Dutch Evangelicalism

Abstract This chapter offers a tentative sketch of features and figures in Dutch (Reformed) Protestantism that usually are embedded in the history of Pietism (including the waning of the so-called Nadere Reformatie movement), but also could be incorporated in a (pre)history of Evangelicalism. Starting in the late seventeenth century, when the religious landscape of the Northern Netherlands had stabilized with a majority of Reformed people in the public church, the story of inner and outward piety in theological discourse and popular practice tells about emotional forms of preaching, reading, and believing in a context of growing openness to the world beyond local congregations and private meetings. After 1760, the breakthrough of Enlightenment in mainstream culture facilitated initiatives for religious sociability, missionary action, and Bible distribution, paving the way for a culture of moderate orthodoxy and civil piety which characterized Dutch Protestantism well into the nineteenth century. All the time, parallel to German Lutheran as well as Reformed Pietism (as described in this volume by Jan Stievermann), personal contacts and correspondence with British and American fellow spirits marked the international space of evangelicalism.