Understanding Struggles About Material Religious Forms in Terms of Resonance and Loss

Abstract

This article examines emotional and practical responses to the damaging, demolition, or repurposing of church buildings in contemporary Western Europe. Drawing on research on the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam, it explores why even individuals who do not, or no longer, identify as Christians may experience such developments as profound losses. Using Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss, I argue that culturalized religious forms can acquire ethical significance because they become part of the social and material world through which individuals develop their practical self-understanding. This perspective helps explain experiences of belonging, resonance, and loss associated with Christian material forms. However, I also argue that such experiences do not by themselves justify preservation politics or the privileged status of historically dominant religious traditions. The article therefore combines an interpretation of attachments to culturalized Christian forms with a critical reflection on their political ambivalence in contemporary religiously diverse democratic societies committed to political equality and freedom of religion or belief.

1. Introduction

Since the 1950s, the religious landscape of European societies has undergone rapid and profound transformations (see Baumgartner 2024, pp. 53–78). While in the 1950s the majority of the population were registered members of a Christian church, participated regularly in religious activities, and were at least familiar with the moral norms and values of their religious communities, “confessional” Christianity1 has since lost much of its formative influence on the lives of most people in late-modern European societies such as Germany and the Netherlands. Religion has not disappeared from the public sphere, however. Alongside Christianity, religions such as Islam, as well as various forms of unaffiliated spirituality, have gained public visibility through, for example, religious clothing, mosques, meditation studios, the sound of the call to prayer, the availability of halal food in restaurants and supermarkets, and the presence of openly religious public figures including politicians, football players, and pop artists. Christianity, too, continues to exert significant societal influence as a structuring principle of society (Joppke 2015, p. 2), although this influence is often expressed in culturalized forms. The public calendar, for example, contains numerous traces of Christianity; many street names and public monuments derive from Christian events and figures, and Christian churches and symbols like the cross are prominent features of the public material landscape.

The presence of culturalized religious forms, particularly those that represent Christianity as the religion of the historical majority, poses specific political challenges to the sense of belonging among members of society who do not identify as Christian. This is especially the case when the state symbolically endorses material forms of the majority religion, for example, by displaying crosses in the entrance halls of government buildings (see Langner-Pitschmann 2019) or by recognizing religious holidays as public days of rest (see Baumgartner 2024, pp. 89–95). Political philosophers widely discuss political endorsement of culturalized religious forms. Critics argue that certain forms of symbolic religious establishment could alienate members of society from the state and society, namely those who do not identify with the religion that is symbolically endorsed by the state (see Lægaard 2017; Modood and Thompson 2022). The state’s endorsement of a religion that is not theirs can disrupt and damage their relationship with the polity; it makes it difficult for them to identify with the state and to develop steady feelings of belonging (see Modood and Thompson 2022, pp. 787–90). Moreover, the state’s endorsement of material forms of a particular religious tradition can be taken to implicitly communicate ideals of belonging that present (a particular) religion as a component of civic identity and establish hierarchies of social and political status. This contributes to the civic normalization of the historically predominant majority religion and to processes of othering, which construe minority (and historically marginalized) religions as subordinate groups (see Modood and Thompson 2022, p. 782). In other words, even if it does not involve any coercive means, the state’s symbolic endorsement of a religion can communicate a message of political inequality, and if so, it “aggravates the social vulnerability of minorities” (Laborde and Lægaard 2020, p. 180; see also Bardon 2022; Laborde 2017, pp. 135–37).

Instances of symbolic religious establishment, such as the mandatory display of crosses in government buildings or the recognition of religious holidays as public holidays, are constituted and maintained through political acts of the state. Their potential to generate alienation and communicative harm is particularly powerful when they are embedded within broader societal discourses that construe the historically predominant religion as a component of national culture and identity. In public political debates, especially on the political right, this is often articulated in terms of a “Judeo-Christian” culture of tradition. Recent scholarship has highlighted both the historical inaccuracy of this term and its politically problematic function as a rhetorical device that construes—or rather asserts—an allegedly homogeneous collective identity of a “historic nation” or a shared “religious heritage” (see Lauwers 2024; Nathan and Topolski 2016; Topolski 2020; de Waal 2020). This identity is then presented as culturally and politically valuable and as something that ought to be protected and preserved for the future (see Baumgartner 2022; Beaman 2024; Burchardt 2020, pp. 155–96).

Consequently, the culturalization or heritagization of Christian forms is politically significant. Conservative and right-wing political parties and movements in Europe frequently mobilize what they describe as “our Judeo-Christian tradition” in racialized and ethnoreligious contexts. They position it in opposition to Islam, which is construed as an “alien” or “foreign” religion and as a “constitutive other in religio-civilizational terms” (Brubaker 2016). Consequently, the presence of Muslim members of society is, at best, tolerated, while Islamic material forms are portrayed as not belonging here and are excluded from the public sphere as much as possible. Some political movements and persons do that straightforwardly, for instance, the far-right political movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) or politicians in German Parliament, stating that “Islam does not belong to Germany” (see Mustafa 2023). Others, such as Dutch politician Chris Stoffer, lament that “the Judeo-Christian roots of the Netherlands are being called into question, whilst Islam is simultaneously given free rein.”2 This suggests a quasi-causal relationship between the presence of Islam in the Netherlands on the one hand and the declining societal influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition on the other.

