This article analyses the public significance of The Passion—a televised retelling of the Passion of Jesus, featuring pop songs and celebrities in the Dutch public sphere. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the authors demonstrate how performances like The Passion offer spaces in which the Dutch can reflect publicly on important identity issues, such as the role of Christian heritage in a supposedly secular age. The article contributes to deeper knowledge of how Dutch late-modern society deals with its secular self-understanding.

This study reports a multidimensional approach to assessing religious leadership, combining leadership assessments made by 22 church leaders with 2819 vitality ratings from members of the associated Protestant churches in the Netherlands who participated in the National Church Life Survey. The multilevel analyses indicated leaders’ personality as the single predictor of church vitality, with lower leader scores on neuroticism resulting in more positive member evaluations. No significant associations were found between leaders’ transformational leadership, servant leadership, emotional intelligence, and member ratings of church vitality in the multilevel statistical model. Furthermore, a discrepancy was observed between the self-assessments of religious leaders and the evaluations made by their congregants, suggesting that self-perceived leadership effectiveness may not align with members’ perceptions. We elaborate on the lessons these findings teach us regarding assessing and mapping religious leadership effectiveness and highlight the importance of a multidimensional approach utilizing multi-source data and multilevel statistical modeling.

In a case study on suburban churches the author describes how religious ideas, material resources and relationships of trust together form capital that enables and limits the civic engagement of the churches. The case study is based on ethnographic research in the newly built suburb of Leidsche Rijn in the Netherlands. The author concludes that a focus on the combination of different forms of capital available in congregational networks helps to obtain a better understanding of the often noted positive relationship between religion and civic engagement. The study shows that capital has an ambiguous influence: it enables and limits civic engagement. Researchers should therefore not be overly positive about the effects of social capital. They should also be aware of the ‘essential contestedness’ of civic engagement. The way civic engagement actually works on an empirical level calls into question any easy definition that researchers may devise.