Over the past two decades, a remarkable shift has taken place in our evaluation of the religious situation in the Dutch Republic. For a long time Calvinism was seen as the dominant force in Dutch society. Textbooks, such as K.H.D. Haley's The Dutch in the Seventeenth Century (1972), or J.L. Price's Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (1974) discussed the position of Catholics, Mennonites, and other so-called minority religions, in terms of toleration. The civic authorities, often liberal in private, had allowed their Churches to practise their rites as long as they did so discreetly, and as long as they were prepared to pay the occasional bribe that persuaded the men in charge to keep looking the other way.

Today, many Dutch historians tend to depict the Calvinist Church as one among the many Churches of the Republic, its membership covering less than half of the population of the Republic. Of course, the Calvinists had their political privileges, but day-to-day practice came closer to a seventeenth-century equivalent of a multi-cultural society. In the fourth volume of A.Th. van Deursen's Het kopergeld van de Gouden Eeuw (1981) we see the first signs of this new picture emerging in his discussion of ‘popular religion’.