Such political rhetoric aggravates existing racial–religious stereotypes in society and effectively fuels processes of othering and social exclusion of Muslims. It illustrates the often exclusionary political mobilization of Judeo-Christian culture and tradition and the reactive Christianism that is part of that—“If “they” are Muslim,” as Rogers Brubaker puts the reasoning behind such strategies, “then in some sense “we” must be Christian (or Judeo-Christian)” (Brubaker 2016). Such a politicization of culturalized Christianity publicly construes Christianity as part of a national culture in order to push Islam to the margins of society, which is well researched in particular as a strategy of the political right in Europe (see, e.g., Baumgartner 2020; Beaman 2020; van den Hemel 2014; Laborde and Lægaard 2020; Lauwers 2024; Marzouki et al. 2016; Topolski 2020; de Waal 2020).

The results of this research (including insights about the historical inadequacy and anti-Islamic racism that is part of the origin and the political use of the term “Judeo-Christian culture”) are crucial for a thorough understanding of controversies about, for example, crucifixes in government buildings, an Islamic public holiday, mosques with minarets, the amplification of the call to prayer, and so forth. However, debates about culturalized Christian forms are not in all cases directly fueled by anti-Islam sentiments, and church buildings, Christian holidays, and Christian practices and festivals seem to be cherished by people who do not or no longer identify as Christians, who do not resent Islam, and who do not support right-wing political parties (see van den Hemel 2020; Wagenaar 2022). This insight informs the perspective from which I want to analyze and interpret the emotional and practical responses of people who are confronted with the actual or anticipated demolition of church buildings in their neighborhood. How do they experience such transformations of the traditional material religious landscape in their social environment? And what do their responses suggest about the significance of particular material religious forms for the practical self-understanding of individuals in their society?

The emotions and practices displayed in such cases are often not—or not directly and not at first sight—connected to the presence of Islam or any other minority religion in society. Making sense of such responses requires a different explanatory framework, one that is not primarily focused on Islamophobia or reactive Christianism. The following analysis seeks to contribute to such an explanation without neglecting the possible influence of political controversies surrounding religious diversity or the exclusionary forces of the political mobilization of a so-called “Judeo-Christian culture”.

Analyzing and interpreting responses to transformations of the material religious landscape requires information about specific situations where such responses occur. To empirically inform my analysis, I draw on two such cases: the fire that severely damaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019 and the (anticipated) destruction or repurposing of a church building in Amsterdam that is no longer used as a house of worship. These cases have been examined in previous research by, among others, social scientists such as Daan Beekers, Nathalie Heinich, Susanne Krasmann, Miguel Maté-González et al., and Oscar Salemink. Their work forms the empirical basis of my analysis (see Beekers 2024; Heinich 2021; Krasmann 2021; Maté-González et al. 2025; Salemink 2022).

The focus of my contribution differs from theirs, however. While these authors are primarily interested in people’s direct responses to particular events, I interpret reported experiences and practices in order to understand the often implicit dimensions of individuals’ self-understanding and their relation to the world they inhabit. In other words, I shift the analytical focus from learning about particular case studies to learning from them, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the practical self-understanding of individual members of society, the specific vulnerabilities associated with it, and the ways in which they relate to the religiously dynamic and diverse conditions of late-modern democratic societies. This approach makes it possible to understand attachments to culturalized material forms of the historical majority religion—in this case, Christianity—not merely as expressions of exclusionary majoritarian–identitarian politics, but also as manifestations of resonant relations to the world. At the same time, the analysis highlights the political ambivalence of such attachments and their potential entanglement with exclusionary projects of belonging and politics of cultural defense (Orgad 2015).

To achieve that, I conceptualize these responses within a theoretical framework informed by the theories of resonance and loss developed by the sociologists Rosa (2019) and Reckwitz (2024). Both authors examine how members of late-modern societies experience and respond to rapid social and political transformations in their lifeworlds and how such experiences are anchored in practical self-understandings shaped by the social conditions that constitute the world to which they belong. The following section briefly introduces those components of their theories that are relevant to my analysis. I then present the case studies of the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral and the repurposing of a church building in Amsterdam. This section also includes an interpretation of the case studies through the lens of resonance and loss. Finally, after a brief recap, I return to the relationship between the insights gained from the analysis of the case studies in terms of resonance and loss on the one side and the exclusionary effects of the political mobilization of Judeo-Christian culture on the other side.

2. Resonance and Loss

Andreas Reckwitz and Hartmut Rosa are two influential German sociologists who, despite significant differences in the theoretical and methodological orientations of their work, have each developed comprehensive accounts of the structural transformations of late-modern societies and their implications for individuals’ practical self-understanding. Both identify distinctive social dynamics as characteristic features of late modernity. These dynamics give rise to social disruptions and experiences of frustration, to which the two sociologists critically respond in their own respective ways.

For Rosa, the point of departure is the concept of “dynamic stabilization,” namely, the observation that society “can only safeguard the stability of its structural properties by building a system of continuous growth, ever denser innovation and acceleration, which, in turn, lead to a further reproduction of the same structures” (Rosa 2025, p. 167). Similarly, Reckwitz identifies the cultural imperative of progress as a defining feature of late-modern societies; the idea that the future will be better than the present, which itself is already better than the past ever was (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 120–29). These characteristics of late-modern societies are associated with specific challenges and experiences that form the focus of Rosa’s and Reckwitz’s respective analyses. To begin, I briefly introduce the key components of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance.

