Revisiting the History of Religious Resistance to Vaccination in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article provides a new framework for the history of religious objections to vaccination in the Netherlands. In public opinion and scholarly literature, these are often associated with the contemporary group of conservative Reformed people or inhabitants of the Dutch Bible Belt and projected back onto the past in a static way. In early modern times, however, reluctance to perform any preventive medical act on the human body was embedded in a general perception of the divine governance of daily life. During the eighteenth century, the innovation of inoculation was gradually accepted by medical and theological specialists, replacing providentialism by supernaturalism. In the nineteenth century, under the influence of orthodox Protestant opinion leaders, spiritual hesitation and anti-science feelings took the form of conscious religious choices and decided positions on personal freedom, especially in education. In the twentieth century, the movement against the vaccination policy of the national state became entangled with political and social mobilisation and theological legitimisation. The COVID-19 crisis reconfirmed the mix of religious and other objections. The reinterpretation of these developments bears on the direction and content of further cultural-historical research.