The dawn of the secular state? : Heritage and identity in Swedish church and state debates 1920–1939

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International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22(4), 631-647. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1017474 2016 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gcul20 Download by: [Jyvaskylan Yliopisto] Date: 17 November 2016, At: 23:16 International Journal of Cultural Policy ISSN: 1028-6632 (Print) 1477-2833 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcul20 The dawn of the secular state? Heritage and identity in Swedish church and state debates 1920–1939 Tobias Harding To cite this article: Tobias Harding (2016) The dawn of the secular state? Heritage and identity in Swedish church and state debates 1920–1939, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22:4, 631-647, DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2015.1017474 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1017474 © 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis Published online: 09 Mar 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 675 View related articles View Crossmark data The dawn of the secular state? Heritage and identity in Swedish church and state debates 1920–1939 Tobias Harding* Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, 40014 Jyväskylä, Finland (Received 26 September 2014; accepted 5 February 2015) This article provides a study of political positions concerning the role of religion in modern society in Sweden between 1920 and 1939. It aims to increase understanding of the Swedish secularization path, with special emphasis on issues related to heritage and national identity, by comparing the dominant perspectives on these issues in the Church of Sweden and in the Social Democratic Party during that period. It addresses how these positions have influenced policies during the period, as well as some of their implications for later path dependence. It explores relations between religious issues and the concept of national heritage, as well as how the fact that both were at that time commonly seen as legitimate tasks of the state came to influence the development of Swedish church-and-state relations and heritage policies. Special attention is given to the positions of the Young Church Movement, a movement within the Church emphasizing its role as a national church with a central position in national identity, as well as to the views of Arthur Engberg, the anti-clerical Social Democratic government minister responsible for church, education, and culture in the 1930s. Keywords: heritage; secularization; Sweden; Church of Sweden; church and state It is absolutely necessary to abolish the state church. If this is not done, the official lie will continue to mark the life of the state in religious matters. (Engberg 1945e, p. 251) 1 When Arthur Engberg wrote this in the editorial of a Social Democratic newspaper in 1919, he considered the established church to have sided with the reactionary right in an ongoing class conflict. The Church included many who strongly identified church, nation, monarchy, and heritage as inseparable and positive values in the national culture. Thirteen years later, the Social Democratic Party (SAP) would be in power, with Engberg as the minister responsible for education, culture, and the Church. Yet, fully separating church and state, or adopting a consistently secular definition of the nation was not paths that Swedish secularization would take until the turn of the millennium, and this development was to be marked more by efforts to achieve consensus than by confrontation. This article suggests that the views and assumptions held in common by proponents of different perspectives during the interwar period may help explain the development of Swedish secularization; especially views and assumptions concerning the role of the state in relation to the spiritual welfare of the population and the maintenance of national heritage. *Email: tobias.harding@jyu.fi © 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2016 Vol. 22, No. 4, 631–647, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1017474 Working from the assumption that national paths of secularization can be traced back to formative periods in history, this article is intended to increase understanding of secularization in Sweden with the help of a focused study of political positions concerning the role of religion in modern society in Sweden between 1920 and 1939. This period was, in many ways, the dawn of the later Swedish welfare society. While the large expansion of the welfare state came in the post-war era, it can be argued that its formative period occurred before World War II, at the time when democracy was introduced and the SAP started to establish itself as the dominant political party (Lagergren 1999). Unlike much of the previous research on secularization in Sweden, which focuses either on the role of religion and the church in a welfare state (e.g. van den Breemer et al.2014), or on the purely ecclesiological implications of these developments (e.g. Blückert 2000, Claesson 2004), this article focuses on ideas concerning the role of the Church of Sweden in relation to Swedish national identity, especially in relation to the Swedish nation as an imagined community bound together by its history, although it does so in the context of more