According to Rosa, dynamic stabilization pushes structures and institutions, but also members of society, to constantly innovate and accelerate their activities in virtually all sectors of society, including the economy, education, media, politics, and science. Consequently, people relate to the world in ways that are primarily functional and interest-driven, which again makes them feel lost, exhausted and alienated from the world they live in. Such alienation constitutes “a failed way of being and relating” (Rosa 2017, p. 449), which involves a relation to a world that “is seen as […] pointless, meaningless stuff which is “of no concern” in any constitutive sense, to us as individuals” (Rosa 2025, pp. 170–71). The insight that alienation and related experiences of meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference are major social pathologies of modern societies is a well-established insight in social and political philosophy (see, e.g., Jaeggi 2014). But if alienation constitutes a failed way of relating to oneself and the world, how can one conceptualize a better, good relation to the world? To critique and counter alienation as a structural pathology of late-modern societies, Rosa develops the theory of resonance as “alienations’ other” and as a theory of “a “good” or fulfilling way of relating to places, people, time, things, and self” (Rosa 2017, p. 449). Resonant relations to the world are not directed towards specific interests or instrumental gain. Rather, they are responsive relations of a person to other people, groups, objects, or places, or in other words, to entities a person cares for and is entangled with. Resonance, as Rosa conceptualizes it, involves the experience of being touched; sometimes a person can feel elevated, at other times deeply connected with the entity they resonate with. Indeed, Rosa’s notion of experiences of resonance in a narrow sense refers to deep, extraordinary, in some contexts almost spiritual experiences that cannot be brought about at will, according to Rosa, since resonance is largely uncontrollable and non-disposable (see Rosa 2017, p. 450). One can, however, create conditions that prepare and facilitate resonant relations to the world—but also conditions that people experience as alienating and as distortions of the world with which they are familiar and to which they understand themselves to belong. Herein lies the important critical thrust of Rosa’s argument: a normative critique of alienating social conditions in terms of resonance, understood as the counterpart of alienation, enables a deeper understanding of how people are situated within and relate to their social world. It also helps to identify obstacles that hinder individuals from relating to that world in positive and constructive ways (see Rosa 2019, pp. 381–424; Rosie 2024). And if, as Rosa suggests, social conditions that enable people to experience resonant relations to their world—rather than alienation from it—are a precondition for a good life, then social and political critique should include critical analyses of existing conditions, structures, and social developments that are experienced by members of society as fostering or hindering resonant relations within their lifeworlds.

I now turn to the second component of the theoretical framework for my analysis: Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss as a fundamental problem of modernity.3

In his analysis of contemporary social and political dynamics, Reckwitz identifies a paradoxical approach to loss that is inextricably connected to (Western) late-modern societies. On the one hand, societal dynamics, driven by the imperative of progress mentioned above, seek to overcome—or at least minimize—losses. On the other hand, however, the accelerated social change that is part of this very process generates new and profound experiences of loss (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 21–22). What does this mean, more precisely, and to what extent are such profound experiences of loss related to the self-understanding of members of late-modern societies, or, perhaps, human beings in general?

Loss, according to Reckwitz, is an experience of individuals, groups, or even societies who evaluate negatively the disappearing of a relevant entity (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 47–48). Of course, not every instance of something disappearing is experienced as loss in a profound sense; people are relieved and happy if something bad or dangerous is no longer there (e.g., a disease or a war), and one can be indifferent concerning the disappearing of something as well. Loss, however, according to Reckwitz, involves a negative response in the sense that one deplores and grieves the disappearing of a particular entity and would prefer it to continue to exist in the present and the future. Accordingly, Reckwitz argues, to speak of loss in a substantive and profound (rather than merely trivial) sense, the object that is lost must have been important to the individual or group experiencing the loss. According to Reckwitz’s theory, loss is experienced only with regard to entities one is strongly connected with. The thing that is lost in Reckwitz’s sense is or has been a central part of somebody’s identity. Consequently, the disappearing of the entity cannot be easily resolved by some functional equivalent (as it might be the case with a discounter that is closed), but it affects a person’s practical self-understanding as a person that is entangled with the entity that is (about to be) lost.

To explain how something can have such an important status for a person’s identity, Reckwitz operates with a praxeological and relational understanding of the human self (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 57–60). According to this praxeological notion, the self—that is a person’s particular identity and their often implicit practical self-understanding—is shaped in the course of an ongoing process of social practices that involves interactions with other people, traditions, and material things (e.g., bodies, buildings, money, texts, etc.). Whilst doing these social practices, people constantly interpret themselves as persons with particular characteristics and with specific relations to their social and natural environment. A person’s identity and practical self-understanding result from these processes of doing and interpreting. Consequently, the person and their self-interpretation are emotionally bound to a particular “meaningful world of practices, other people, and objects, that seems to secure their existence, which ideally corresponds to their self-interpretation” (Reckwitz 2024, p. 59; my translation). As people continue to engage in social practices and reflect on themselves and their relations to the world, their selves are fragile in the sense that what they consider important aspects of their practical self-understanding can change or disappear. This can interrupt and shatter their self-interpretation, for as Reckwitz points out such experiences of loss are connected with specific temporalities that affect a person’s self: a person’s practical self-understanding is constituted through past and present social practices and processes of self-interpretation. When entities that are integral to these foundations disappear, this may be experienced as a loss of possible modes of self-understanding in the future and thus as a loss of expectations of the future one is invested in. In other words, what is lost are not merely entities one values highly (e.g., because of their function or their beauty). Beyond that, the loss of certain entities “shatters the self and their subjective world. If one experiences loss in a strong sense, the self is wounded by the disappearing of social practices that are essential for one’s identity” (Reckwitz 2024, p. 59; my translation). Consequently, being the person one expected oneself to be in the future turns out to be no longer possible. In a similar vein, the disappearance of entities one (often implicitly) construes as integral to the world one resonates with may be experienced, according to Reckwitz’s theory, not only as a loss of something outside of one’s self, but as a loss of one’s own world and self (Reckwitz 2024, p. 60).

