medias res. This book
understands these critiques of secularity as an impetus to work bottom
up, all the time taking our own conceptual background and trajectories
into consideration.
Transcending the idea that ‘the secular’ and ‘the sacred’ are separate
categories, we seek to find new and better ways to understand the current
emotionally charged articulations of nationalism and religion that have
come to define the beginning of the twenty-first century in many places
across the globe. We propose to use the notion of the ‘secular sacred’ in
order to analyze this worldwide phenomenon. The key innovation of this
book is that it investigates this conjuncture by bringing together three
focal points: emotions, nationalism and religion. We argue that this com-
bination provides an important update to an understanding of the poli-
tics of binding, belonging and exclusion across the globe. The concept of
the secular sacred allows us to focus on the processes of cultural produc-
tion through which notions of the secular and the sacred emerge in spe-
cific ethnographic settings. Not seeking to define the secular or the
religious, the book focuses on the boundary work through which both
categories are being defined, contested and re-made in social and political
practice.
The ‘secular sacred’, then, in this book is crafted to approach new
modalities of sacrality as well as the impact of secular paradigms on more
classically religious registers of sacrality. The ‘secular sacred’ indicates a
starting point in the middle of this entanglement in order to understand
how public spaces, images and bodies are constituted and contested in
new ways.
Far from being an emphasis on the rational choices individuals might
make, we focus on how the secular sacred unconsciously guides emotions
and delineations of belonging. For instance, echoing Sara Ahmed’s work
on emotions, we might not know how we feel nor why we feel the way
we do. The person standing before a painting by Mark Rothko who feels
the tears well up might not be conscious of the tradition of sacred tears
and art, nor might it be a conscious continuation of a tradition, yet as
Roodenburg outlines in his description of this phenomenon, the words
used to describe these experiences, the way in which Rothko describes his
artworks all directly draw from or resonate with explicit registers of

sacrality.
These shifting, coalescing, overlapping and contradicting qualities
associated with secularism and religion call for a praxeological approach,
paying particular attention to the involvement of the body, the emotions
and the senses or, more specifically, to ‘embodied practices’, ‘sensational
forms’ and sense perception (aisthesis) (Meyer 2006; Scheer 2012; Verrips
2005). Such an approach sheds light not only on how the secular and the
sacred are mediated, but also on how they deeply take root in people
becoming all the more persuasive. The secular sacred emphatically
includes the study of objects, materials and images that would be excluded
in a ‘mentalistic’ (Meyer 2012: 8) framework. The secular sacred is not
inward and personal, but takes place precisely at the intersection of the
public and the private, evoking and mediating emotions, mobilizing old
and creating new publics. Taking the established notions of habitus, the
body, senses, and emotions as a point of departure (Bourdieu 1977;
Connerton 1989), then, may provide us with a more detailed under-
standing of how practices may both reproduce and (temporarily) subvert
structures of power. Thus, our notion of the secular sacred implies a criti-
cal engagement with seemingly self-evident distinctions between religion
and the secular inherent in Western modernity. In other words, the emer-
gence of categories like ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ have to be understood
in the context of European colonial expansion, and the confrontation
with difference it entailed (Veer 1994).
Sections of this Book

This book is structured around several ‘secular sacreds’ that unfold in
various contexts worldwide. In particular, we present the following nodal
points: culture, tolerance, public space, images and the body. Guiding
principle in these sections is that the chapters take a bottom-up perspec-
tive by presenting ethnographic studies in which the nation, secular and
religious dimensions entangle. Unpacking these entanglements provides
us with an opportunity to revisit familiar approaches and hence formu-
late an updated understanding of our emotionally volatile times.
Culture
Culture has, in recent decades, become a sacrosanct concept in many
places around the world. Whereas in mainstream secularization theory
the spheres of the religious and the secular drift apart, we witness, in
Europe and elsewhere, both academic and politically influential
approaches that emphasize interconnections, fusions and more complex
relations to cultural identity. Take for instance Samuel Huntington’s
famous idea of a clash of civilizations, in which the fault lines of the next
major conflicts were announced to be cultural (Huntington 1993). In his
framework, cultural identity is defined as the most broad, far-reaching,
basic identification humans are capable of. For Huntington, secularity is
part and parcel of a Western, cultural framework in which religion plays
a significant role. Note also how religion and secularity are part of this
cultural clash:
We are facing a need and a movement far transcending the level of issues
and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a
clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of
an ancient rival [Islamic civilization] against our Judeo-Christian heritage,
our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. (Bernard Lewis,
as quoted in Huntington 1993: 32)
For Huntington, secularity is part and parcel of a Western, cultural

framework in which religious heritage plays a significant role. In this
sense, cultural identity is frequently opposed to and triggered by critical
reflections on globalization. In the twenty-first century, religion and sec-
ularity are taken up in processes of culturalization and polarization in
new and often profoundly disruptive ways. This is further complicated by
the fact that culture is formulated in increasingly nativist terms
(Duyvendak 2011; Balkenhol et al. 2016). As Etienne Balibar argues,
cultural identity can play the role nature once played, raising the question
in what ways culture can function in structurally similar ways to race.
Frequently what is at stake in invocations of culture is what Appadurai
has called a ‘community of sentiment’ (Appadurai 1990: 93): ‘a group
that begins to imagine and feel things together’. This can take the shape
of rather vague or even deliberately empty signifiers that invite people to

attach their feelings of discomfort. The chapters in this section deploy
ethnographic analysis to map how invocations of cultural communities
of sentiments take place.
In his contribution, Ernst van den Hemel looks at the implications of
current populist discourse on ‘religion’, which sets up new conflations of
and juxtapositions between the secular and the religious. His analysis of
a local debate by a Dutch orthodox Protestant political party shows that
populist discursive practice can productively be characterized as a pro-
foundly influential postsecular imagination. Irene Götz presents a case
study on the repetitive debates on ‘dual citizenship’ in Germany, that has
to be contextualized by a historic sketch on the ‘anthropologization’ of
the ‘national’, which developed into a powerful emotional movement
during the nineteenth century and started to attract the masses via cul-
tural images and bodily practices.
Public Space
The public sphere has long been a constitutive element of ‘the secular’.
Presumed to be neutral, and its neutrality safeguarded by a secular state,
the public sphere is, both in common parlance as well as in theory, an
important site where citizens of the secular state can meet on equal foot-
ing regardless of religious outlook. Religion, concomitantly, is relegated
to the private sphere (e.g. the conjugal home) where it can be practiced
without interference. Such a clear distinction has become, as we have
argued above, untenable considering the continued presence and newly
emerging forms of public religion (Vries and Sullivan 2006), the increas-
ingly apparent entanglements of the public sphere with religion in gen-
eral and Protestantism in particular (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2009), as
well as nascent questions concerning location of religion in connection to
new media and globalizing currents (Knott 2005; Meyer and Moors
2006). These developments have led scholars to be wary of clear-cut dis-
tinctions between private and public spheres, and the presence or absence
of religion. The spatial turn, marking a move away from place as neutral
metric and toward space as constitutive, dynamic and complex, has
inspired scholars of religion to ask not just what takes place in public
places but also how space constitutes publics and vice versa how public
performances constitutes public space. In a 2013 volume, for instance,
Knott et al. highlight how media portrayals of religion and new media
activities re-shape the role of religious and secular beliefs and values in
public life. Moving beyond these critical reflections, we focus on material
and spatial contestations in particular, taking place in public space. This
focus on public space allows us to unpack the way in which divisions
between public and private registers are far from stable but hinge upon
perpetual performances and forms of public circulation. Moreover,
notions of who belongs to the public sphere and the complex role of reli-
gious items, rituals and people therein, are themselves to an important
degree, constituted by performances taking place in public space. From
Hindu-nationalist public proclamations that public space should be
dominated by a homogeneous shared culture, to the performance of pub-
lic mourning as we have seen in Thailand, public space is the site of
clashes and contestations in which emotions related to nationalism, reli-
gion and secularity run high. Ethnographic description and analysis of
contestations in public space are ways of entry into understanding the
complex forces that make up who will be seen, heard, felt and smelled and
will take up a certain place in a community.
Stefan Binder, in his contribution, highlights how organized atheism
presents a particular challenge to the way in which religious nationalism
increasingly aligns itself with Hinduism in India. Murtala Ibrahim pres-
ents an analysis of a variety of ‘pious spectacles’ in Northern Nigeria in
which particularly the rituals of Shia Muslims highlight questions of vis-
ibility, contestations and presence of religious pluriformity. In their chap-
ter, Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Godoy present an analysis of
Brazilian carnaval, where the festive body is framed by overlapping layers
of religion, popular culture and national identity.
Tolerance
Originally a concept that arose in Western Europe to manage conflicts
between Protestants, tolerance developed for many into a hallmark of
Western modernity. Continuously, the notion served to regulate differ-
ences, but also to demarcate communities along moral lines. Tolerance
has proven a tricky and at times paradoxical notion, however. Karl Popper
has described the ‘paradox of tolerance’ as follows: ‘Unlimited tolerance
must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. … We should therefore
claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant’
(Popper 1945: 226). But how are the borders between tolerance and
intolerance defined and policed?
In recent decades, the nature and boundaries of tolerance have become
a hotbed of debate, division and conflict. According to Wendy Brown,
there has been something of a global renaissance in discourse on toler-
ance. Tolerance is now enumerated and promoted at the United Nations,
in the context of human rights campaigns, as a tool of managing diverse
societies, as a key to pacifying racially divided neighborhoods, or in the
context of LGBTQ+ rights. Tolerance has become transpolitical as it is
being mobilized by progressives, liberals, conservatives, fundamentalist
Christians and atheists alike:
tolerance knows no political party: it is what liberals and leftists reproach a

religious, xenophobic, and homophobic right for lacking, but also what
evangelical Christians claim that secular liberals refuse them and what con-
servative foreign policy ideologues claim America cherishes and ‘radical
Islamicists’ abhor. (Brown 2009: 3)
What originated as a theological and philosophical debate about free-

