Not So Secular Sweden

Långläsning för en lördag

Lördagar är, som trogna Vit Rök-prenumeranter vet, normalt inte en dag då jag postar här – men idag ville jag tipsa om en längre essä som jag publicerade i Comment Magazine i veckan (en väldigt fin tidskrift, för övrigt).

Det är kombination av personlig betraktelse och analys av religionen i det svenska samhället de senaste decenniet, skriven för en internationell publik. Och eftersom den är lite längre tänkte jag att den kan passa på en lördag.

Jag kan inte lägga ut hela här, men nedan finner ni den första delen och så följer länk på slutet (om ni inte vill gå till hela direkt – då kan ni göra det här!)

En sak till, förresten: Efter gårdagens post om Klenell vs. Jönsson och den senares uppfattning att kyrkan inte bör uppmuntra människor till solidaritet fick jag följande citat från påve Leos encyklika Dilexi Te skickat till mig av en trogen läsare. Så här säger påven där:

“Den patristiska teologin var praktisk, den syftade till en kyrka som var fattig och var till för de fattiga, en påminnelse om att evangeliet förkunnas på rätt sätt endast när det sporrar oss att komma i konkret kontakt med de nedersta bland oss och en varning om att sträng rättlärighet utan barmhärtighet är tomma ord.”

Nu till essän: Not So Secular Sweden

It has always been difficult for me to convey to my American friends just how secular Sweden has been. You can look at the data, which show us perched in the top-left corner of the World Values Survey’s global map, leading the world in secularism and self-expression. This tells you something—but numbers don’t capture the texture of everyday life.

When I started school at age seven, I was convinced I was the only Christian among the three hundred students in attendance. That turned out to be not quite true; the others were just clever enough to keep their heads down.

If someone discovered I went to church, they were baffled. How could I possibly believe in fairy tales? Had I missed the memo? Religion was obsolete, science had disproved God’s existence, and now, finally free from its oppressive force, we were about to build a brave new world. It was other kids telling me this—not tenured professors at elite universities.

Any churchgoing kid growing up in Sweden during the seventies or eighties will tell you a similar story. Not one of persecution, but of being regarded with mild condescension. When we started university or stepped into our first jobs, we’d swap strategies on how best to come out as Christians.

We lived at the zenith of a culture brimming with secular self-assurance. This movement started among the educated elites during the Enlightenment but went mainstream in the 1950s. The years following World War II were a time of searching in the Western world: a quest to define what a modern, postwar identity would look like. In the United States, religion became part of that identity. The country adopted “In God We Trust” as its national motto in 1956, and before long, presidents were closing their speeches with the now-familiar benediction: “God bless America.”

Sweden, however, chose a different path. We equated modernity with a secular, enlightened rationality, cast in stark opposition to tradition, and set out to become the most modern—that is, secular—nation on earth. Our country became notorious for “the Swedish sin”: films laced with nudity and premarital sex, which symbolized our deliberate break with conventional religious morality.

In public debates, Swedish politicians and leading intellectuals declared religion a relic of the past. Its claims, it was said, had been disqualified by the lack of scientific proof for God’s existence. This perspective was championed by the daily paper Dagens Nyheter, which gave ample space to atheists taking aim at the church.

A 1949 editorial captures the mood. With thinly veiled satisfaction, Dagens Nyheter observed the decline of Swedish religiosity, noting that the only holdouts were “groups which, for various reasons, represent what one might call an earlier stage of human development”—namely, “the rural population and women.”

By 1968, historian Anton Jansson observes, priests, pastors, and theologians had retreated from the Swedish public sphere. Secularism became the default position in civic life. The consequences were evident in the pews. Since World War II, every metric of religious belief and practice in Sweden has been in decline. This includes baptisms, church attendance, confirmation rites, belief in God, and membership. The drop has been slow but steady.

As a comparison, in 2000, 42 percent of Americans attended church weekly. In Sweden, that figure reached barely 5 percent. Across Europe, only the Czech Republic has rivalled our status as the nation where fewest believe in God.

But in the last few years, something has shifted.

In 2010, Dagens Nyheter—that standard-bearer of secularism—hired a culture editor, Björn Wiman, who wore a cross, attended church, and penned columns praising Swedish archbishops.

A couple of years later, I began writing for another major newspaper, Expressen. I noticed then that when I wrote about theology, eye-rolls and sharp rebukes came mostly from older readers and columnists. A memorable outburst was that of ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus (born in 1945), who wrote a hit piece in Svenska Dagbladet equating my faith in God with being anti-science.

Boomers raged, but millennials were unbothered—and every time I encountered a Gen Z reader, they were curious and encouraging.

Soon every major Swedish newspaper had a theologian among their columnists.

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