Accelerated social change, a defining feature of late-modern societies, can result not only in exhaustion and alienation, as described in Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, but also in experiences of loss. As Reckwitz argues, social change creates losers, because it affects entities that matter to individuals or groups—traditions, practices, social status, et cetera—and that have shaped their practical self-understanding. The disappearance of such things, or changes in their social standing and the status associated with them, can be experienced as loss in the sense developed by Reckwitz’s theory.

With respect to possible strategies to deal with experiences of loss, the scope of Reckwitz’s theory goes beyond the subjective experience of loss. He identifies a variety of practices of “doing loss” (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 60–64, 373–409), for instance, grieving, commemorating somebody or something that has been lost, nostalgia, but also protest and resistance against (anticipated) loss. In that context, Reckwitz also distinguishes three different entities or “figures” that are involved in constellations of loss: the person or group who experiences loss; the entity that has disappeared; and finally, a “third figure” (Figur des Dritten), which can be an observer or a person who is taken to be responsible for the loss (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 110–13). I will come back to that in the concluding section of this article.

So, to what extent could concepts like resonance and loss help us to understand deeper dimensions of emotional and practical responses to transformations of the material religious landscape? The following sections explore such questions.

3. Damaging, Demolishing or Repurposing Church Buildings: Two Case Studies

To analyze responses to transformations of material religious forms in the public sphere, I draw on social scientific research on two cases involving the actual or anticipated damaging or destruction of church buildings: the damaging of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral by a fire in April 2019 and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam as an alternative to its planned demolition. These cases share that they both concern material forms of the historically predominant religion Christianity. Moreover, both studies concern situations in which the continued existence of a church building is at stake.

The two case studies differ, however, with regard to the significance of the buildings involved: Notre-Dame Cathedral is of national significance and internationally renowned. By contrast, the significance of the church building in Amsterdam is largely limited to the neighborhood in which it is located. There are also important differences in the processes through which the buildings were damaged or transformed: Notre-Dame Cathedral was unintentionally damaged by fire, and the event received extensive international media coverage. The repurposing of the neighborhood church in Amsterdam, by contrast, resulted from a long process of planning, negotiation, and renovation that attracted little attention beyond the local community.

In what follows, I briefly sketch each case study. In a subsequent section, I analyze them through the theoretical framework developed above, drawing on the theories of resonance and loss.

3.1. Notre-Dame Cathedral Fire in 2019

On 15 April 2019, a fire broke out beneath the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, destroying large parts of the building. For centuries, Notre-Dame has been a house of worship. It is also an iconic national monument, a political symbol of French cultural identity, a major tourist attraction, the setting for Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, as well as for an opera and several films. Many regard it as one of the defining landmarks of Paris, a city known and cherished by people throughout the world (see Maté-González et al. 2025; Morgan 2021, pp. 129–54). The burning cathedral was breaking news in many countries, and social media feeds were quickly flooded with spectacular pictures of the fire.4 Many Parisians gathered near the cathedral, “gripped in dismay” (Morgan 2021, p. 131), expressing deep affection, and many “Catholic faithful were aghast and spent the evening and night praying for the salvation of this most holy church in France” (Salemink 2022, p. 249). Parisians as well as visitors were horrified at the sight of the burning cathedral; many who witnessed the fire were visibly moved and cried even if they were not observing Catholics, had not paid much attention to the cathedral before, and had never or only a few times been inside the building (see Heinich 2021; Maté-González et al. 2025; Morgan 2021).

Researchers collecting and investigating witnesses’ responses to the fire point out that many onlookers described a community-building function of Notre-Dame Cathedral, for the French people, but also for visitors of Paris (see, e.g., de Jong 2023). In short interviews, people who witnessed the fire, or who had heard about it and had seen televised pictures of the burning cathedral, described a sense of an “invaluable”, “universal” or “spiritual” value of the building (Salemink 2022, p. 250). Some even expressed “that the sight of the burning felt not just as if Paris was losing its heart, but indeed as if they were losing part of their body—a limb or something very essential to their being” (Salemink 2022, p. 252). Moreover, the cathedral was frequently described as an entity that functioned as a medium of collective identity formation for Catholics, Parisians, and the French nation. Not all these relations and valuations had been explicit prior to the fire. Accordingly, as David Morgan points out, the damage to Notre-Dame de Paris was not only destructive but also “a kind of revelation” (Morgan 2021, p. 129) of what the building meant to Parisians, other French citizens, and even some visitors. It revealed the extent to which the cathedral was in one way or another close to the hearts of many people (see Krasmann 2021, p. 2).