dom and the state has in recent years turned into a sacrosanct essence
through which various actors define themselves.
The three articles in this section each take up this changing character
of the notion of tolerance. Oscar Salemink describes how tolerance is
central to human rights discourse, and the implications of the global use
of tolerance. In particular, he explores how religious toleration in Vietnam
is used by a variety of actors to claim (inter)national recognition. The case
of spirit possessions in Vietnam provides a particularly poignant example
of the disciplinary implications of global tolerance. Josip Kešić and Jan
Willem Duyvendak argue that tolerance is mobilized from a quasi-
historical perspective in which it incorrectly appears as a continuous his-
tory since the time of Spinoza. This selective history of the concept
implies the ‘forgetting’ of many other periods in which the Dutch were
conservative and intolerant. Alex van Stipriaan asks how this famed
Dutch tolerance functions within a history of extreme asymmetrical rela-
tions between white and black in Dutch history from slavery up till today.
Is tolerance a white privilege? If so, is there also black tolerance? And
what does tolerance mean in the (coming?) age of reparations and
reconciliation?
Images
Images are often found at the heart of controversies around where to
draw the line between the secular and the religious: at what point does an
image lose or gain its sacredness, where does freedom of expression end,
and blasphemy begin (Kruse et al. 2018)? Cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed or the protests by Pussy Riot and Femen have become scan-
dalous precisely because they test and redefine the limits of tolerance, free
speech and transgression. In short, the boundaries of the secular and the
sacred are not given, but emerge through an engagement with images.
People not only embrace or reject certain images, but they show strong
bodily and affective responses. Cases of blasphemy, for instance, can
cause literal disgust or nausea, but images, both religious and profane,
can also be held dear and caressed. All of these processes deeply involve
the body, the senses and emotions. In the words of Hans Belting the sig-
nificance of images ‘becomes accessible only when we take into account
other, non-iconic determinants such as, in a most general sense, medium
and body’ (Belting 2005: 302). The body may be both performing and
perceiving, but Belting regards bodies as central to an understanding of
the significance of images. This resonates with the idea of religion as an
outward form that exerts influence beyond religious contexts as such, but
intersects with politics and society at large.
The contributions in this section engage with black Atlantic and Dutch
settings. Markus Balkenhol looks at the international controversies about
colonial statues through the lens of the Dutch case of Jan Pieterszoon
Coen, widely seen as a maritime hero of the Dutch Golden Age, but also
infamous for his brutal reign in the Dutch East Indian colonies. Balkenhol
looks at how the magical power of statues is harnessed, disavowed and
contested. At stake here is the modern subject whose supposed secularism

is constantly undermined by magic. Herman Roodenburg analyzes the
way in which the abstract art of Mark Rothko is the subject of processes
of secular sacralization. Analyzing the tears viewers shed in front of his
monochrome artworks, Roodenburg outlines the way in which registers
of the sacred and profound bodily reactions to sacred images such as tears
cross over into the domain of modern art.
Bodies
In societies where issues of secular and sacred values are at stake, the body
invariably becomes the object of fierce debate. Debates on the status of
the body are a hallmark of secularizing society where secular autonomy
has frequently clashed with more explicitly confessional oriented concep-
tualizations of the body. However, more important than re-hashing the
struggle between liberal autonomy and confessional dependence, this
book aims to highlight what binds approaches to the body. The sover-
eignty of the body as the ultimate locus of self-understanding, indisput-
able site of existential experience and embodied knowledge has attained a
sacred value in many societies (Csordas 1994). This leads to all sorts of
new clashes. For instance, the universal rights of personal freedom and
integrity of the body often clash with the sovereign secular power of the
nation-state, which aims to discipline human bodies by exercising rules
and regulations, politics that often include violence. The body is thus also
a visual marker of autochthony and belonging (Geschiere 2009). The
immanent transcendental potential in bodies is often most palpable dur-
ing emotional events that celebrate the nation-state or other communi-
ties, such as commemorative ceremonies, sport celebrations, election
victories, entailing processes of sacralization in which bodies play a piv-
otal role (see Emile Durkheim’s (1915) and Victor Turner’s (2018) respec-
tive notions of effervescence and communitas). In our view, this shows
that such communities are not simply ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983), but
that they take shape through emotional and visceral engagements
(Meyer 2009).
The essays in this section reflect these tensions: through his discussion
of disgust as a deeply physical sentiment that is in close proximity to the
sacred, Jojada Verrips analyzes how linguistic violence is part and parcel
of both the religious as well as the secular sacred. Verrips focuses on vul-
gar graffiti on glass containers in Berlin, where a scatological debate on
immigrants is waged. Verrips takes up this mundane occurrence in order
to analyze how disgust informs both contemporary polarization as well as
the reactions to contemporary political linguistic violence. Irene Stengs
presents an ethnographic analysis of the vast movements and choreo-
graphic ritual arrangements of Thai mourning King Bhumibol in black-
and-white colored bodies. She demonstrates how the massive emotional
ritual outpour for one part was grounded in a fierce and coercive royalist-
nationalism, and for another part has been organized by and dissemi-
nated along the administrative state structure. The Thai secular
administration, in other words, is pivotal in (re)producing the sacrality of
the monarchy.
The essays thus contribute to both a practical understanding of these
individual contexts, as well as to an overarching conceptual debate.
Taking our cue from Birgit Meyer, these contributions focus on ‘the net-
work of relations that make the sacred a social reality (…) what bodies
and things do, on the practices that put them to work, on the epistemo-
logical and aesthetic paradigms that organize the bodily experience of
things (…)’ (Meyer et al. 2010: 209). Paying attention to concrete
embodied practices, as well as the lives of images and the performance in
public space, enables us to understand in better detail how specific rela-
tions of power inform and transform people’s lives.
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licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or
exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the
copyright holder.
Part I
Culture
2
The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized
Religion: The Impact of the Populist
Radical Right on Confessional Politics
in the Netherlands
Ernst van den Hemel
etting the Scene: ‘Is Islam a Threat

S
to the Netherlands?’
The debate created quite a stir from the moment it was announced in
spring 2017. The poster depicting a bomb about to explode, in combi-
nation with the main topic of the debate—‘is Islam a threat to the
Netherlands?’—was associated with islamophobia as usually practiced
by the populist radical right (provocative cartoons of the prophet
Mohamed wearing a bomb as a turban or the well-known image of the
suicide bomber). However, in this case it was not the populist radical
right, but a confessional political party, the Reformed Party (the
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij [SGP]) who organized the debate. Was
the Reformed Party now copying far-right populist discourse? The reac-
tions suggest the organizers were at the least uncomfortable with the
E. van den Hemel (*)

e-mail: Ernst.van.den.hemel2@meertens.knaw.nl
© The Author(s) 2020 21

M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity
and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_2
22 E. van den Hemel
public associations the poster created. Faced with nation-wide backlash,

the organizers withdrew and re-designed the poster, replacing the bomb
with a mosque. But questions remained: was it simply naïveté on the
part of the organizers? Was it indicative of a shift to the right? Or, rather,
is this apparent flirt by confessional political actors with populist imag-
ery part of a more complex shift in the Dutch political landscape? By
zooming in on this debate, I investigate the question of how religious
players situate themselves in a political landscape that increasingly draws
on ‘religion’ as a marker of identity.1
In this debate, a number of important issues come to the fore. As I will
show, the discourse of the participants in this debate illustrates how sig-
nificant yet unclear the impact of the populist radical right2 is in the
Dutch political landscape. In particular, it shows that orthodox confes-
sional politics, long an outsider in the Dutch political landscape, is in the
process of resituating itself. As I will show, the rise of the populist radical
right on the one hand offers a register that allows confessional politics to
resituate itself in postsecular Dutch society, but this also brings along
unforeseen consequences. In times in which religion is used to indicate a
contrast between ‘Islam’ and ‘the Judeo-Christian West’, the question
arises who belongs to Dutch Judeo-Christian culture? What is the place
of orthodox Christianity in the clash of civilizations?
In order to answer these questions, I propose to close-read the way in
which participants of this debate fuse orthodox Protestant registers with
discourse hailing from the populist radical right and how this constitutes
a continuation or rupture with the register of Protestant orthodoxy. I will
first set the scene by situating the Reformed Party in the Dutch political
landscape. I will subsequently discuss how the rise of the populist radical
right has impacted the status of religion in Dutch political discourse. I
will then return to the debate and the discourse of its participants to show
how the political relevance of religion has been given a new yet
confusingly diverse lease on life in the twenty-first century. I conclude by
reflecting on implications for the future of the Dutch political landscape.
1
I base myself here and in what follows on fieldwork at the event, conducted together with my
colleague Pooyan Tamimi Arab. The responsibility for text, translation, and interpretation is mine.
2
In this article, I use Cas Mudde’s definition of right-wing political parties as characterized by ‘a
core ideology that is a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism’ (Mudde
2007: 26).
2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The Impact… 23
onfessional Politics: The SGP on the Outside

