Religions make incompatible truth claims. Every pluralist state has to deal with them in some way that ensures that its citizens do not kill one another, and that the state survives (preferably) without getting sucked into adjudging the truth of religious claims. The Netherlands has over four centuries' experience of managing these claims. So this book by a group of Dutch theologians might have a lot to say about this question. The recent murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in the name of religion show that the issue was not settled in the days of William the Silent, nor yet by the famous ‘pillars’ that kept Dutch society in three columns – Protestant, Catholic and secular – for much of the twentieth century.

Alas, the book is very disappointing because most of the authors do not acknowledge what other parts of the Academy have to contribute. It is unhelpful to discuss the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the US Constitution (Amendment i) by reference only to some recent theology conference papers (pp. 171–2), and ignore two centuries of legal and historical scholarship on the origins and meaning of the First Amendment. It is alarming to see ‘the movie I, Claudius’ cited as evidence about the historical character Claudius (p. 231). The most interesting historical chapters are the only two to go outside the former Dutch empire, to Transylvania. The declaration of religious freedom proclaimed in Torda in 1568 is indeed a remarkable document. It is good to learn some of its context, but, unfortunately, not enough to understand its precocity, nor why it failed to become a model for state accommodation of incompatible religious truth-claims elsewhere in the world.

Several contributors wrestle with religiously-inspired violence, not surprisingly in a Dutch context, but only one acknowledges that the Old Testament sometimes sets a very bad example, for example by praising Phinehas's murder of an Israelite man and a Midianite woman (‘He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman's stomach’, Numbers xxv.8; cf comment on p. 242 of this book). Several contributors circle round the competing claims of religious freedom and freedom from discrimination on grounds of gender or sexuality. To say that either one should always prevail over the other is to deny that the other has any value. It must therefore lie with the legislature or the courts to find a middle way. None of the contributions advances this important current issue very far. An analysis of current European Court jurisprudence on cases of religious discrimination, or of the history of the ‘ministerial exemption’ in US First Amendment cases, would have thrown more light on the subject.