3.2. The Repurposing of Neighborhood Churches in The Netherlands

My second case study concerns a repurposed church building in Amsterdam. Resulting from processes of secularization and unchurching, many church buildings in the Netherlands are no longer needed in their original function as houses of worship. A decreasing number of people attend church services; smaller rooms are needed for gatherings of believers and suffice for most of the services the churches provide. Consequently, numerous church buildings have been demolished or repurposed for use as, for instance, flats, bookstores, or dance studios (see Beekers 2017; Beekers 2024; Velthuis and Spennemann 2007; from a different perspective, Kuyk 2023). These changes provoked protests against the demolition or repurposing of a church, which Daan Beekers researched in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities. Beekers analyzed how people responded to plans for the demolishing or repurposing of a church building in their neighborhood—in this case Beekers studied a church building in Amsterdam that was preserved and repurposed as a dance studio (Beekers 2024). People who had cherished the building as their house of worship, Beekers reports, deplored the closing of the church building, and they grieved the loss of their church. They could not find solace in plans to repurpose the building and use it for profane purposes; what mattered to them was the character and purpose of the church building as a house of worship (Beekers 2024, pp. 847–50). Others, however, who did not have a religious relation to the church, were not interested in a specific religious purpose of the building and what it was used for. Yet, they had a strong interest in the presence of the architectural form and the material structure in their neighborhood: “what mattered most for the local protest group [who fought against the demolition of the church building, ChrB] was the physical appearance of the building itself, its outside” (Beekers 2024, p. 855).5 These people described the significance of the church building in terms of history and identity (their own, that of their family and neighborhood) and feelings of belonging, familiarity, and being at home (Beekers 2024, pp. 850–54). In other words, the church building had a great personal significance to people from the neighborhood, even though they did not identify with any religious or theological meaning of the church. They protested its demolition and campaigned for the preservation of the material building, but with a different function (here: a dance studio). What was valuable for people of the neighborhood was the presence of the particular architectural form that had characterized the space they had lived in for a long time.

Let me now explore the extent to which theories of resonance and loss can help us understand the deeper dimensions of responses to the damaging or (planned) demolition of church buildings.

4. Resonance and Loss in Relation to Church Buildings

The two case studies outlined above demonstrate the—sometimes implicit—significance that objects can have for a person’s practical self-understanding in the context of a religiously dynamic society. Human persons develop their practical self-understanding as persons situated in a particular place, related to the particular world they inhabit, and deriving orientation from it. Consequently, the material world to which they feel they belong can matter deeply to them and shape their sense of who they are.

This helps to explain why people do not merely deplore the (anticipated) damaging or demolition of a church building close to their home. Rather, they experience such events as profoundly affecting them personally, sometimes to their own surprise. Recall David Morgan’s observation, mentioned above, that it was only the fire and resulting severe damage to Notre-Dame Cathedral, or the planned demolition of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam, that “revealed” to people in Paris and the Amsterdam neighborhood, respectively, that a particular church building mattered to them in a profound and substantive sense. Once the building was threatened with destruction, people realized that it is an essential component of the world they belong to and are entangled with (see Morgan 2021, p. 131; Heinich 2021, pp. 72–73; Krasmann 2021, p. 5). The fire did not only reveal something about the relational status of the church, however, but also about the practical self-understanding of the people affected: they experience themselves as being, in a substantive sense, related to a particular world in which this particular building constitutes an important component. Or to put it in terms of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance: moments in which the continued existence of the cathedral was at stake revealed to people that this particular building was an essential part of the world to which they related positively. Even if they do not directly experience resonance as Rosa describes it (as being “touched, moved, or gripped”, see, e.g., Rosa 2017, p. 95) in relation to a church building, and even if the building is not part of their religious life, they anticipate their world without the cathedral and thus the conditions for resonant relations in mundane interactions as closer to “pointless” and “meaningless stuff”, thus evoking a sense of alienation. For the people whose responses were analyzed in the case studies presented above, a less alienating world is a world that has been co-constituted by the presence of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral or the neighborhood church in Amsterdam.

With respect to Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss, research into responses to the fire damaging Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and to the plans to demolish church buildings in Amsterdam neighborhoods identifies a broad variety of responses of different people—shock, grief, bafflement, and so forth. It is noticeable, however, that reported experiences of loss, along with related feelings and practices, recur across virtually all studies of the two events. In the case of the burning cathedral, researchers speak of sadness, of being wounded and cut off from something one is attached to, and of exposure to damage and loss (see Morgan 2021, p. 131; Krasmann 2021, p. 4). Similarly, parishioners in Amsterdam report “feelings of loss, estrangement and homelessness” (Beekers 2024, p. 856) when plans were made to demolish their neighborhood church. They also experienced “a sense of rootlessness, of disorientation after their church closed down” (Beekers 2024, p. 848).6 Such almost existential responses can be explained on the basis of Reckwitz’s praxeological account of the formation of a person’s self and their practical self-understanding (see above): people who experience the (anticipated) disappearance of a church building in ways as described above have shaped their identity and their practical self-understanding in interaction with a material world that is co-constituted by the church building that is at the center of one of the two case studies above. The result of this process is an “ontological identification” of persons with the building, as Oscar Salemink calls it (Salemink 2022, p. 252), interpreting interviews with onlookers who compared the destruction of large parts of Notre-Dame Cathedral with losing part of their own bodies. “Here,” Salemink argues, “the valuation of Notre-Dame is not just as heritage or icon, but as part of self” (Salemink 2022, p. 252).

A theoretical framework of resonance and loss can also help to understand practices of coping with or fighting against the impending loss of the church building. In the case of the Amsterdam neighborhood church, one needs to distinguish between parishioners to whom the closed church was their house of worship, on the one hand, and people from the neighborhood who do not belong to the religious community of the church on the other hand.