C
and Inside
The Reformed Political Party was founded in 1918 as a result of discon-
tent among orthodox Protestants in the Netherlands with two other
Protestant political parties.3 The founders of the SGP accused the more
mainstream confessional parties of having become too weak in translat-
ing religious conviction in political principles. In a time when suffrag-
ettes, electoral innovation and rising communism was seen as threatening
the true Christian way of life, the SGP argued, a truly Christian political
party needs to take a firm stand for true principles of faith. The resulting
party, the SGP, developed into a firebrand theocratic party with unapolo-
getic activism in favour of theocracy. Up until today, the party includes a
paraphrase from the 1561 Belgic Confession (Nederlandse Geloofsbelijdenis)
in its declaration of principles: ‘the government should ban atheist propa-
ganda, false religions and anti-Christian ideologies from public life’.4 The
exact portent of this phrase, known as ‘the 21 words’, is complex and
changes over time. For instance, it was initially mainly oriented towards
the persecution of Catholics, and was later used to counter atheism, and,
presently, as we will see, Islam, but by and large it indicates that the role
of the government is not to be a neutral arbiter of a religiously pluriform
nation, but rather to be the protector of Christianity (Zwaag 2018). In
short, the SGP was a firmly anti-secular party in origin.
As the Netherlands transformed from one of the most religious coun-
tries in Europe to one of the most secularized ones, the party vehemently
opposed the legalization of abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage. In
particular, the SGP has had a long track record of protesting equality
between men and women. Already in the first party programme of 1918,
they had explicitly rejected voting rights for women, and when the right
to vote was passed in 1922, in spite of fiery parliamentary objections by
3
I base myself here on the historical overview of the SGP published to commemorate its centenary
(Vollaard and Voerman 2018).
4
For the most recent statement of principles of the SGP and all past editions, see the repository
created by the University of Groningen: http://pubnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/?Search=&SortBy=date_
issued&SearchIns[]=&Title=SGP%20beginselprogramma%27s&pQuery=Metadata_Party_pro-
gram.party%20like%20%27SGP%25%27
24 E. van den Hemel
SGP parliamentarians, the party called upon its female constituents not
to use their right to vote. This standpoint remained in effect until 1989.
In 1993, the party explicitly affirmed that women were not allowed to
become members of the SGP. After a long juridical trajectory, the party
was forced in 2010 to allow women to be electable for the SGP.5
Although these positions place the party on the margins of the Dutch
political landscape, the electoral appeal of the SGP has remained stable
though limited. Its electoral appeal has been almost exclusively based on
the religious communities it draws its inspiration from (orthodox
reformed Dutch Protestantism). It remains stable because the SGP has a
loyal electorate and, all reports of secularization notwithstanding, the
religious population it draws its voters from remains stable due to rela-
tively high procreation rates and diminished impact of dwindling church
numbers.
In order to further understand the position of the SGP, we need to
highlight not just how the SGP is situated in the Dutch political land-
scape but also in the geographical landscape. The main constituencies of
the SGP are located in the so-called Bible Belt.6 Running from the north
of the Netherlands down to the South West, the Bible Belt encircles the
most densely populated urban areas known as the Randstad. The Bible
Belt is a region where church attendance, in particular that of the
Orthodox Protestant Churches, remains high, and where the influence of
religion on public and political life is strong. As a result, the SGP can
count on solid electoral representation. This leads to the fact that although
the party has a limited presence in parliament in terms of parliamentary
seats, regionally they are a major player as they are included in many
executive boards of municipalities and they provide numerous aldermen
and mayors in the Bible Belt. In the Bible Belt, secularization plays out
differently than in the cities, and hardliner confessional politics plays a
bigger role in that region compared to the major cities. The Bible Belt
thus also is a place that challenges all too easy understandings of the
5
Henk Post ‘Een gespannen relatie. De SGP en de vrouw’, 2019.
6
Fred van Lieburg has provided an important impetus in modernizing the study of the Bible Belt
in the Netherlands (Lieburg 2010). Furthermore, see Hemel (2014) for an overview of how the
Bible Belt does not sit comfortably in larger histories of Dutch society as the vanguard of
secularization.
Netherlands as one of the most secularized countries on earth. The image

of Dutch secularity (both abroad and among the Dutch themselves) is
often predicated upon a foregrounding of the urban regions of the
Netherlands.
This short expose serves as a backdrop that allows us to understand the
shifts in understanding that occur when the political landscape changes.
It allows us to understand how the rise of the populist radical right pro-
vokes a reconsideration of the way in which the SGP is framed. The SGP,
which has historically been a self-conscious radical voice of orthodoxy
from the margin which prides itself for countering the secular spirit of the
times with theocratic hardlinership, is now confronted with a changed
religious-political landscape in which religion is present in new ways.
This challenges parties like the SGP to reformulate their own positions.
In particular, I want to highlight how the tendency of the populist radical
right to speak in terms of a dominant religious national culture (which
needs to be protected from Islam and multiculturalists) resonates as well
as clashes with the way in which SGP constituents conceive of the public
role of religion. In order to explain this, I need to first outline how the
rise of the populist radical right stimulated not just ardent islamophobia,
but also a reappraisal of (Judeo-)Christianity.
he Rise of the Populist Radical Right

T
and Religion: Dutch Culture Is Christian!
As is becoming increasingly clear, the rise of the populist radical right
changed the political agenda not only by including immigration and a
criticism of Islam, but also by its willingness to revisit and reframe the
role of religion and secularity in Western societies. In particular, the ten-
dency to reposition Christianity as Leitkultur of Western nation states has
led the populist radical right to a willingness to favour Christianity,
defined in religious-cultural terms, over other religions, most notably, of
course, Islam.7
7
Hemel (2017a).
26 E. van den Hemel
The perhaps most well-known example of this mode of thinking can

be found in Samuel Huntington’s ‘A Clash of Civilizations?’ In this semi-
nal text, the incommensurability of civilizations is proclaimed. These
civilizations, that are unavoidably headed for conflict according to
Huntington, are to an important degree characterized by religion. Take
for instance the following quotation, in which Huntington cites Bernard
Lewis and which was the inspiration for the title of this famous article.
Huntington describes how in the near future we will see a clash between
‘Islam’ and ‘The West’, which he further specifies as follows:
This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but

surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heri-
tage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both.
(Huntington 1993: 32)
Culture, in Huntington’s mindset, is defined as the deepest identifica-

tion that a human being is capable of. Note how in this quotation, ‘our
secular present’ and ‘our Judeo-Christian heritage’ are conflated into ‘the
world-wide expansion’ of Western culture. For Huntington, as for many
others of the populist radical right, Judeo-Christian heritage and secular-
ity together make up contemporary Western culture.
In different contexts across Western Europe and North America, we
see similar discourses take hold.8 Take, for instance, this citation from
perhaps the first Dutch populist politician in the twenty-first century,
Pim Fortuyn:9
Problems concentrate around all those fellow-citizens that originate from

areas that are culturally very different from us. In general, we can say that
Islamic cultures are very different from areas that are culturally speaking
Judeo-Christian (…). Problems concerning integration and mutual accep-
tance are centred on the relation between the dominant Judeo-Christian
humanistic culture on the one hand and Islamic culture on the other. I
consciously speak in the broad terminology of culture rather than of
8
Duyvendak (2011), Duyvendak et al. (2016).
9
Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002) was a politician and founder of what has been called the first populist
radical right party of the Netherlands in the twenty-first century.
r eligion. One can leave a religion, as we can see happening massively in our
country, a culture however, one cannot leave behind. (Fortuyn 2002: 83)
In this citation, drawn from Fortuyn’s 2002 book De verweesde samen-

leving: een religieus-sociologisch traktaat (‘The Orphaned Society: A
Religious-Sociological Treatise’), religion functions in two ways. In the
first, religion is associated with cultural identity and in the second, it is
associated with a confession an individual can hold (or leave behind).
These two can clash, or contradict each other. As Fortuyn outlines, it is
one of the characteristics of Dutch Judeo-Christian-humanistic culture
that people leave religion behind, thus connecting an aspect of seculariza-
tion (dwindling church numbers) to Judeo-Christian culture. This asso-
ciation of secularization with a religious-cultural framework occurs more
frequently in Dutch exponents of the populist radical right. Thierry
Baudet, for instance, contemporary politician and self-expressed heir of
Fortuyn, is known for his embrace of Christianity-as-culture. In a recent
Tweet, he expresses a similar conflation of leaving religion and Christianity:
‘In fact, being atheist means being a Christian. Atheism is a subset of
Christianity’.10
Although discursive manoeuvres like this have been ridiculed as con-
tradictory, it is becoming more and more apparent that it resonates with
religious and non-religious members of the Dutch electorate. In earlier
publications, I have described how this discourse is increasingly effective
in setting up alliances of odd bedfellows (Hemel 2017a, 2017b; Balkenhol
and Hemel 2019). Secular (including explicitly atheist) and confessional
actors can find themselves united around a cause, be it a protest against
the construction of a mosque, alleged attacks on Easter by Muslims and
‘self-hating liberal elites’, or controversies concerning Christmas trees or
the saying of ‘Merry Christmas’, in the name of fidelity to a shared, yet
vaguely defined, notion of Judeo-Christian heritage.
What is more, whereas at the beginning of the twenty-first century this
discourse was largely limited to the populist radical right, it is now not
uncommon to see more mainstream liberal and Christian democratic
10
Thierry Baudet (@thierrybaudet): ‘Atheïsme is in feite een vorm van christen zijn; een subcatego-
rie van het Christendom.’ 10 September 2016, 12: 16. https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/
status/774688057320738816
28 E. van den Hemel
parties echo similar sentiments. At the moment of writing, the three larg-
est parties in parliament have referenced as their goal to protect the
Judeo-Christian culture of the Netherlands. Thus, it can happen that a
liberal prime minister of the Netherlands takes it upon himself to protect
Easter Eggs against alleged attacks by self-hating elites and Muslims11 and
that the leader of the Christian Democrats proclaimed the following
rather free-wheeling interpretation of history when he was pressured to
provide examples of the superior Christian values: ‘well, you know, things
we’ve had here for thousands of years, like equality between men
and women’.
These examples show that the status of secularity is shifting in the
Netherlands. The rise of the populist radical right heralded the advent of
a discourse in which it is increasingly normalized to state that not all
cultures are equal, that it befits a government to discriminate between
native Judeo-Christian culture and the culture of newcomers, and that
Islam should be curtailed in order to protect the secular, and therefore
Judeo-Christian, culture of the Netherlands. The results of this are far-
reaching. Not only does the rise of such discourse create crucial questions
about the status of constitutional protection of the rights of Muslims in
the Netherlands, but it is also far from clear what the fusion of secular
and religious registers means for Christians themselves. When the popu-
list radical right speaks of Judeo-Christianity to describe the accomplish-
ments of secularity, where do Christians fit in? In particular, how do
Christians whose orthodoxy puts them at odds with secular accomplish-
ments fit in?
Having formulated an understanding of the religious-secular discourse
of the populist radical right, I will illustrate how this discourse resonates
with SGP constituents. Its insistence on the importance of religion in
national matters, its willingness to see the government as not only allowed
to, but also obliged to discriminate between religions, and its vehement
criticism of Islam resonate with the fighting spirit that has characterized
In 2017, a Dutch warehouse chain was accused of having changed the name of its assortment of
11
Easter Eggs, which now appear in the spring catalogue as ‘hiding eggs’. This was first taken up by
populist radical right politicians as an example of a ‘fatwa against Easter’ and it led prime minister
Mark Rutte to declare on national radio that he sees it as his task as leader of the Netherlands, to
make sure that ‘Easter remains Easter’. See Hemel (2017b) for further analysis.
the SGP since its inception. Yet, on the other hand, the conflation of
secular and religious registers also creates tensions for the constituents of
the SGP which, historically, has not had much truck with secular accom-
plishments and the embrace of gay rights and feminisms as hallmarks of
Western culture. As I will show, the populist radical right discourse is
present explicitly and implicitly in the discourse of the participants of the
debate, creating a particular set of tensions. To illustrate this, let us now
return to the debate.
The ‘Islam Debate’

The Islam debate took place in Oldebroek, which is a municipality of
23,500 inhabitants in the province of Gelderland. This location is of par-
ticular interest, as it is one of the better-known communities in the Bible
Belt. I described above how the Bible Belt is itself an anomaly in the
mainstream narrative in which secular Dutch society has shed its reli-
gious past. As I will show later on, the location of this debate is of impor-
tance in more ways than one.
The venue was Molen de Hoop, an old repurposed windmill which now
functions as a monument and a venue to be rented for events. We counted
80 people in attendance, of which 8 were female, and all were white. The
room in which the debate was held contained rows of opposing benches
and chairs. This set up was intentional, the moderator highlighted. The
set-up of the room aimed to mirror that of Lagerhuis, a Dutch
TV-programme in which proponents and opponents of a statement
debated whilst sitting on opposing sides of the room. This programme, in
turn, was named after the House of Commons in the United Kingdom,
where the two parties are seated opposite each other. However, as the
audience that was assembled in the old windmill was not divided accord-
ing to political leanings, the moderator of the debate in Oldebroek asked
the audience to ‘help out’ by taking up positions in favour or in opposi-
tion of the prepared statements. As the statements were read out, this
format was quickly abandoned and what took place resembled more of a
session in which SGP politicians and constituents reflected on a number
30 E. van den Hemel
of talking points that were direct citations from well-known populist

radical right politicians and movements.
The debate covered prepared statements such as ‘should Islam have the
same rights as Christianity in the Netherlands?’, and ‘Does moderate
Islam exist?’ and ‘We should no longer allow even a single Muslim to
enter the Netherlands’. What binds the statements is a concern with
Islam and the need to take measures to curtail its influence and presence.
What is more, all of these statements are either direct citations from or
paraphrases of a discourse championed by the populist radical right. For
instance, populist radical right politician Geert Wilders has included in
its programmes and publications sentences such as ‘there is no such thing
as moderate Islam’ and ‘moderate Islam does not exist’.12 In general, the
selection of statements communicated a clear goal for the evening: what
should the SGP’s reaction be to arguments put forward by the populist
radical right?
As the debate unfolded, there was little disagreement about the state-
ments themselves, nor was there a debate about the viability or desirabil-
ity of constitutional changes necessary to effectuate the implementation
of most of these statements. On the contrary, a majority of participants
seemed to be in agreement with these statements. Most of the energy of
the debate was directed towards providing argumentations why these
statements should be supported. Let me provide some illustrations.
When debating whether ‘Muslims should have the same rights as
Christians’, most participants chimed in with arguments in favour of dis-
criminating in favour of Christians. A participant mentioned that terror-
ism is a suitable reason for ‘keeping a closer eye on radical Islam’. Yet, a
number of participants felt the need to push the point a bit further. Take
for instance this contribution, provided by a man who introduced him-
self as a lifelong SGP supporter:
We all agree that terrorism constitutes a danger for the Netherlands. But
we should also say that Islam as a system is incompatible with our Western
way of life, including the Christian way of life which has historically
imprinted the West, and is present in the roots of Dutch society. We should
12
De Volkskrant, 8 August 2007. Genoeg is Genoeg: Verbied de Koran.
therefore not be ashamed to publicly say that we should arm ourselves

against this culture that is now entering the Netherlands. This means that
we should dare to publicly support our culture, however you would want
to define our culture, but it sure is not Islamic. We should be able to stop
the construction of minarets like in Switzerland, because they are a threat
to our culture. And because it just doesn’t fit in. We should be allowed to
discriminate between cultures and we should not be forced to participate
in the ideology of equality (gelijkheidsdenken) that Islam should have as
much room in the Netherlands. We should discriminate. My appeal to van
der Staaij (SGP chairman and member of parliament) is to take a firmer
stance. I say, show them how it’s done!
The participant hints at his intimate knowledge of SGP political jar-

gon in multiple ways. For instance, in using the term gelijkheidsdenken,
the participant acknowledges a well-known notion in orthodox Protestant
thought. Originally directed at the representatives of the (French)
Revolution, gelijkheidsdenken decries that all modes of life are equal and
therefore deserve equal treatment (Baalen et al. 2018). Opposing this
false ideology of equality, the Reformed Party’s standpoint is that reli-
gions are not equal, there is only one true religion. In the past, the word
has been part of an outright theocratic argument and has transformed
over the course of the twentieth century into a term more open to cul-
tural and constitutional issues.13 In short, gelijkheidsdenken has been a
battle cry of the orthodox Protestants since the foundation of the party.
A second indication that this participant knows his orthodox reformed
sources is his use of the phrase ‘the Christian way of life which has histori-
cally imprinted the West’ (door het christendom gestempeld). This phrase
has appeared in SGP party programmes since, at least, 1994, where we
can read:
When minorities are given the opportunity to maintain their own cultural
identity, this should not negatively impact the historically imprinted (ges-
tempeld) character of the Dutch nation. Government should not contrib-
ute financially nor otherwise to the spread of anti-Christian views.
Subsidizing mosques should be rejected. (SGP 1994, translation EvdH)
13
Zwaag (2018), ‘Van theocractie naar godsdienstvrijheid: de SGP over religie en politie’.
32 E. van den Hemel
Since then, it has appeared frequently in SGP discourse. Most recently,

it has appeared in publications of the scientific bureau of the SGP, where
it is used to promote maintenance of the Christian way of life, even when
it violates constitutional equality.
The Netherlands is a country that has been imprinted by Christianity. The

Christian conviction has influenced our state and mode of government.
For instance, we do not have an officially recognized Islamic holiday. If we
would use a strict ideology of equality (gelijkheidsdenken, EvdH), this
should not be allowed, whereas from a Christian-historic perspective there
is nothing wrong with this. (Schippers 2016: 248)
By using the terms ‘imprint’ (gestempeld) and ‘ideology of equality’

(gelijkheidsdenken) this participant shows that he is well-versed in ortho-
dox Protestant political thought. Yet, it is important to indicate that there
is a certain distance or change in emphasis in this contribution with
regards to the way in which these terms are used.
For instance, in contrast with the explicit embrace of orthodox
Protestantism as the true religion, there is a certain vagueness with which
the participant describes Dutch culture: ‘we should dare to publicly sup-
port our culture—however you would want to define ‘our culture’—but
it sure is not Islamic’. Christianity is mentioned only as part of Western
way of life. This leads to the concrete example that is given on how the
historical imprint should be safeguarded: ban the building of ‘minarets’.
This participant explicitly states that favouring Christianity over Islam is
not only about protecting society from terrorism. The threat to Dutch
society this participant is concerned about is formulated in terms of cul-
ture, not confession. What is more, Christianity here is spoken of as a
vaguely outlined cultural way of life. Also, the participant states that the
parliamentary faction of the SGP should, ‘more firmly’, protect Dutch
culture. The participant addresses the SGP directly for not doing their
job thoroughly enough. This was a recurrent tendency during the debate:
the parliamentary faction of the SGP was addressed critically for not
being firm enough on Islam. In short, from this intervention, we can
glean tendencies that recurred more often during the debate: a discourse
reminiscent of that of the populist radical right was used to critically
revisit SGP positions. As the following example illustrates, a tendency

during the debate was to conflate religious and secular categories in man-
ners reminiscent of that of the populist radical right.
Short Skirts Against Islam?

One participant, a man who described himself as having ‘considerable
professional experience’ in the Middle East, described how: ‘In Islamic
countries (moslimmeerderheidslanden) tolerance and freedom do not exist
(…) all the short skirts in Afghanistan and Iran disappeared since the
Islamists came to power’. The participant concluded that one should not
be tolerant to a culture that does not allow for tolerance and that there-
fore the expansion of ‘Islam’ in the Netherlands can rightfully be curtailed.
For anyone who has followed Western European (or Northern
American) political discourse, this is a frequently heard argument: the
reference to the freedom of women is a particularly frequently occurring
trope in the clash of civilizations-style rhetoric which places the secular
West over and against the Islamic East. However, the argument is a bit
more surprising to hear for those with any knowledge of orthodox
reformed Protestantism in the Netherlands. For those who, like me, grew
up in a province where the orthodox reformed are numerically strong, it
was and remains to this day a well-known phenomenon to see large
groups of long-skirted schoolgirls cycle their way to the orthodox
Protestant schools in the province. Long skirts were obligatory dress-
codes at orthodox Protestant schools (dress codes are almost fully absent
from the Dutch education system). In short, this particular strand of
Protestantism was associated with wearing long skirts to such a degree
that the long skirt was an icon of this form of orthodox Protestantism. It
is surprising then, to hear a participant in the debate criticize Islam not as
a false religion that needs to be rooted out, which would fit in with the
classical SGP-line one could say, but as anathema to the cherished free-
doms of Dutch society of which the short skirt has become one of the
favourite symbols.
The role of women was invoked more often during the debate. This
exchange took place when the statement ‘We should not admit any more
34 E. van den Hemel
Muslims into the Netherlands’ was debated. A lull in the discussion was
filled when one of the women in the audience stood up and stated ‘well,
when the men fall silent the women should step up’. This remark was
followed by cheering and applause. She continued:
we should not forget that Dutch culture is starting to change … particu-

larly in the cities. That is a sort of danger, when people with very different
norms and values are taking up increasingly important positions in society
and perhaps even in government. When that happens, a lot is going to
change in the Netherlands. Perhaps especially for us Christians (….) to
stop all Muslims from entering our country is perhaps practically impos-
sible but you could make the argument that we should be careful not to
admit too many Muslims.
We see in this short contribution a similar emphasis on cultural iden-

tity and norms and values. She also indicated a fear that Christianity, in
a future where Muslims will become part of government, might be espe-
cially targeted by these changes in Dutch culture. Implicit in this inter-
vention was the close proximity of ‘Dutch culture’ and ‘us Christians’.
This symbiotic relation is now changing, according to this participant,
particularly in the cities (implying that Dutchness and Christianity
remain more intimately connected in the countryside). There was also a
nod in the opening of the woman’s contribution to the debate. When she
stated ‘when men are silent women should step up’ she seems to refer to
the issue of the role of women in the SGP. Let me unpack this particular
point in more detail.
As I indicated above, the SGP has a long history of resisting gen-
der equality and has included many references to the traditional family
values. Since 2010, the SGP was forced to stop officially banning women
from active functions. Since then, the first female members of the SGP
have offered themselves for election. One case in point was a municipal
election in Vlissingen in 2014, in the South-Western province of Zeeland
(part of the Bible Belt, like Oldebroek). The woman who was on the roll
to be elected offered the following argument: ‘when there are no suitable
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Wie zerschlagen kam er nach Hause. Adele hatte bereits den
Besuch zweier Lehrerfrauen gehabt. Sie war in Tränen aufgelöst und
hatte das Dienstmädchen zu Luise geschickt, um sie zu holen. Denn
Luise mußte helfen, mußte raten. Luise war so klug! Und Alwin ...
nein, wie hatte Alwin sich so vergessen können! ... Luise kam. Alwin
Maurer wurde richtig ins Verhör genommen. Der Aufsatz wurde laut
gelesen — jeder Satz doppelt und dreifach ausgelegt. Es war
fürchterlich, was er da alles geäußert hatte! Umstürzlerische Ideen
waren das! Er erschütterte die Grundfesten deutscher
Jugenderziehung ... er war ein Revolutionär, ein Sozialdemokrat! ...
Das war damals noch ein Schimpfwort, und Adele hob
beschwörend die Hand:
„Nicht zu weit gehen, Luise!“
Aber Luise schob sie aus dem Zimmer. Schließlich brauchte die
Frau nicht dabei zu sein, wenn sie ihren Mann abkanzelte, wenn er
so dastand, richtig wie ein dummer Junge, der was ausgefressen
hatte! Und als der Schwager ihr endlich sein Aneinandergeraten mit
dem Direktor berichtete und daß das Ministerium „Material“ über ihn
verlangt hatte, da schrie Luise Altmann verzweifelt, unter Tränen:
„Revoziere! ... Revoziere!“ ...
Adele wurde gerufen. Sie weinte mit und schrie mit: „Revoziere!
Revoziere!“
Die Kinder wurden hereingeschleppt, die „unschuldigen Würmer“.
Die heulten auch mit, ohne zu wissen, warum. Es war ein
Höllenlärm. Dr. Alwin Maurer, der nichts hatte wissen wollen von
irgendwelcher Zurücknahme seiner Worte, fühlte die zerrenden
Finger seines kleinen Mädchens, seines Jungen ... Um seine Ohren
gellte das Schreien der Kinder, das Jammern der Frauen.
„Revoziere! Revoziere!“ ...
Adelens nasse Wangen lagen an den seinen. Luise drückte
krampfhaft seine Hand, zeigte pathetisch auf das schwarzgerahmte
Bild der Mutter:
„Wenn sie das erlebt hätte — sie, die so viel von dir gehalten!“
Zeigte die alten, gediegenen Möbel, die einst der Inbegriff allen
Behagens für ihn gewesen: „Wovon lebt Ihr denn, wenn du deine
Stellung verlierst, wenn du versetzt wirst? ... Dann kannst du alles
für ein paar Groschen verschleudern ....“
Die Angst kroch langsam aus Alwin Maurers verborgensten
Herzenswinkeln heraus:
„Aber,“ ... stammelte er, „aber“ .... Nichts anderes.
Er ließ sich zu seinem Schreibtisch schleifen. Die Frauen
standen ihm zur Seite: rechts Luise, links Adele. Sie beugten ihre
Köpfe über seine Mappe; die eine reichte ihm Briefpapier, die andere
tauchte seine Feder in die Tinte.
„Revoziere!“
Ihm war, als hätten sie ihm sein Gehirn aus der Schale gelöst
und stocherten mit ihren Fingern darin herum .... Er hatte keinen
Gedanken mehr, kein Gefühl .... Nicht für das Tragische seiner Lage,
nicht für das Lächerliche.
Er schrieb, strich aus — fing wieder an.
„Ich kann nicht so ....“
Sie nahmen ihm den Atem, die beiden Frauen.
„Wir sehen nicht hin ... schreib nur.“
Aber ihre Körper lehnten an den Ecken seines Tisches, und der
Dunst ihrer Tränen umhüllte ihn.
So revozierte er feige, erbärmlich. „Aus den Zuschriften, die er
erhalten, hätte er ersehen, daß seine Worte mißverstanden worden
wären.“
Behauptung für Behauptung nahm er zurück, Wort für Wort. Der
Schweiß sickerte in dicken Tropfen unter dem leicht gekrausten
blonden Haar hervor, rann die Schläfen entlang.
Jetzt noch die Unterschrift.
„Aber das geht doch nicht ... ich kann das doch nicht.“ ...
Luise Altmann legte ihre feste, hagere Hand auf seinen linken
Arm. Adele schluchzte noch einmal drängend auf.
Und dann schrieb er: Dr. Alwin Maurer. Luise faltete das Papier,
schrieb die Adresse des Blattes auf den Umschlag.
„Ich bringe den Brief selbst in die Redaktion. Morgen früh muß
der Brief in der Zeitung stehen.“
Adele war damals ihrer Schwester um den Hals gefallen. Und sie
beide waren aus dem Zimmer gerannt, als könnte Alwin Maurer
ihnen noch im letzten Augenblick den Brief aus den Händen reißen.
Aber er dachte nicht daran.
Wie erschlagen lag er im Sessel. Und nur seine Augen
wanderten voll Ekel von einem gediegenen Möbelstück zum andern.
Altem Plüsch und morschem Holz hatte er seine Überzeugung
geopfert — der Speisekammer seiner Frau und dem
Autoritätenglauben seiner Schwägerin. Er riß die Schreibtischlade
auf und zerfetzte die Seiten des nächsten Artikels, den er bereits
begonnen hatte. Zerfetzte den Traum, den ein paar Glas Wein ihm
eingegeben und den zu verwirklichen er vielleicht das Talent gehabt
hätte. Und er weinte.
Weinte bitterlich, wie ein kleiner Junge weint, dem die Hand
eines Großen sein Schaukelpferd zertrümmert.
Die Zeitung brachte den Widerruf, mit einigen spöttischen Worten
verbrämt. Der Schuldirektor klopfte ihm auf die Schulter:
„War das einzig Vernünftige, lieber Doktor!“
Die Klasse aber mußte wegen groben Unfugs während seines
Unterrichts zwei Stunden nachsitzen.
Adele kochte ihm eine Woche lang seine Lieblingsgerichte, und
Luise Altmann brachte ihm eine Kiste mit fünfundzwanzig Zigarren,
das Stück zu fünfzehn Pfennig.
Das Leben in der Culmstraße ging weiter, sättigend und
behaglich. Luise „verbesserte“ sich. Sie kam als Erzieherin in ein
reiches Haus, hatte gutes Gehalt und unterstützte nach wie vor den
Haushalt der Schwester.
Jedes Jahr um Palmarum kam Ernst Altmann.
Die Schwestern fühlten sich verpflichtet, dem „Zigeuner“
gegenüber ihre makellose Bürgerlichkeit stark zu betonen. Aber
Adele war nicht unempfänglich für die Theaterbilletts, die sie durch
ihn bekam. Auch war er immer bereit, die Kinder auszuführen, in den
Zirkus oder eine Klassikervorstellung am Nachmittag.
Mit Dr. Maurer hatte er wenig Berührungspunkte, oder
wenigstens nicht viel mehr, als ein gemeinsamer Bierabend ergibt.
Dem Pastorensohn aus den schlesischen Bergen war die
Kulissenwelt fremd, kaum reizvoll. Immerhin brachte Altmanns
alljährliches Erscheinen in Berlin eine kurze, willkommene
Abwechslung in die starre Regelmäßigkeit der Lebensführung.
Einmal nahm Altmann seinen Schwager zu einem Rennen mit
nach Karlshorst. Keiner von beiden setzte, aber Dr. Alwin Maurer
kam wie berauscht nach Hause. Er hatte Frauen gesehen, wie er sie
nur für möglich gehalten im Schimmer des Rampenlichts. Vor seinen
weltfremden, erstaunten Augen hatte sich ein Stück
gesellschaftlichen Lebens abgerollt, wie er es nur in dem einen oder
andern Roman geschildert gefunden und als unwahrscheinlich
abgelehnt hatte.
Das Lehrerlein in dem engen schwarzen Rock, mit dem Zylinder
auf dem krausen Blondkopf, mochte wohl eine recht komische Figur
abgegeben haben in dem schillernden Bild des grünen Rasens. Eine
Dame, von deren sich ziemlich deutlich äußerndem Beruf Alwin
Maurer nur dunkle theoretische Kenntnis besaß, warf ihm im
Vorbeigehen lachend ihr Veilchensträußchen ins Gesicht. Gar zu
herausfordernd naiv sah er aus.
Altmann war froh, als er den sehr widerstrebenden Schwager
glücklich wieder nach Hause bugsiert hatte. Am anderen Tage
mußte er aber Adelens bitterste Vorwürfe über sich ergehen lassen.
Auch Luise schrieb ihm einen empörten Brief. Was war ihm denn
eingefallen? Alwin in solche Umgebung zu bringen! Wollte er
durchaus den Frieden des Hauses zerstören, indem er Alwin
Einblick in eine äußerlich vielleicht verlockende, gewiß aber
verderbte Welt gewährte, indem er ihn mitschleifte dorthin, wo „sich
das nackte Laster und alle verbotenen Leidenschaften die Hand
reichten“?
Der Satz war aus Luisens Brief.
Altmann wurde vorsichtiger. In seiner ernsten Verehrung für die
Schwestern fand er kaum ein Lächeln für diese übertriebene Angst.
Nein, gewiß, von ihm brauchten sie für Alwin nichts zu fürchten,
obwohl er nicht glaubte, daß der gute Alwin ...
So? Das glaubte er nicht ...? Na, dann sollte er nur hören!
Bei geschlossenen Türen suchte Adele den Zeitungsartikel
heraus. Nun ... was sagte er jetzt? ...
Altmann fand den Artikel ausgezeichnet. Er selbst hatte das
humanistische Gebüffel nicht ertragen und war darum
durchgebrannt. Sehr vernünftig von Alwin, er wollte ihm die Hand
schütteln! So viel Mut hatte er ihm gar nicht zugetraut ...
Erst nach einer ganzen Weile begriff er, daß der Schwager gar
nicht das Recht gehabt hatte, so zu schreiben. Daß es ein Verrat
gewesen war an Frau und Kind, nur entschuldbar durch Alwins
Feuertemperament. Aber wie hatte er sich bezwungen ... mit
welchem Opfer hatte er die Ruhe des Hauses erkauft ... Und Adele
legte dem Bruder den Widerruf vor.
Irgend etwas behagte Altmann nicht daran. Aber er mußte es
dem Schwager doch danken, daß er Adele vor Kummer und Sorgen
bewahrt hatte. Ja ... vielleicht war das eine größere Tat, als wenn er
darauflos seine Überzeugung herausgeschrien hätte ... Die
Schwestern wollten jedenfalls, daß er das so ansah ...
Und mit den Jahren kam es auch so weit, daß er nicht zu sagen
gewußt hätte, ob Alwin Maurer ein Held oder ein Waschlappen
gewesen war. Gewiß ein Held — weil er Adelens Mann war. Und
noch mehr wurde er in dieser Annahme bestärkt, als der Zufall das
Gespräch einmal auf den Mut der Überzeugung brachte. Da sagte
Dr. Alwin Maurer, und seine Stimme war dabei ein wenig belegt:
„Es kann sein, daß der größte Mut darin besteht, sich zu einer
entgegengesetzten Überzeugung zu bekennen.“
Adele und Luise drückten ihm darauf die Hand. Aber er stand
vom Tisch auf und kam den Abend über nicht mehr aus seinem
Zimmer heraus.
„Man darf gar nicht daran rühren“, sagte Adele.
Es gefiel ihr eigentlich, daß es in dem glatten, nichtssagenden
