By the 1950s the pillars were already beginning to crumble. Economic development and increasing personal mobility drove the so-called nivellering, or levelling, of Dutch society. As the Catholic magazine Tablet reported in 1954, in southern cities like Eindhoven employers such as Philips had a tendency to ‘attract workers and technicians from other parts; men with enquiring, searching minds, the setting of their own lives… often sundered from the family tradition’. These migrant workers were, the magazine noted with a sigh, ‘men sometimes ready to describe themselves as agnostics when it comes
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