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ABSTRACT
In this paper I look at the widespread, and often much debated, abandonment and reuse of church buildings in the Netherlands. I focus on the striking case of the Roman Catholic Chassé Church that, after years of being left abandoned, was converted into the Chassé Dance Studios and Hotel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the site, I show that the transformation process of the Chassé Church took place within a field of contestation in which different groups involved, articulated distinct modes of understanding the site and attributing it with value. I argue that these registers of valuation all centre in important ways on notions of home. Consequentially, while the repurposing of the church building represents the loss of a home for some, it has been co-opted as an instrument of home-building by others. For the latter, the site has played an important role in their quests for local belonging, feeling at home in the neighbourhood and, to some extent, delineating a national culture. By tracing such emotions of not only attachment and belonging, but also loss and nostalgia, this paper calls attention to the everyday affective dimension of processes of religious heritage making.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on postdoctoral research I conducted at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, as part of the HERA project Iconic Religion. I thank my colleagues in that project for our pleasant and productive collaboration. I am particularly grateful to Birgit Meyer for her warm support, advice and intellectual stimulation throughout the course of my research. I also thank my colleagues within a network of scholars working on religion, heritage and materiality in the Netherlands and beyond, who have provided valuable feedback during various stages of the research. In this context, I remember it was Jojada Verrips who once suggested to think about the relevance of conceptions of home for the case presented here. The paper has further benefited from questions and comments from audiences at several conferences and research seminars, including the Anthropology of Christianity seminar and the Religious Studies seminar, both at the University of Edinburgh. I thank the editors of this special issue, Marian Burchardt and Nur Yasemin Ural, for their kind invitation to contribute to this issue and for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Finally, I thank the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) for granting me the time to complete this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For a timeline detailing the changes that the Chassé Church has gone through, see the website The Urban Sacred: http://www.urban-sacred.org/index.html%3Fp = 12390.html [accessed on 16 June 2023]. This website and its accompanying exhibition were co-created by artists and academic researchers as part of the HERA project Iconic Religion, of which my research on this church building was a part.
2 Based within the Iconic Religion project, my fieldwork focused on church buildings in Amsterdam that were converted for new – secular or religious – purposes (see http://www.urban-sacred.org/index.html%3Fp = 11721.html, accessed on 14 July 2023). I followed up this research by conducting fieldwork on the closure and abandonment of Roman Catholic churches in Utrecht, which I undertook between 2016 and 2018 as a member of the research programme Religious Matters in an Entangled World, convened by Birgit Meyer at Utrecht University. In my fieldwork on the converted Chassé church I regularly frequented the site, spoke with passers-by and staff at the dance studios, attended public events at the site, read the minutes of neighbourhood meetings concerning the repurposing of the building and conducted interviews with various individuals involved, including church officials, former parishioners, neighbourhood residents, the managers of the dance studios, civil servants and members of committees concerned with local history or heritage. I identified myself as a researcher to my interlocutors and acquired their verbal permission to use our interviews or informal conservations for the purposes of this study.
3 A small selection of the data collected during my fieldwork on the Chassé Church has been briefly discussed in previous publications: a catalogue essay on the perception that something sacred remains after religious sites have been converted (Beekers Citation2016) and a paper on the tensions between ‘culturalized’ and ‘confessional’ religion (Beekers Citation2023). Parts of the data have been used more extensively in a Dutch paper written for a broad audience, which offers a general discussion of the contested and emotionally charged processes of church repurposing in the Netherlands (Beekers Citation2017). Different from these earlier publications, the present paper offers a focused case-study of the transformation of the Chassé Church, looking specifically at the diverse registers of valuation at play and at how each of these centre on notions of the home. Thus, the data are used here to demonstrate the affective desires of belonging and home-making involved in processes of religious heritage making.
4 I have replaced the real names of my interlocutors by pseudonyms, except for the owner of the dance studios, who is easily identifiable based on his role.
5 A Dutch Catholic newspaper which did look in detail into the consequences of church closures for social life in rural communities (it conducted a year-long journalistic research on the topic), came to the conclusion that these consequences were rather limited. It found that many of the social functions parishes performed were ‘effortlessly’ taken on by local organizations (De Wit Citation2020).
6 Code of Canon law, can. 1222, par. 2. https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann1205-1243_en.html#CHAPTER_I [accessed on 14 July 2023].
7 This quote and the first quote of Bram above also appear in an earlier publication (Beekers, Citation2023, p. 91, 96).
8 My analysis resonates with Martin Radermacher’s (Citation2021) study of the repurposed Dominican Church in Münster, Germany. Radermacher argues that the different kinds of ‘communicative attributions’ (p. 22) with respect to the building – based for example on a religious, economic, political or artistic perspective – are informed by the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘semantic agency’ (p. 23) of the building. One of the consequences of this, he writes, is that even ‘political communication’ exposes a tendency to refer to the site’s ‘sacredness’ (p. 23). I have taken a different approach in this paper, by focusing less on distinct communicative repertoires than on the social and contentious process of church conversion, in which a number of social groups articulate different ideas about the value and meaning of the building. While not denying that the ‘semantic agency’ of the site can play a role in these various positions, my material has rather pointed me toward the divergent registers of valuation with respect to the repurposed building, which are based on different affective, discursive and social engagements with the site.