Churches in Dutch: Causes of religious disaffiliation in the Netherlands, 1937-1995

The Netherlands has become one of the most secular countries in the world. A vast majority of the Dutch people does not attend church regularly and mo re than hair its population is not affiliated with any church at all. In th is study were set out to test which individual and contextual characteristi cs affect religious disaffiliation. We deduced several hypotheses from theo ries on social integration and rationalization. To test these hypotheses we used retrospective data containing information on events that took place i n the lives of our respondents since adolescence. These data were analysed using a discrete-time event history model. We found that the higher the lev el of rationalization in a certainyear, the more likely people were to disa ffiliate. This effect was particularly strong for young people. Moreover, k v introducing rationalization in the model we found a number of spurious re lationships that at first glance seemed to be causal. Not surprisingly, res pondents were more likely to disaffiliate in cases where their partners wer e nonreligious. However, as respondents and their partners presumably are e ffected equally by rationalization, we cannot but conclude that the process of rationalization is mainly responsible for the process of religious disa ffiliation that takes place in The Netherlands.