I found this comment underneath an article about Dutch culture (and I think the foreign writer got much of the article wrong):

Hélčne M. P. June 29, 2019 at 18:35

Hi Chuka Nwanazia, delighted to come across this piece of yours. I was born (long ago :=) ) in Eindhoven in a Belgian-Dutch ‘border family’ which for centuries went back and forth living on either side of the border, intermarrying and so on. So of course we are of Catholic extraction, and culturally and historically really belonged to what is now Belgium. The provinces of Noord Brabant and Limburg were in the 17th century, at the end of the wars of religion, annexed by ‘Holland’ (as we still call the Northern Dutch) as a military buffer zone against the Catholic countries in the South. The Catholic cult was forbidden, churches confiscated and all the way till the time of Belgian independence in 1830 the region was often under military rule. For a long time Protestant missionaries came to convert the Southern locals – one example was the father of Vincent van Gogh – but they never succeeded. That is the first intimation that culture and not just religion was at stake. Moreover, there was no support from the ruling classes in the North for economic development, unless they could make money out of it such as in the case of the coal mines in Limburg. If Eindhoven became a big, prosperous city, it was thanks to the resolve of the locals (such as the family Philips or van Doorn of DAF and others, as well as a motivated work force), not because of solidarity from up North. The ‘tolerance’ Holland always proclaims being so proud of, also wore very thin with prejudice being not only verbal but institutional. As children in the ’50s and ’60s we were told we were ‘colonized’ by ‘Holland’ and our parents were outraged that ‘our history’ did not appear, or merely in a few sentences, in our school history books while in our geography books our farmers were treated as backward little potato growers on our sandy soils and compared with the prosperous farmers of the North on their rich ‘kleigrond’ or polders. Of course according to good old Dutch customs, all this couched in a religious framework. However, even as children, we already understood it was really a matter of culture with its roots in religion, but not only. It was more a matter of culture and mentality; in our eyes rigid, domineering Calvinist culture vs more easy-going and compromise-inclined Catholic culture.

But it was also regional. E.g. my mother was from a Catholic family in Haarlem. We called them ‘Calvinist Catholics’ because they had the same rigidity as Calvinists and took the Roman Church’s dogma really literally. To our astonishment. Because this wasn’t the case of my father’s family and the majority of people in the South. where there was a tendency to ignore or get around dogma that people considered their own business such as contraception, divorce and even sometimes remarriage (in the church!). But Catholics generally did like their rituals which is not amazing as their culture bathed in some 2000 years history. So even now, with by far most people not practicing – whether they call themselves atheists or nominal Catholics – they often still go to church for the rituals of baptism, marriage and funeral, as one can observe in Belgium and most other ‘Catholic countries’. Of course such things are anathema to a Calvinist mentality…

More in general, I always found it hard to understand that Calvinist culture. In my youth, there was in fact little or no contact. Even it’s literature remained opaque to me with it’s themes of rebellion against the Bible quoting patriarch and rigid family and sexual life. In fact it’s only by contact with Afrikaners in South Africa that I became a bit more familiar with it. But many Afrikaners have had to question many aspects of their Calvinist culture and traditions which I guess the Dutch hardly ever had to do. That’s why your piece is so refreshing!

I haven’t lived in the Netherlands for very many years, but reading you I am not amazed that you find a ‘Calvinist nature’ in ‘the’ Dutch in general, of whatever religious extraction they might be. The few times I have been back in the South, I had the impression that, probably through mass communication and internal migration, many ‘indigenous’ people there have in recent years pretty much assimilated that dominant Calvinist ‘nature’, even linguistically when they want to speak ‘nicely’ – which sounds horribly harsh and in their case even a bit treacherous in my ears! So ‘Calvinist nature’ might actually have become a ‘national’ culture as you say. And as I have a few grandchildren living in the North, I see that our Southern history is still largely ignored in their school programmes…. So there is a little angle to your findings – at least in the eyes of offspring of a Southern ‘border family’ like mine – that is not so pretty: it is what my parents’ generation call a successful colonisation :=)