The parishioners in Amsterdam who lost their house of worship cannot find solace in the fact that the building is preserved and repurposed with the profane function of a dance studio. For what they lost is no longer present in the architectural structure that looks like their church. To them, it has become something fundamentally different. For the members of the church community, the church building was “a place where God lives among the people, a house of God”, as a pastor put it (Beekers 2024, p. 845).7 Even if the building itself is repurposed, what the parishioners lost has genuinely disappeared, and the continued presence of the architectural structure of the (former) church can even intensify the feelings of loss and alienation they experience when confronted with the absence of their church from the neighborhood (see Beekers 2024, pp. 848–50). For them, doing loss means grieving, perhaps feeling nostalgic, and looking for a different parish with a different house of worship as their new religious home.

The situation is different, however, for people from the neighborhood who do not belong to the religious community of the church yet still have a relation resembling resonance to the world that is co-constituted by the church building. Once the plans to demolish the church building were announced, some people engaged in practices of doing (anticipated) loss that aimed at the preservation of the architectural structure by repurposing the church building. From their perspective this prevents profound loss, as the building’s religious function was not, for them, its primary source of value. Daan Beekers reports that “for many [of the local residents he met] the renovated building [repurposed as a dance studio] signifies not the loss but the return of a home” (Beekers 2024, p. 850. Italics in original). Or in the words of one of his interlocutors: “The fact that churches have to close down is not a bad thing in itself”, which Beekers interprets as an illustration of “what matters most for the local protest group”, namely “the physical appearance of the building itself, its outside, as a material reminder of the past” (Beekers 2024, p. 855). They fought for the preservation of the architectural structure, since this is what contributes to the world they feel they belong to and resonate with.

Similarly, many people who witnessed (directly or indirectly) the burning of Notre-Dame du Paris in April 2019 did not only mourn the destruction of the cathedral, but they also expressed feelings of responsibility to restore the cathedral and hand it intact to future generations (see Maté-González et al. 2025; Moisi 2019). Such feelings and practices of both mourning loss and building a new future indicate the importance of the entity that is lost for the practical self-understanding of Parisians, whether Catholic or not.

The two cases examined above demonstrate that some people’s relations to particular material components of their world cannot be adequately understood in purely functional terms. Responses to the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral and the threatened destruction of an Amsterdam neighborhood church indicate that people see these buildings as having not only instrumental or esthetic value.8 In some cases, people were even not interested in a church building’s function as a house of worship. What did matter to them, however, was that they had developed their own practical self-understanding in and of a world that was co-constituted by, amongst other things, the entity that was about to be lost. Removing the building from the world a person resonates with and is part of is experienced both as a disruption of their self-understanding and as an alienating transformation of the world around them. Or as put by Reckwitz, since a person’s self-interpretation is constituted within and bound to a particular culturally and ethically meaningful world of practices, other people, and things, the loss of an entity that is an integral part of that constellation can fracture the self of that particular person (see Reckwitz 2024, p. 59). This is why architectural structures like Notre-Dame Cathedral or the neighborhood church in Amsterdam can have ethical significance—they are important components of the world people resonate with and that shapes their practical self-understanding.

French president Emmanuel Macron appears to have been acutely aware of the political significance of the destruction of an entity with the cultural and national importance of Notre-Dame Cathedral, particularly at a time when protests of the mouvement des Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest movement) was articulating broader discontent with Macron’s politics. In a speech to the nation delivered on the day after the fire, Macron stated that a “part of all of us burns” (quoted in Stengs 2023, p. 27) and politicized the destruction of the cathedral by declaring that “it is our responsibility to ensure the continuity of the French nation.” In doing so, he suggested a political imperative to rebuild the damaged cathedral as quickly as possible, and “more beautifully than before” (see de Jong 2023, p. 2; Salemink 2022, p. 250).

Presented in Reckwitz’s terms, Marcon’s way of “doing loss” was to offer the prospect of a future in which what has been lost would be restored. At the same time, he presented “the resurrection of Notre Dame as a condition for the continuity of the French nation.” As a result, “[t]he rebuilding of the Notre Dame became entangled with the project of overcoming national divisions” (de Jong 2023, p. 2). One implication of this analysis is that, from the perspective of egalitarian political philosophy, such a majority-identitarian politics of doing loss is problematic because it leaves little room for facilitating material expressions of cultural and religious diversity (see also Baumgartner 2020).

This note on the political dimension of loss in the context of culturalized religious forms allows me, in the following sections, to address issues that were not central to the two case studies but nevertheless remain important for discussions of concepts such as alienation, belonging, resonance, and loss. These issues emerge in the context of processes such as secularization and unchurching, the diversification of the religious landscape, the culturalization and heritagization of the religion of the historical majority, and the construction and politization of an allegedly “Judeo-Christian” culture, together with the race–religion entanglements associated with it that I mentioned at the beginning of this contribution.

5. Recap: The Ethical Significance of Christian Material Forms

I began this article by addressing political challenges arising from the presence of material religious forms of the historical majority in the public sphere, especially when this presence is symbolically endorsed by the state. These challenges include the potentially alienating effects of symbolic establishment as well as the implicit promotion of ideals of belonging that conflict with political equality. Such effects are further aggravated when they are embedded in societal and political discourses that construe and politically mobilize an alleged “Judeo-Christian culture” as part of a country’s national identity.