general ideas regarding the role of religion in a modern society and the relationship between church and state. This article aims to compare the dominant positions taken on these issues in the Church of Sweden and in the SAP between 1920 and 1939. These positions have been identified with the help of previous research. Special attention is given to the Young Church Movement, a movement within the Church which emphasized its role as a national church with a central position in national identity. The views of Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, the highest clerical leader of the Church during a large part of the period, are also discussed. On the SAP side, special attention is given to Arthur Engberg, at first a spokesman for a radical approach, and later the responsible government minister. Harald Hallén, a priest within the Church of Sweden and a Social Democratic member of parliament, is also discussed as a leading proponent of a more Church-friendly position within the party. The article also addresses how these positions have influenced policies during the period and implications for later policies, providing a case study of how implicit cultural policy is created over time through path dependency, in the sense that certain policy choices result in a series of events that are especially hard to depart from (cf. Levi 1997, Pierson 2000). The article combines results from previous research in several academic disciplines –including Theology, Sociology, and History –with studies of primary sources. These primary sources include traditional political genres, such as newspaper editorials, official reports, parliament motions, political speeches, and autobiographies, but also a hymn adopted by the Church of Sweden in 1939 and strongly associated with the Young Church Movement. Central concepts and background The relationship between, on the one hand, government and politics and, on the other hand, religion and religious organizations is often seen as one of the central characteristics of the implicit cultural policy of any country, if by implicit cultural policy we mean ‘any political strategy that looks to work on the culture of the territory over which it presides (or on that of its adversary)’(Ahearne 2009, p. 143). Secularization can then be described as a cultural change in how people relate to religious matters, but also as a change in the implicit cultural policy of the state (relating to religion, religious organizations, and religious institutions). Frequently, 632 T. Harding governments have supported this change through implicit cultural policies, e.g. in the case of French laïcité policies, described by Ahearne (2009) as a countermeasure by which French secularists sought to limit the reach of the Church. This is, in many ways, the most common way of thinking about secularization, i.e. as a process opposing religion. In contemporary studies of secularization, it is increasingly accepted that secularization can follow many paths, the most commonly observed alternative to the path of laïcité policies being that of the US, in which religion is largely considered to be a domain of civil society, which the government has historically treated as generally positive but did not involve itself in. van den Breemer et al.( 2014) have suggested that Scandinavia might exemplify a third path of secularization, combining a relatively high level of secularization in cultural terms with an equally high degree of legal and organizational integration of the state and an established church. Sweden, being a clear example of this category, combines a population where only 45% of the population believes in God 2 with a law that specifically regulates the activities and faith of the Church of Sweden, which until the year 2000 was a clear example of a state church. Since this article is concerned with ideas about the nation, or conceptions of it, it follows Anderson’s concept of the nation as an ‘an imagined political community –and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’(Anderson 2006, p. 6). The nation can thus be separated from other imagined communities both by being imagined as ideally limited –geographically as well as in terms of who is included –and by claiming political sovereignty as a nation-state, in contrast to e.g. Christendom, an imagined community which historically has striven to include all, but at the same time recognized that power in the world was shared with governments that were relatively independent of the Church. Correspondingly, nationstates can be defined as ‘states claiming to be nations’(Smith 1991, p. 143). The state is thus treated as an institution which may, in order to legitimize itself, lay claim to represent a national community. In the present nation-state system, it is generally assumed that all states do this. Since nations are commonly imagined not only in geographical terms or as communities of citizens, but also as (ethno-)cultural communities, cultural policy – both explicit and implicit, and especially on the national level –becomes linked to legitimizing nation states by being a way for the state to influence how national culture is imagined by the people (Harding 2007). Similarly, other levels of government, or organizations such as a church, may use cultural policy to present alternatives to the national cultural community and its narratives, and thereby potentially strengthen alternative power centers, such as regional governments, religious institutions, or the European Union. They may also –as national churches have often done –associate themselves with the nation-state and strengthen the national community (cf. Smith 2003). These implications are especially present in heritage policies. Historical narratives bind nations together as ethno-cultural communities. These historical narratives are often supported by cultural policies of nation-states and nationalist organizations; they are expressed in schools, museums, academia, art, and a number of other ways, including the physical preservation of national monuments and other representations of heritage that can be seen in collections, as well as in cityscapes and countryside. As Blückert (2000) points out, a church can also be seen as an imagined community. In Christian ecclesiology, the Church is often conceived of as a universal International Journal of Cultural Policy 633 community of all (true) Christians, but ‘churches’can also refer to a multitude of different imagined communities, separated through geography as well as by creed. As such, the Church is also an institution, as well as an organization. In this article, I will also utilize the Weberian distinction between Church and denomination, and thus use the term Church as referring to a religious institution claiming to be the only legitimate such institution in a specific territory, or anywhere. It is recognized that these terms are rooted in the social organization of Western societies, where churches held this position and self-identity during medieval and early modern times, and to a varying degree still do so in some respects, especially in European countries. In the same context, a denomination can be distinguished from a Church by being understood as one among many religious communities active in the same society (Casanova 1994,2014). The distinction can be understood in the context of a secularization process in which society moves from recognizing one religious institution as the Church and assigning it a unique position in relation to the state, toward considering religion a part of civil society and private life, where it may play a more or less important and/or political role. This article specifically focuses on the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran church separated from the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation, and from that point in time strongly integrated into the Swedish state, though retaining its separate episcopal structure. In large parts of Sweden, between the end of the Reformation and the late nineteenth century, the parishes had been the only local government; and the parish priest was the closest representative of the state, simultaneously performing religious and governmental duties, from church services to the registration of parishioners for taxation and military service. Together with the monarchy and a sense of ethnic community, Lutheranism played a significant role in the development of Swedish identity, and thus in the legitimation of the realm as a nation-state (Blückert 2000, Nordin 2000, cf. Smith 2003). Church laws, concerning everything from organizational matters to articles of faith, were integrated in secular law and made by the King and the parliament, in which the clergy, until 1866, formed one of the four estates. After the parliamentary reform of 1866, the lost status of the clergy as an integrated part of the national parliament was compensated with the creation of a National Synod, which the parliament had to consult on legal issues directly concerning the Church of Sweden (Ekström 2003). Legal protection of church buildings as part of a national heritage can be traced at least back to the first royal decree intended to protect historical monuments, issued in 1666, but the present legal protection largely dates back to the royal decree on public buildings published in 1920 (SFS 1920). This, latter, decree prescribed both that no additional church buildings should be erected by the Church of Sweden without government approval, and that no existing church buildings should be significantly altered without a government decision which should take both heritage and artistic value into account. At present, church buildings belonging to the Church of Sweden retain this legal protection, and the Church of Sweden receives government grants intended to cover the extra costs that this may lead to. Views within the established Church In the early twentieth century, it was a widespread notion that the established Church was facing a crisis. The Church, based in the parish structures of the countryside, was facing the dual threats of urbanization and the spread of both 634 T. Harding nonconformist denominations and secular popular movements. Much of its response to these challenges was channeled in the Young Church Movement, a movement consisting of both clergy and educated laity within the Church, aiming to recreate a central position for the Church in the new society that was being built. Among its defining moments was the ‘crusade’of 1909, when Young Church men worked to reach out to laborers through lectures and pamphlets. The Young Church Movement also became associated with the political right, and with conservative nationalism, a link which became firmly established through the Church services held in connection to the Farmer’s March of 1914 (less than a year before the outbreak of World War I), a demonstration intended to petition the King for a strengthened military deference, openly challenging the Liberal government on the defense issue, one of the central political issues of the day. By supporting the Farmer’s March, Manfred Björkquist and other central figures in the Young Church Movement became involved in a political crisis that temporarily replaced parliamentary government with a civil service government personally appointed by the King (Tergel 1974, Mitchel and Tergel 1994, Claesson 2004). In the minds of the growing Young Church Movement, nationalism and Christendom became closely associated through a strong association of people, King, and church, with the King seen as the protector of both the Church and the people, the latter historically identified with the free yeoman class that was in 1914 invoked by the farmers petitioning the King under the blessings of the churchmen (cf. Tergel 1974, Blückert 2000, Claesson 2004). Much of this synthesis is expressed in the hymn ‘Church of the Fathers’, which was written in 1909 by J.A. Eklund and soon became the informal hymn of the Young Church Movement. In 1919, it was added in an appendix to the official Swedish Book of Hymns, fully included in the revision of 1939 and removed in the revision of 1986. It was, in other words, recognized as a hymn during the years with which this article is concerned. The active act of including this already well-known hymn (Eckerdal 1988, Blückert 2000) as one of the contemporary additions to the hymn book can be seen as an example of the continued integration of the Young Church Movement into the main stream of the Church of Sweden during this period (Blückert 2000, cf. Tergel 1974). In the following, this hymn will be used as an illustration of some of the main themes of Young Church Movement ideology. Church of the fathers in the land of Sweden, Most loved of communities on earth! Widely she extends from coast to coast, Firmly she is founded by the hand of the Lord, Built to be his temple in the North. All was consecrated in the embrace of the Church: The bridegroom’s vow to his bride, The home, the newborn’s Christian name, The warriors’voyage to the last haven, The banner and the garb of the King. (Den svenska psalmboken 1937, p. 154f) The hymn is concerned specifically with the national church; although it is described as the Church ‘in the land of Sweden’, rather than as an entity separate International Journal of Cultural Policy 635 from the universal Church, and as the most loved of communities on earth, i.e. in this world. The central metaphors in the first two verses (quoted above) concern the Church as a place coinciding with the territory of the nation ‘from coast to coast’,‘in the land of Sweden’; as a building, a ‘temple in the North’; and as place where important events in the life of the individual and the nation are consecrated. The latter place may be the church building, as well as the Church as an organization or community. The Church is the –metaphorical and physical –place of symbolical events: the place of weddings, baptisms, and funerals, but also of royal coronations (Blückert 2000). The Church is thus a place that connects the local and the national, the home and the nation, the people and their King, as well as the present and the past, all within a sacral imagined community. Manfred Björkquist spoke of Sweden as a ‘home for the people’(Claesson 2004), a phrase that was also used by his father-in-law, the nationalist political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, but which would later be taken up by the Social Democrat leader Per Albin Hansson as a metaphor for the democratic welfare state. Specifically important to note is that the organic Church-centered image of Swedish society described in the hymn is described in the imperfect form –‘All was consecrated’–indicating that this unity of Church, nation, and home is now in the past. The last verse is a call for a reawakening (cf. Eckerdal 1988, Blückert 2000); ‘Come once more to fight for God, the gathering meeting its King’(Den svenska psalmboken 1937, p. 155). The metaphor of the reawakening is a central theme in nationalist ideology (Anderson 2006), well in line with Young Church support for mobilizing the Swedish people in favor of military armament, seen by Björkquist as closely linked to moral and religious reawakening (Blückert 2000). There is also a noticeable focus on heritage and institutions, as well as a striking lack of biblical references. As Eckerdal (1988) has pointed out, references to the ‘church’were, in themselves, relatively new in the context of Swedish hymns at this time; prior to the late nineteenth century, the community of believers had typically been metaphorically referred to as ‘Zion’or as the ‘congregation’(församling), and the later word had even been used as the main translation for the Greek ‘ecclesia’. This can be seen as a sign of increasingly viewing the Church as an institution – inviting a building metaphor –rather than as a community. The status of the church building as a focal metaphor for both the ecclesiastical and the national imagined community is also clear in the hymn quote above. It is significant that we see this emphasis at a time as public engagement in the preservation of church buildings increased, as evidenced by all such buildings being protected by royal decree in 1920 (SFS 1920). