From Pillarization to New Religious Pluralism.

This article highlights a social science congress on religion and politics held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in May 1983. The initiators of the event hope that the congress will stimulate developments in religion and politics in the Netherlands. The organization of the event was inspired by a range of phenomena: the fact that sociologists had been drawn into discussions about the churches' social and political testimony but that a thorough basis of insights into the manifold relations between religion and politics was lacking, so far; the fact that both sociology and political science had concentrated on the notorious pillarization, characteristic of the relation between religion and politics in the country, whereas that very pillarization was rapidly losing ground and giving way to another pluralism; the presence of sizeable old and new immigrant groups from Mediterranean countries as well as former Dutch colonies, who represent various foreign religions; the fact that cultural anthropologists were turning their attention to the investigation of Western subpopulations, especially the immigrant groups; a growing awareness--even though weakly developed--that interdisciplinary cooperation cannot be omitted any more.