The two case studies analyzed in this contribution concern church buildings and thus material Christian forms. Christianity is the historical majority religion in late-modern European societies, which constitute the political context of my analysis. However, whereas discussions of symbolic religious establishment and the political construction and mobilization of a “Judeo-Christian culture” as part of national identity primarily revolve around issues concerning alienation, discrimination, exclusion, and racialization of religion, my contribution is also concerned with the positive significance of culturalized religious forms for the practical self-understanding of individuals. This practical self-understanding has been shaped, directly or indirectly, under the influence of culturalized Christianity.

My analysis reconstructs responses to the actual or anticipated damaging or demolition of church buildings as indicators of a quasi-resonant relationship between people and a world that is co-constituted by these buildings. Such relationships make people feel at home in their world and deeply connected to it. The anticipated destruction of a church building as an entity to which they are closely related is experienced not merely as the disappearing of something instrumentally valuable, or of a beautiful object, but as the profound loss of an entity that plays an important role in shaping the practical self-understanding of some people. Consequently, within the framework of Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss, the destruction of an architectural structure can be conceptualized in terms of a “shattering of a person’s self and their subjective world” (Reckwitz 2024, p. 59). In other words, the destruction or disappearance of such an entity is experienced as the destruction of a part of the world one resonates with.

This insight has explanatory value for debates concerning the presence or the possible removal of material religious forms in the public sphere of late-modern liberal democratic societies. Committed to political equality and freedom of religion or belief as fundamental political principles, such societies foster religious diversity. However, their material culture typically reflects Christianity as the historically predominant religion. Consequently, people whose practical self-understanding has been shaped through interaction with culturalized or heritagized Christian forms occupy a structurally privileged position in society (see Lauwers 2023). For them, material structures such as church buildings can have genuine ethical significance, and they encounter numerous opportunities to relate positively to the predominant material culture. This, in turn, supports experiences of belonging and resonance rather than alienation. This distinctive status of these material religious forms—and the particular vulnerability associated with attachments to them—is revealed most clearly in situations in which such structures, and the relationships people have with them, are threatened with destruction. In such situations, people come to understand that what is threatened with disappearance matters to them and their practical self-understanding and that they should act to prevent the anticipated loss from occurring—for instance, by donating money for the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral (Maté-González et al. 2025, p. 7), or by joining the initiative for the preservation of the church building in their neighborhood (Beekers 2024).

Analyses such as the one offered in this contribution help us understand the basis and purposes of certain emotions and practices in relation to the actual or planned destruction of particular material forms. However, they do not by themselves suffice to justify normative claims concerning the protection or preservation of, for instance, church buildings.

At first sight, the privileged position of culturalized Christian forms in the public sphere—and of people whose practical self-understanding has been shaped through interaction with such forms—might appear largely justifiable. As Sophie Lauwers points out, “because Christianity is the longstanding dominant tradition in Europe, it is to a certain extent inevitable that it is overrepresented in the public sphere, with a predominance of Christian buildings and architectural norms” (Lauwers 2023, p. 415). However, Lauwers also demonstrates in her analysis of Christian privilege in Western Europe that history is a dynamic process and that “the relationship between past and present is and must be constantly negotiated” (Lauwers 2023, p. 415). This negotiation necessarily includes a critical reflection on the legacy of historically predominant traditions, including Christianity. Such a critical reflection is particularly urgent in contexts where seemingly benign religious material forms are mobilized for conservative and exclusionary purposes as is sometimes the case in rhetorics of an alleged “Judeo-Christian culture” that is presented as in need of protection and preservation. Such rhetoric contributes to the construction of minority religions—particularly Islam—as foreign religions that are said to not really belong here.9

Moreover, and with respect to the theories of resonance and loss that inform my analysis, it is important to note that neither Rosa nor Reckwitz claims that the fact that somebody resonates with a particular entity, or experiences profound loss when a particular thing disappears, establishes strong reasons for preservation politics. Although Hartmut Rosa presents resonant relations to the world as constituent element of a good life, such relations do not depend exclusively on particular entities such as church buildings. Rather, the critical force of Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance is directed at social conditions that make it difficult or even impossible to develop resonant relations to the world—for instance, the imperative of constant advancement, innovation, acceleration, and production and consumption that characterizes late-modern societies (see Rosa 2019, pp. 404–24).

If we broaden the scope of the analysis and return to the political mobilization of a so-called “Judeo-Christian culture”, further aspects of debates about resonance and loss come into view.

6. Whose Resonance? And Whose Social Exclusion and Alienation?

I explained the choice of my case studies with the aim to identify those aspects of debates about culturalized Christian forms that are not, or not directly, motivated by sentiments against Islam or any other minority religion. The material that I studied for my analysis—social scientific research by Daan Beeker, Nathalie Heinich, Susanne Krasmann, Oscar Salemink, and others—allows for this strategy, for these authors do not report references to the presence of Islam or other minority religions as factors that could have shaped people’s responses to what happens to culturalized Christian forms. However, if we reflect upon the broader discursive context of such debates, we can see that virtually all recent controversies about religion in the public sphere of late-modern European societies took place in a context where Islam in particular is connected to all kinds of developments in the religious landscape. Processes such as the ongoing unchurching of countries such as Germany and the Netherlands are often discursively framed within a broader narrative that juxtaposes a decline of an alleged “Judeo-Christian culture” with the alleged “Islamization” of society. Recall, for instance, the statement by the Dutch politician Chris Stoffer that what he calls the Judeo-Christian roots of the Netherlands are under pressure while Islam is being given free rein (see above). This proximity, within the same political and societal context, of something portrayed as declining and something else described as being on the rise, is characteristic of what Andreas Reckwitz describes as “arenas of loss” (Verlustarenen; see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 106–13).

