Media and politicians in the Netherlands - as well as throughout Europe - are used to emphasize the large numbers of Muslims that have settled in the country in the past few decades. Since 9/11 and with the rise of a relatively small group of fanatical Muslims worldwide, Muslim communities are often treated as communities that might oppose ‘Western’ values. Especially some populist politicians are crossing new borders to blame Muslims for many wrongs in Dutch society, as is ridiculised by cartoonists Fokke and Sukke in Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad (see cartoon below).
In the past, the Netherlands Central Statistics Agency (CBS) estimated the number of Muslims in the Netherlands at about 1 million. That number was based on the number of migrants and their children from Muslim countries. Only recently did the CBS give a new estimation: 850,000. This was based on the fact that, especially when it comes to refugee communities, not every person from a predominantly Muslim country is a Muslim.
Having said that, we come to the following matter. Are Muslims really the single largest religious group among migrant communities in the Netherlands? In recent years, churches in the Netherlands major cities have become more popular than they were for a long time. Many of those who attend church service have an African or Afro-Caribbean background. And if we add the recent migrant workers from Eastern European countries to Christian migrant communities from Africa, South America and even the Middle East and Asia, we might even find that the number of Christian migrants - in all its diversity - is almost as high as the number of migrants with a Muslim background.