Leben ihres Mannes eine wunde Stelle gab.
In wortloser Übereinstimmung hatten die Schwestern aus jenem
Vorfall das „große Erlebnis“ gestaltet, ohne das vielleicht kein Mann
auskam! Aber nun hatte er es. Nun sollte er daran leiden und sich
aufrichten ...
So dachten die Schwestern noch heute, nachdem zehn Jahre
vergangen waren.
Dr. Alwin Maurer hatte jetzt eine Art kleiner Tonsur in seinem
blonden Lockenkopf, und sein Gesicht war blaß und
verschwommen. Adele und Luise sahen einander auch heute noch
zum Verwechseln ähnlich. Nur wer genauer hinsah, bemerkte weiße
Silberfäden in Luisens dunkelblondem Scheitel und kleine Fältchen
um Adelens Augen. Sie hatten beide die schmalen Altmannschen
Lippen, die geraden dunklen Brauen und zogen in harter Linie die
Mundwinkel herab, wenn sie auch nur innerlich etwas ablehnten.
Ihres Bruders Heirat lehnten sie beide ab. Aber sie waren
wohlerzogen und höflich. So warteten sie in der Wohnstube, in
schwarze Seide gekleidet, auf das Läuten an der Korridortür.
Dr. Alwin Maurer, im Bratenrock, der an den Nähten spannte,
ging auf und ab, mit auf dem Rücken verschlungenen Händen.
Der Duft des Kalbsbratens umwehte verheißungsvoll seine
empfindsamen Nüstern. Er blickte öfters auf den Regulator. Wenn
sie nur zur Zeit kamen, und das Essen nicht verdarb!
Schließlich war das bißchen „Fraß“ doch das einzige, was das
Leben lebenswert machte ...
Die Klingel schrillte durch die Wohnung ... Dr. Maurer stürzte im
letzten Augenblick in eine Ecke des Zimmers und warf den hellen
Rohrstock, mit dem er am heutigen Vormittag seinen Stammhalter
verdroschen, unter das braunrote Plüschsofa.
arla machte kaum den Mund auf. Sie war gesellschaftlich
noch ungewandt, und die frostige Freundlichkeit der fremden
Verwandten ließ sie zu Eis erstarren.
Luise Altmann fand, daß sie sich bei Tisch nicht recht benehmen
konnte, denn sie schnitt die Kartoffeln mit dem Messer durch und
trank, bevor sie den Bissen im Munde heruntergeschluckt hatte!
Auf das verwandtschaftliche „Du“ wurde bei der Zitronenspeise
eine Flasche deutschen Sekts geleert. Altmann hatte eine elegante
Art, die Serviette um den Flaschenhals zu schlagen und die Gläser
nur bis zur Hälfte vollzuschenken.
Karla bewunderte ihn sehr in dieser Tätigkeit, und verträumt
versetzte sie sich an ihre Hochzeitstafel zurück in der „Krone“.
Schön war das damals gewesen — und lustig! Wie die Kollegen sich
gefreut hatten! So viel Liebes hatten sie alle gesagt, und so hübsche
Trinksprüche waren gestiegen. Nach dem Kaffee hatte man auch
noch ein bißchen gesungen, vorgetragen und sogar getanzt ...
Der Kalbsbraten und die Zitronenspeise waren gewiß gut
geraten, aber es wollte ihr nichts so recht durch die Kehle rutschen.
Der Altmannsche Typus in seiner dreifachen Spielart bedrängte
sie. Die Vornehmheit und Schönheit ihres Mannes verloren ihren
Wert, da sie sie in den beiden Schwestern wiederfand. Diese
Gleichheit reizte sie. Sie bekam einen roten Kopf.
„Wie fühlst du dich, Karla, hm?“
Es war klar, daß Altmann den Ausdruck innigsten Entzückens für
selbstverständlich hielt. Darum wartete er die Antwort gar nicht erst
ab, sondern sprach weiter mit seinen Leuten — über die Kredenz, an
die der Vater noch selbst eine Leiste angeklebt und die sich so
prachtvoll erhalten, über Luisens Stellung im Hause der englischen
Familie, über den voraussichtlichen Beruf von seinem Neffen Fritz.
„Dem Jungen mußte ich heute auf Spanisch Mores lehren,“ sagte
Dr. Maurer, „glaubst du es, daß der vierzehnjährige Bengel alte
Schulbücher verkloppt hat, um sich Zigaretten zu kaufen?“
Karla lachte plötzlich los.
Altmann sah sie befremdet und zurechtweisend an.
„Was ist denn so Belustigendes daran?“
Dr. Maurer war in seiner Pädagogenwürde leicht verletzt, aber er
war nicht unempfänglich für das wundervolle Lachen und die
blitzenden Zähne seiner jungen Schwägerin.
„Findest du das etwa in der Ordnung?“
Er lächelte unwillkürlich, beugte sich über den Tisch und
bemerkte dabei, daß sie wunderhübsche, junge, braune Augen
hatte, unter kaum angedeuteten, hilflos und drollig geschwungenen
Brauen.
„Nimm dich zusammen“, flüsterte Altmann streng.
Sie kämpfte noch immer mit dem Lachen, das sie schüttelte, wie
ein boshafter Protest gegen all die steife Würde an diesem Tisch.
„Ihr müßt es mir nicht übelnehmen, aber wie der ... der ...“
„Alwin“, soufflierte Dr. Maurer.
„Ja also, wie der Alwin erzählte, daß sein Junge Bücher verkloppt
hat für Zigaretten, da mußte ich an meinen Verehrer denken ... weißt
du, Ernst, den kleinen Korbach. Der brachte mir wochenlang gefüllte
Malz- und Honigbonbons an den Bühneneingang. Ich wußte immer
nicht, wo der Junge das viele Geld dafür hernahm. Wußte auch
nicht, wie er heißt. Bis er eines Abends — ich hatte gerade
Schnupfen und Husten, und der Regisseur ließ das Publikum um
Nachsicht bitten — mit Chininpulver in Oblaten anrückte, am
nächsten Tage eine Flasche Emser Krähnchen bei meiner Wirtin
ablud und am dritten Tage Rizinuspillen brachte ...“
Sie schüttelte sich wieder vor Lachen, und Dr. Alwin Maurer, der
strenge Pädagoge, stimmte ein.
„Apothekersohn? Was?“
Karla nickte.
„Ja ... dreizehn Jahre war das Kerlchen! Saß abends, wenn ich
sang, auf dem Olymp und klaute, was er konnte, um mir seine Liebe
zu zeigen ...“
„Empörend!“ sagte Luise Altmann.
„Schrecklich! ... Ja, das Theater ...“, meinte Adele.
Dr. Maurer fuhr sich mit der sehr vollen, kurzfingerigen Hand (ein
Erbteil seines Vaters) durch das Haar.
„Na ... da wird wohl der Junge auch seine Tracht Prügel
bekommen haben ...“
„Das hoffe ich“, warf Adele rasch ein. „Du hast doch den Vater
aufgeklärt?“
Karla nickte vergnügt.
„Gewiß. Ich habe den Jungen bei der Hand genommen, bin mit
ihm zu seinem Vater ’rüber, und wie der von Hauen und so
gesprochen, da hab’ ich gebeten, er möchte das lassen, und hab’
ihm dafür was vorgesungen. Er war sehr musikalisch, der Korbach ...
nicht wahr, Ernst, du hast doch auch von ihm gehört? ... Fast eine
Stunde haben wir zusammen musiziert. Zum Schluß haben wir das
Duett aus ‚Carmen‘ gesungen ... der Kleine hat uns begleitet ...
famos war das! Von Hieben war natürlich keine Rede mehr. Und zu
Weihnachten, da schickte mir Herr Korbach eine Reiseapotheke.
Riesig praktisch. Ernst benutzt sie auch sehr gern.“
Karla war losgelassen.
Die Schwestern wechselten einen Blick.
‚Unmöglich‘, sagte der. Karla war unmöglich. Jedenfalls in ihren
bürgerlichen Kreisen. Adele dachte an ihre Bekannten: die Frau
Lehrer Wagner, die Frau Oberlehrer Lange, die Frau Rechnungsrat
Florian ... Nein, mit dem besten Willen konnte sie Karla nicht bei den
Damen einführen.
„Machst du Handarbeiten?“ fragte sie, mit einem letzten Versuch,
irgend eine ernste Eigenschaft an der Schwägerin zu entdecken.
„Karla hat wenig Zeit gehabt bisher“, meinte Altmann und dann
mit einer jäh erwachten Hoffnung zu seiner Frau gewendet:
„Oder solltest du doch vielleicht ...?“
Es war verzeihlich. Er war ja erst einige Monate verheiratet.
Aber nein. Karla gestand schamlos, daß sie gar keine
Handarbeiten machen könne; auch mit dem Nähen hapere es.
„Wenn ich erst Geld verdiene, dann halte ich mir eine
Flickschneiderin.“
Adele zog die Mundwinkel ein. Eine verheiratete Frau, die von
„Verdienen“ sprach, verletzte alle ihre Begriffe. Wenn nur um Gottes
willen der arme Ernst in dieser unseligen Ehe nicht jedes „Gefühl für
Anstand und Schicklichkeit verlor!“
Altmann faßte seine Frau unter das Kinn.
„Sie ist noch eine kleine Wilde“, sagte er versöhnlich.
Karla wurde ärgerlich. Was hatten sie hier alle an ihr
herumzukritisieren?!
„Warum bin ich eine Wilde?“
Dr. Maurer hob die Tafel auf.
„Na, Kinder, nur immer ruhig. Ärger nach Tisch gibt rote Flecke
im Gesicht.“
Es wurde Kaffee in die Wohnstube gebracht, Bier und Zigarren
für die Herren.
„Ach ja, richtig — du rauchst ja nicht“, sagte Alwin Maurer zum
Schwager und qualmte seine „Imitierte“ genüßlich an.
„Willst du nicht ein bißchen singen, Karla?“ fragte Luise Altmann.
Karla sah zu ihrem Mann herüber. „Bitte nicht“, schienen ihre
Augen zu sagen. Sie war, weiß Gott, nicht in der Stimmung! Die steif
an die Wand gelehnten braunroten Plüschmöbel, die starren,
schwarzen Seidenkleider und die geraden Brauen schienen ihr eine
unüberwindliche Feindseligkeit auszuströmen.
„Ja, natürlich, sing’ doch ein bißchen was“, munterte Alwin
Maurer auf.
Ein paar nette, warme Töne mußte sie — ihrem Lachen nach zu
urteilen — im Leibe haben. Er sang selbst gerne, war eine Zeit lang
Mitglied eines Männergesangvereins gewesen und begleitete Luise
Altmann oft in die Konzerte, zu denen ihre Herrschaft ihr zeitweilig
ihre Plätze überließ.
„Alwin versteht sehr viel“, flüsterte Adele, laut genug, daß Karla
es hörte.
„Ich kann heut’ nicht singen ... nein ... wirklich nicht ....“
Man nahm es als übliche Ziererei und beachtete es nicht. Alwin
Maurer räumte das Stehalbum und die zwei Vasen mit künstlichen
Blumen von dem schwarzen Pianino.
„Soll ich die Kerzen anzünden? ... Nein ... das Gas brennt wohl
hell genug ....“
Er blies Karla den Rauch seiner Zigarre ins Gesicht, ohne es zu
merken.
„Ich will doch nicht singen“, murmelte sie.
Wie konnte ihr Mann sie zwingen! Nie hätte sie das von ihm
gedacht — nie!
„Komm, komm ....“
Und er schlug leicht gegen das Klavier. Anders hätte er auch
einen Hund nicht herangelockt. Alwin Maurer blätterte in den
angegrauten Notenheften. Da fehlte die erste — da die letzte Seite.
„Tja .. ich sehe, unser Bestand ist erneuerungsbedürftig. Aber —
da ... Schubert ... Frauenliebe und Leben — hm? Wie wär’s?“
Karla war keine Liedersängerin. Die kleine, geschlossene Form
lag ihren breit ausladenden Mitteln nicht.
„Nein ... keine Lieder ... die mag ich nicht.“
„Schubert magst du nicht?“
Luise Altmann hob die Augen zur Decke. Nette Sängerin war
das! Armer Ernst ... Was hatte er sich da aufgeladen!
„Habt Ihr nicht etwas von Wagner ... dann ...“
Um Gottes Willen — Wagner! War ja ganz schön im Opernhause.
Aber im Zimmer — da zerriß er einem ja die Ohren.
Doch Alwin Maurer wühlte weiter in den Noten. Ja ... doch ... ein
Lohengrin-Auszug ... der mußte da sein. Den hatte er vor einigen
Jahren gekauft, um eine kleine Lohengrin-Parodie für ein Vereinsfest
zu verfassen. Wo war er denn nur ....?
„Da ....“
Eigentlich machte es ihm uneingestandenen Spaß, daß seine
Damen sich ärgerten.
„Los, Kinder, los ...“
Altmanns Finger schlugen hart und trocken auf die Tasten.
Karla stand leicht zurückgebeugt mit unter der Brust
verschlungenen Händen, wie es ihre Art war beim Singen, am
Klavier.
Das Gaslicht fiel grell und schonungslos auf ihr
zusammengestecktes Kleid und den unverhältnismäßig breiten
Hüftenumfang.
Die Schwestern stießen sich an, und Adele flüsterte:
„Du, ich glaube gar ...“
„Mir scheint auch ...“
Sie waren beide ein bißchen blaß geworden. Das hatte noch