Earlier I mentioned Reckwitz’s distinction between different “figures” involved in constellations of loss: a person who experiences loss, an entity that has disappeared, and a “third figure”, which may be a person or institution held responsible for the loss (see Reckwitz 2024, pp. 110–13). According to Reckwitz, questions concerning what should be recognized as a profound and legitimate experience of loss, and who should be held responsible for it, are discussed and negotiated within “social arenas of loss” (Reckwitz 2024, p. 35). In the context of religion and religious diversity in the public sphere, such arenas of loss are often shaped by right-wing populist actors who take up sentiments of perceived loss (e.g., that “Judeo-Christian roots of the Netherlands are called into question”) and contrast them with allegedly privileged beneficiaries (e.g., “Islam is given free rein”), regardless of whether the two phenomena are in fact connected (and whether they actually exist). Reckwitz is very clear about the dangers of such populist strategies, which transform social arenas of loss into “explosive experimental spaces for dealing with negative events” (Reckwitz 2023; see also Reckwitz 2024, pp. 390–95). Populism, he argues, “is at its core motivated by loss” (Reckwitz 2023). It draws on societal transformations that are perceived by some as losses, and, by targeting marginalized groups, right-wing populists fuel and redirect existing anger over loss. Moreover, and this relates to what Reckwitz identifies as a key feature of late-modern societies, right-wing populism no longer primarily promises to ensure innovation and progress. Rather, “the promise is […] about the illusion of regaining what has been lost” (Reckwitz 2023).

As noted above, research on the case studies of the Notre-Dame fire and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam did not report anti-Islamic motives in the debates about loss. Nevertheless, one can identify valuations and arguments that resonate with broader mobilizations of an alleged “Judeo-Christian” culture and tradition in connection with notions of home and belonging. In the cases examined here, I could not find significant exclusionary forces, and culturalized Christian forms were not positioned as reactive Christianism (Brubaker 2016; see above) directed against Islam or other minority religions. In the margins of the debate about the fire that damaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, however, misinformation circulated through various professional news outlets—and even more extensively through social media—that falsely linked the fire to Islamic terrorism (see Hern 2019). Although this misinformation did not significantly shape public perceptions of the fire and failed to enter the relevant social and discursive arenas of loss, it nevertheless demonstrates how mourning about the loss of something positively valued can be mobilized and redirected into hostility toward a different entity, even when that entity has no connection to the loss in question. Given the exclusionary and sometimes racialized dimensions of debates about a so-called “Judeo-Christian culture”, it is therefore important to recognize that experiences of resonance and loss are not, in themselves, immune to appropriation by right-wing populist actors. Social critique needs to be vigilant, therefore, and ensure that obstacles towards “the other of alienation”, that is, the resonant relations to the world that has been shaped primarily by the historically predominant cultural majority, do not come at the cost of processes of othering, social exclusion, and alienation of members of cultural and religious minorities. Such vigilant social critique can start by recognizing the historical and thus largely contingent nature of existing material and social structures, and, related to that, the necessarily dynamic character of traditions and cultures, including national culture (see Scheffler 2010, pp. 256–86).

My analysis has shown that some individuals are strongly attached to particular material forms of the historical majority religion because they have developed their practical self-understanding in interaction with these forms. Consequently, the presence of such forms in the world to which they belong matters to them. When these forms are damaged or destroyed, individuals can experience profound loss.

However, the recognition of such experiences does not by itself justify rigid preservation politics or, as Liav Orgad puts it, politics of cultural defense (Orgad 2015). Preventing experiences of loss by fortifying particular elements of material culture as constitutive parts of “the” national culture is not compatible with liberal democracies’ commitment to political equality and freedom of religion or belief. Although people who resonate with a world co-constituted by material religious forms of the historical majority can have a legitimate interest in the continued presence of such forms, this interest cannot justify the exclusion or marginalization of other cultural or religious traditions. Accordingly, a critical theory of resonance and loss in late-modern and religiously diverse societies must be concerned not only with identifying and articulating existing relations of resonance, but also with safeguarding the social, political, and discursive conditions under which all members of society can develop such relations. This requires that all members of society are able to participate as equals in shaping the future of their society. Such participation necessarily takes place at a particular moment in time, in societies whose material culture and social structures have already been shaped by particular cultural and religious traditions, often those of the historical majority. Existing attachments to material forms therefore deserve recognition and may provide reasons for taking their ethical significance into account, for instance, in processes of urban planning. Considerations of this kind can support decisions such as the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris or the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam. However, they must not be construed as justifying the preservation of the privileged status of one cultural or religious tradition, especially not when this implies the suppression of the material presence of other religions in the public sphere.

This point is particularly important in the context of social arenas of loss that are framed in terms of a supposedly homogeneous “Judeo-Christian culture”, which is discursively constituted through the exclusion of minority religions, particularly Islam, as “foreign” and “constitutive other in religio-civilizational terms” (Brubaker 2016, see also Topolski 2020).

Identifying and articulating the value of existing relations of resonance can therefore be only one task of social critique. Another, more fundamental task consists of protecting the social, political, and discursive conditions that enable all members of society, irrespective of their religion or belief, to contribute to shaping the future of society. In doing so, they are able to inscribe their own histories and their cultural or religious traditions into the material culture of society alongside those of others. This creates diverse opportunities for resonance, supports relations of belonging for all members of society, and contributes to making a culturally and religiously diverse world genuinely theirs.