[aspasia]

Oh, my. What a tangle you write. They are closer to England, from a historical standpoint, because of Christianity and Calvin. Linguistically, it’s pretty Germanic. As for the rest, what DIRTYSECRET said.

[Wallace T.]

The Church of England was never entirely Calvinist, as the Dutch Reformed Church was until the 19th Century, when liberalism arose in that church. The Anglicans had Arminian and Anglo-Catholic factions, as well as Calvinists. The 39 Articles of Faith were not as thoroughly reformed as were the Canons of the Synod of Dort or the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Anglican statement of faith was broadly Protestant, while the latter two were specifically Reformed.

Language and genetics cannot be discounted. While Dutch, Frisian, and Low German are not intelligible to an English speaker, their grammar and basic vocabularies are closer to English than are French or Spanish. Language helps to structure thought, which in turn influences culture. The culture of the historically Protestant Dutch is similar to that of the historically Catholic Flemish. Both groups speak the same language.

Much of the genetic inheritance of the English people. outside of Cornwall or Devon, is derived from Denmark, northwest Germany, and the Netherlands, the result of the 5th and 6th Century invasions by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. English, and to some extent, lowland Scots, genetics differ markedly from the Celtic areas of the British Isles. There are IQ gradients within Europe, with Central and Northern Europe having several points higher IQ than the western or eastern fringes or southern Europe.