oa Een Nederlandse calvinist in Amerika

A Dutch Calvinist in the United States: Postsecular Critique in The Blood of the Lamb (1961) by Peter de Vries

With The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries has written a novel that can be qualified as a typical Dutch novel about secularization; but the novel is not Dutch. The Blood of the Lamb is written by an American author of Dutch descent. In this article, Lameijer and Ieven argue that De Vries’s way of dealing with religion can be understood as typical of how Dutch culture in the 20th century dealt with the secularisation of society. Reading The Blood of the Lamb from a contemporary, post-secular perspective, Ieven and Lameijer demonstrate how Peter de Vries’s novel can be taken as the starting point for a reflection on Dutch patterns of religion and secular critique.