History and the Netherlands

The other day I was discussing the Netherlands with a friend of mine. She remarked that she was pretty sure that the Netherlands was much more different than it had been during the life of Abram Kuyper. This evening as I was reading R.J. Rushdoony's 80th Position Paper in his Roots of Reconstruction, he mentioned a story about a lady in the Netherlands. It was interesting how Rushdoony speaks of the importance of history:

Meanwhile, Christendom is suffering from a loss of memory, and the nations have an altered memory of their past. In the 1960s, I met an American veteran’s bride, a young woman whom the veteran had met soon after the end of World War II, in the Netherlands. Living in a bombed-out city through the war years, she knew nothing of her country’s history. Since I had, as a very young man, read Motley’s marvelous histories of that country, I was interested in discussing them with her. I found that she knew nothing of her motherland’s history. Because of the war, during the key years of her life, she had been without schooling. The bombed out schools and the life of deprivation had meant no schooling, and hence no past as a Hollander. She knew about as much of her country’s history as she did of Libya’s, and she frankly confessed her ignorance (p. 346).

Perhaps World War II led to the destabilization of the Dutch church, and perhaps few remember Dutch history well. Maybe that is one of the reasons why the nation is no longer a Christian bulwark.