gefehlt — ach, du lieber Himmel!
Ein ganz leises Mitgefühl für Karla regte sich in ihnen. Aber ein
noch größeres für den Bruder. Nicht einmal eine Wohnung, ein Heim
hatten solche Leute. Sie tuschelten leise: Ob schon für das Kind
vorgesorgt war? ... Ob es Wäsche vorfand — einen Wagen? ...
Adele rechnete nach, was ihr von der Ausstattung ihrer Kleinen übrig
geblieben war. ... Acht Windeln, fünf Hemdchen, neun
Sabberlätzchen mochten sich noch erhalten haben! ... Dazu der
Kinderwagen; nur neue Vorhänge waren nötig — die schnitt man
einfach aus den ausgemusterten Gardinen der guten Stube
heraus ....
„Wenn sie Pflege braucht, so bitte ich um Urlaub ... Man kann
das Wurm doch nicht verkommen lassen ...“
Mit dem Wurm meinte Luise Altmann das Kind, für das die
Schwestern jetzt schon eine gewisse Zärtlichkeit empfanden, weil es
ihnen den Bruder näher brachte.
In ihrem Getuschel entging es ihnen völlig, daß Karlas Stimme
nach dem sechsten Takte umkippte.
„Macht nichts, macht nichts“, beruhigte Dr. Alwin Maurer
gutmütig. „Vielleicht hat dich mein Rauch gestört.“
Er legte die Zigarre aufs Fensterbrett.
„Nur keine Gêne ... fang’ ruhig wieder an!“
Altmann war rasend. Sogar das Tuscheln der Schwestern
entging ihm vor Arger über Karla.
„So paß doch auf!“
Wie ein ungezogenes, durch zu viel Freiheit verzogenes Kind war
sie, das nach den ersten Schulferien kaum noch die Buchstaben
erkennen will. Er schlug den Takt mit dem Fuß, Alwin Maurer mit der
Hand ...
Karlas Augen füllten sich mit Tränen ohnmächtiger Wut.
„Nein ... so kann ich nicht ... so sing’ ich nicht.“
„Quäl’ sie doch nicht“, rief Luise Altmann herüber.
Altmann warf den Auszug in kalter Wut auf das Notengestell
zurück.
„Gut, lassen wir’s bleiben!“
Diese Bockigkeit verzieh er Karla nicht so bald! ...
Alwin Maurer schenkte die Biergläser voll.
„Mensch, ärgere dich nicht! Erzählen wir uns lieber was. Waren ja
lange genug nicht beisammen ... Na, Prost! Karla, gebt euch einen
Kuß ...“
„Willst du die Wohnung sehen, Karla?“ fragte Adele.
Die Schwestern erhoben sich, Karla folgte ihnen, froh, aus dem
Bereich von Altmanns dunklen Blicken zu kommen. Innerlich
frohlockte sie, daß sie nicht hatte singen brauchen und war gern
bereit die Küche zu bewundern, in der vom Abendbrot noch alles
kunterbunt und ungesäubert durcheinander stand, und die
selbstgehäkelten Kanten.
Im Schlafzimmer nahmen die Schwestern sie ins Gebet.
„Ja — merkt man es denn wirklich schon so sehr?“ fragte Karla.
Sie war unbändig stolz. Und gleich darauf wurde sie redselig.
Schrecklich war das Verheiratetsein, ohne ein Kind zu haben!
Man kam sich eigentlich gar nicht recht verheiratet vor! Ein bißchen
was mußte man doch voraushaben vor denen, die sich
zusammentaten, weil sie gerade auf ein paar Jahre an derselben
Bühne engagiert waren! Wenn’s nach ihr ging, würde sie ein
Dutzend Kinder haben wollen. Aber das ginge wohl nicht, wegen
ihrer Stimme. Schreckliche Angst hatte sie, die Stimme zu verlieren!
Dann lieber gar kein Kind! Wenn das passierte — dann ... ja, gewiß,
dann würde sie ihr Kind nicht mehr ansehen können — na, und
liebhaben schon gar nicht! Aber sonst — auffressen würde sie es vor
Liebe! Keinen Augenblick würde sie es allein lassen. Sie würde es
sich schon so einrichten, daß sie es in ihre Garderobe mitnehmen
könnte! Mitten auf den Schminktisch würde sie es legen, und da
sollte es ruhig strampeln. Die Ankleidefrau würde schon aufpassen,
so lange sie draußen war! ...
„Nun, ich hoffe, Ernst wird so vernünftig sein, daß er diesen
Unfug untersagt“, meinte Adele.
Und Luise Altmann fügte hinzu:
„Wir werden mit Ernst sprechen.“
Karlas kurzes Frohgefühl erlosch. Hätte sie doch nichts gesagt!
... Das hatte sie nun davon! Aber schließlich war sie die Mutter. Sie
hatte doch allein das Bestimmungsrecht. Ihr Mann ... ja gewiß. Aber
was verstand der von kleinen Kindern, von Mutterangst! ...
Mißmutig und mit halbem Ohr hörte sie auf die Aufzählung der
Wäschestücke, die zu einer vollständigen Kleinkinderausstattung
gehörten.
„Ja ... na, das sagt man uns schon im Geschäft.“
„Nein, Karla. Das mußt du selbst nähen“, erklärte Adele. „Ich
habe eine Nähmaschine und will dir gern dabei helfen.“
„Die erforderlichen Spitzen und Stickerei bekommst du von mir“,
setzte Luise hinzu.
Karla dankte nicht. Ihre runden, jungen, hübschen Augen blickten
ganz starr.
Lieber Gott — warum waren sie nach Berlin gegangen? ...
Luise sagte:
„Du kannst dir ein Beispiel an Adele nehmen. Sie ist eine
vorzügliche Mutter und wird dir von gutem Rat sein ...“
„Wo sind denn deine Kinder?“ fragte Karla mit grollendem
Unterton.
„Die schlafen, liebe Karla. Wenn ihr das nächste Mal am Tage
kommt, werdet ihr sie sehen.“
In Dr. Maurers Haushalt war alles aufs Genaueste ausgerechnet.
Der stete Heißhunger der Kinder ließ sich nicht mit teurem
Kalbsbraten stillen.
Luise Altmann nickte.
„Kinder gehören abends ins Bett und nicht unter Erwachsene!“
Die Damen kehrten zurück zu den Herren.
„Wir gehen“, sagte Altmann und stand auf.
Er hatte immer noch sein kaltes, beleidigtes Gesicht.
„Nimm meinen Arm“, sagte er auf der Straße.
Aber seine Stimme klang messerscharf. Szenen machte er nicht.
Aber es konnte gut sein, daß er acht Tage mit demselben beleidigten
Gesicht an ihrer Seite ging.
Karla schluckte ihre Tränen herunter. Ein grauenhafter Abend
war das gewesen! Nur gut, daß sie nicht gesungen, daß sie ihre
liebe, schöne, jubelnde Stimme diesen Menschen nicht hergegeben
hatte!
Morgen ging sie zum Papa! Auf den freute sie sich. Auf ihren
zierlichen, eleganten, feinen Papa ...
Altmann mußte ihr die Nadeln aufmachen. Er tat es, als ob er ein
gleichgültiges Paket aufschnüre.
„Luft“ war Karla heute für ihn ... Luft! Und nicht heute bloß. Es
sollte ihr nicht so bald einfallen, sich derartig widerspenstig zu
benehmen. — — —
„Na ... was sagst du?“ fragte Adele im ehelichen Schlafzimmer
ihren Mann.
Er zuckte die Achseln:
„Verrückt! Hätte deinen Bruder für keinen solchen Phantasten
gehalten. Wenn man ihn hört, so gibt es nächst der Lucca kein
solches Genie wie seine Frau! So weit ich urteilen konnte ... ganze
hübsche Töne ... aber — es war doch kläglich. Weder Breite noch
Schwung, und kaum klettert sie in die Höhe, kippt sie um, kiekst.
Wenn sich der gute Ernst nur nicht verrechnet!“
Adele bürstete ihr recht spärlich werdendes blondes Haar.
„Wenn man für Ernst irgend etwas finden könnte ... irgendeine
sichere Stellung. Denn jetzt, wo noch Familie kommt ...“
„Au weh! Das ist unter Umständen bitter!“
Er dehnte sich behaglich in seinem Bett. Immerhin —
unmittelbare Not hatte er nicht kennengelernt, in der sicheren
Umfriedung seiner bürgerlichen Genügsamkeit.
„Wer nimmt denn einen Schauspieler? Wo bringt man den
unter?“
Adele schlug mit der Bürste heftig auf ihren kleinen Frisiertisch.
„Wenn ich nur wüßte, was er an der gefressen hat ... wenn ich
das nur wüßte ...“
Dr. Maurer erstickte mit der kaum entfalteten Abendzeitung die
Kerzenflamme und drehte sich auf die andere Seite.
„Da fragst du viel ...“, sagte er gähnend.
Aber die Frage ließ ihn doch nicht gleich einschlafen. Sie
erweckte ein wunderschönes, junges Lachen in seinem Ohr und
zauberte ihm das Blitzen prachtvoller Zähne zwischen frischen, roten
Lippen vor die Augen.
apa hatte einen allerliebsten Teetisch vorbereitet. Über dem
weißen Tischtuch lag dämpfend ein bläulicher, silbergestickter
Gazeschal. Die ganz feinen Meißener Tassen hatte er aus
dem Glasschrank geholt und das schwere Silberkörbchen für
das Gebäck von Kranzler: kleine, zuckerbestreute Küchelchen, die
auf der Zunge schmolzen.
In einer Kristallflasche schillerte topasfarbiger Wein, der in den
Fassetten der geschliffenen Gläser auffunkelte. Die
Nachmittagssonne spielte auf den Goldfransen der buntseidenen
Kranzschleifen, die zwischen goldgerahmten Photographien hingen.
Es waren viele Berühmtheiten darunter: große Sänger, Sängerinnen,
Schauspieler, Tänzer und Tänzerinnen. Den Ehrenplatz nahm das
Bild des berühmten Schachspielers Anderssen ein, mit einer
Widmung in verblaßter Tinte aus dem Jahre 1860.
Vor dem breiten Fenster, umflossen von Sonne, erhoben sich
zierlich geschnitzte Figuren auf einem Schachtisch, und auf einem
Stehbücherbrett häuften sich gebundene und ungebundene
Jahrgänge der Deutschen Schachzeitung sowie einschlägige Werke,
wie „Theorie und Praxis der Endspiele“ von J. Berger, Cordels
„Führer durch die Schachtheorie“, das „Lehrbuch“ von Lange und
andere.
Es roch gut bei Papa — nach sehr feinen Zigaretten und
irgendeiner Essenz, die Karla noch nicht kannte.
Papa kam ihnen entgegen in einem knappen, grauen Gehrock,
zu dem er eine weißseidene Lavallièrekrawatte trug. Er hatte eine
gepflegte kleine Hand, deren linken Zeigefinger ein länglicher, von
Rauten umgebener Emaillering zierte. Seine Füße staken in
tiefausgeschnittenen Lackschuhen, die den hechtgrauen Florstrumpf
sehen ließen.
Unter silberweißem gelockten Haar sprühten kluge, runde,
braune Augen hervor. Er war ungemein zierlich und behende, und
nur ein rasch unterdrücktes Verziehen der Lippen deutete auf
zeitweilige Schmerzempfindung.
„Das freut mich, daß ihr endlich da seid ... das freut mich.
Willkommen, lieber Schwiegersohn; machen Sie sich’s bequem ...
Sie müssen vorlieb nehmen. Ein alter Garçon, da haperts überall.“
Karla war befangen. Die Wohnung war ihr fremd und die Art ihrer
Einrichtung. All die von der Mutter kostbar gehüteten und im
Glasschrank verwahrten Nippsachen standen offen herum. Die
Bezüge waren von den Stühlen entfernt, so daß die ehedem so
streng verwahrte Pracht leichtfertig ihren verblaßten Glanz zeigte.
Karla wagte es kaum, sich auf den gelbseidenen Sessel zu
setzen.
Aber Papa tätschelte ihren Arm.
„Na ... Kleine ... erkennst du nichts mehr? Das ist doch Adolar ...“
Nun lachte Karla. Richtig, Adolar ... der Sessel, mit dem sie ihre
Liebesszenen gespielt, den sie hatte umfangen, vor dem sie hatte
knien müssen.
„Adolar ... du Guter!“
Sie hatte ihn nur unter grauem Bezug gesehen und fühlte die
Ohrfeige noch heute, die die Mutter ihr verabreicht, als sie in
Backfischübermut den Bezug einmal abgenommen, um zu
probieren, „wie es sich auf Seide sitzt“.
Mutters Geist hatte jetzt zu herrschen aufgehört. Das sah sie an
dem Gebrauch des kostbaren Teeservices, an der Nutzbarmachung
aller einst so geschonten Gegenstände. Aber wie gut auch der Papa
da hineinpaßte! ...
Er schenkte den Tee ein, die Sahne, mit anmutig wippenden
Bewegungen, reichte das Silberkörbchen herum in schwebendem
Gleiten seines gerundeten Armes.
Karla streifte ihren Mann mit einem zagen Seitenblick. Wie ein
Denkmal saß er da in seiner steifen Unbeweglichkeit, mit seinem
schönen, starren Gesicht.
„Besten Dank, Papa ... bitte bemühen Sie sich nicht ...“

The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and The Perils of Nation and Religion 1St Ed Edition Markus Balkenhol Full Chapter

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The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and The Perils of Nation and Religion 1St Ed Edition Markus Balkenhol Full Chapter

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The Secular Sacred: Emotions of

Belonging and the Perils of Nation and

The Secular Sacred

More information about this series at

The Secular Sacred

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Cover illustration: © Irene Stengs

1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and

2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The

3 ‘We’ and ‘The Others’ as Constituents of Symbolic

Part II Public Space 67

4 Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the

5 Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics

6 Samba Struggles: Carnaval Parades, Race and Religious

7 Homo Sanctus: Religious Contestations and the

8 Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious

9 Dutch Tolerance in Black and White: From Religious

10 Colonial Heritage and the Sacred: Contesting the Statue

11 Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing,

12 Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the

13 United in Competitive Mourning: Commemorative

Markus Balkenhol Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Irene Stengs Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Fig. 10.2 Empty pedestal of the Coen statue, 2011. © Vereniging

How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and

M. Balkenhol • E. van den Hemel

© The Author(s) 2020 1

wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms.

The Thai King as Secular and Sacred

(Cavanaugh 2011), this book is inspired both by recent developments in

The Secular Sacred: A Praxeological Approach

losing or at least transforming their sacredness in the process. Inversely,

(…) is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it

Instead of the opposite of religion, Asad understands the secular to be

As much of recent scholarship suggests, contrary to the ideological self-­

In Mahmood’s understanding, to portray secularism as opposed to

artworks all directly draw from or resonate with explicit registers of

Sections of this Book

For Huntington, secularity is part and parcel of a Western, cultural

of rather vague or even deliberately empty signifiers that invite people to

tolerance knows no political party: it is what liberals and leftists reproach a

What originated as a theological and philosophical debate about free-

contested. At stake here is the modern subject whose supposed secularism

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.

 etting the Scene: ‘Is Islam a Threat

E. van den Hemel (*)

© The Author(s) 2020 21

public associations the poster created. Faced with nation-wide backlash,

 onfessional Politics: The SGP on the Outside

Netherlands as one of the most secularized countries on earth. The image

 he Rise of the Populist Radical Right

The perhaps most well-known example of this mode of thinking can

This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but

Culture, in Huntington’s mindset, is defined as the deepest identifica-

Problems concentrate around all those fellow-citizens that originate from

In this citation, drawn from Fortuyn’s 2002 book De verweesde samen-

The ‘Islam Debate’

of talking points that were direct citations from well-known populist

therefore not be ashamed to publicly say that we should arm ourselves

The participant hints at his intimate knowledge of SGP political jar-

Since then, it has appeared frequently in SGP discourse. Most recently,

The Netherlands is a country that has been imprinted by Christianity. The

By using the terms ‘imprint’ (gestempeld) and ‘ideology of equality’

1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and

2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The

3 ‘We’ and ‘The Others’ as Constituents of Symbolic

Part II Public Space 67

4 Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the

5 Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics

6 Samba Struggles: Carnaval Parades, Race and Religious

7 Homo Sanctus: Religious Contestations and the

8 Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious

9 Dutch Tolerance in Black and White: From Religious

10 Colonial Heritage and the Sacred: Contesting the Statue

11 Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing,

12 Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the

13 United in Competitive Mourning: Commemorative

The Thai King as Secular and Sacred

The Secular Sacred: A Praxeological Approach

As much of recent scholarship suggests, contrary to the ideological self-

Sections of this Book

etting the Scene: ‘Is Islam a Threat

onfessional Politics: The SGP on the Outside

he Rise of the Populist Radical Right

The ‘Islam Debate’

Short Skirts Against Islam?