Small town of Urk exemplifies pious heart of the Dutch Christian right

URK, Netherlands: Though its population is not quite 18,000, the Dutch town of Urk already has more Protestant churches than some small cities.

For this remote and traditional fishing community, though, 19 established places of worship are not enough, so plans are afoot to build two more.

An hour's drive from Amsterdam, where marijuana is sold openly in coffee shops and prostitution is legal, Urk is one of Europe's most God-fearing places.

Thousands here spurn television, theater, movies and dancing. Many dress in black and attend three hours of church services on Sunday. And some refuse to immunize their children or buy insurance because they believe this interferes with the will of God.

In recent years, the murder of two critics of Islam - Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant gay politician and opponent of immigration, and Theo van Gogh, a film director - convulsed the Netherlands, prompting a vivid debate about national identity and the assimilation of minorities in Dutch cities.

But Urk is part of a different Netherlands, the heartland of the country's Christian right, which has two political parties, one of which holds the post of deputy prime minister in the coalition government.

If this town illustrates anything about the famed tolerance of the Dutch - a multicultural nation of 16 million, more than three million of whom have a foreign background - it shows that it is based more on co-existence than on a desire for social integration.

http://www.opc.org/new_horizons/NH99/NH9901d.html

(A brief review of Kuyper at this site, who was Dutch premier .)
Abraham Kuyper: A Christian Worldview
McKendree R. Langley

It has been a hundred years since Abraham Kuyper came to America to deliver his famous Stone Lectures on the subject of Calvinism at Princeton Theological Seminary. Those on campus at that time included Professors B. B. Warfield and Francis L. Patton (who was also President of Princeton University); future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson taught political science at Princeton University. Those not yet on campus, but who would later be influenced by Kuyper, included J. Gresham Machen, 17, of Baltimore, and Cornelius Van Til, 3, of Grotegast, Groningen province, the Netherlands.

Kuyper’s great contribution at Princeton a century ago, which is still relevant today, is the fact that the Christian faith is both for salvation and for the rest of life. He was sobered by the total challenge of secularist unbelief that had been unleashed on Christendom by the French Revolution of 1789. In contrast to that, Kuyper articulated a powerful apologetic or a Christian worldview. Later this world-view greatly influenced the thinking of Cornelius Van Til at Princeton and Westminster Seminary.

This great Christian leader from Amsterdam communicated powerfully to masses of ordinary people that they needed to have a Christian way of looking at life’personal, church, and publicthat is based on Bible truth. This Reformed worldview is always needed, even though a Christian political party is not suitable for America today (as it was one hundred years ago in the Netherlands). But most important, Kuyper’s witness of a worldview can help us keep our spiritual balance in a secular culture that is increasingly given over to the demons of unbelief.... (excerpt)

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