Samenvatting

Appeals to religion in the public domain, in particular by politicians, prove to be controversial. This is good news, given that the ensuing debate usually uncovers forgotten aspects of religious traditions. Using three cases from the Dutch political discourse, to wit: the appeal to ‘Jewish Christian’ tradition, the claim that Jewish Christian tradition has been of key emancipatory value, and the identification of immigrants as religious, and applying Aleida Assmann’s theory about the dynamics of forgetting (and remembrance), the paper demonstrates that in each of these cases, the public debates surrounding these instances of references to religion and their rhetorical use, were instrumental in uncovering ‘forgotten’ aspects of religion that had disappeared from the ‘memory’ of the political discourse.