Inter-religious Dialogue and Migrants: The Case of the Netherlands

In the Netherlands the first official inter-religious dialogues were initiated in the first half of the 1970s. But the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk, one of the most important churches had taken the first steps towards an attitude of dialogue already in 1949 and 1950. The atrocities against the Jews and the deportation of the 90 per cent of the Dutch Jews in the Second World War as well as the solidarity deeply felt by many church members with the new state of Israel prompted this church, and later two other large mainline churches, to alter their attitudes towards Jews and Judaism. After 1970 they extended these dialogues to Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, who together outnumber the Jews today. The altered Dutch religious landscape had made inter-religious dialogue inevitable. This dialogue was held with migrants, so the position of the adherents of non-Christian religions was weaker than that of Christians. This inequality is reflected in the dialogue, for it became predominantly a dialogue of life, in which the Christians started with helping their partners to find a good position in Dutch society. The dialogue with the Jews, however, already quickly became a dialogue of the mind. In the second half of the 1990s a dialogue of the mind was initiated with Muslims, and in the first decade of the twenty-first century with some Hindus. The vulnerability of migrants was underscored by the impact of the governments in their countries of origin and by the fact that the Christians paid for almost everything. In 2000 the churches began to hesitate; nonetheless they remained in dialogue.