Buildings and Bibles Between Profanization and Sacralization: Semiotic Ambivalence in the Protestant Dutch Bible Belt

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic case study of three recently erected church buildings in the Dutch Bible Belt, this article demonstrates how orthodox Reformed congregations in the Netherlands define church buildings—especially the auditoria—and bibles as simultaneously profane and mediating the sacred. These at first glance ambivalent discourses are informed by a particular semiotic ideology, which maintains that material spaces and objects like these are sacralized if, and only if, individual believers can meaningfully relate them to their personal spiritual experiences. This ideology makes a primary attitude of profanization of material forms indispensable, because any preexistent sacredness of matter would precisely rule out these personal spiritual experiences.

Keywords:

• church buildings
• material religion
• mediation
• Protestantism
• semiotic ideology

Notes

1 “Semiotic ideology” is a concept introduced by Webb Keane (2007, 17–21) to describe the set of beliefs among a religious group about whether and how material forms can mediate the divine, and how good and evil forms have to be distinguished. We will discuss this concept in more detail further on.

2 All representatives were male. We did not deliberately choose to exclude women. Their absence in our research sample is due to the fact that gender roles are very traditional in the Dutch Bible Belt. Women are simply not involved in the public positions of the building committees of the Dutch Bible Belt.

3 The respondents used the “States translation” (Statenvertaling) when they cited from the Bible. In this article the King James Version is used to translate these quotations.

4 Another recently built church in Harskamp, a village close to Barneveld.

5 As a part of the procedure to obtain a building license from the municipal council, the municipal’s Design Review Committee reviewed the application concerning the appearance of the building’s design. This committee initially rejected the application because they preferred a more colorful type of stone for the walls. However, the congregation’s building committee deemed their choice for a natural looking, light-colored type of stone so important that they contested the decision of the Design Review Committee, and spent a lot of time to convince the municipal council. In the end they succeeded, and as a consequence the light-colored type of stone preferred by the congregation was used.

6 This is a literal translation of the Dutch Psalter of 1773, made by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

anneke pons-de wit

Anneke Pons- de Wit is a PhD student in cultural sociology at the Centre for Sociological Research, Leuven, researching into the formation of contemporary atheist, fundamentalist religious, and relativist religious identities. She has previously published in Social Compass on the religious use of new media (2015).

dick houtman

Dick Houtman is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at the Centre for Sociological Research, Leuven. His principal research interests are religious and political culture in the West (for details and publications, see www.dickhoutman.nl).

john exalto

John Exalto is Assistant Professor in the History of Education at the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, VU Amsterdam. His research focuses on the relationship between education and religion.

fred van lieburg

Fred van Lieburg is Professor of Religious History in the Faculty of Humanities, VU Amsterdam. He coordinates the Dutch Bible Belt Network and is specialized in the cultural history of transatlantic Pietism and Revivalism.

johan roeland

Johan Roeland is Assistant Professor in Media, Religion and Culture in the Faculty of Theology, VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands and the Department of Practical Theology, University of Free State, South Africa. He has published on the intersections between media, religion and popular culture in several journals, for example Journal of Contemporary Religion, Social Compass, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and the International Journal of Practical Theology.

maarten wisse

Maarten Wisse is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam. He has published in the field of philosophy of religion, contemporary theology and the history of dogma. [email protected]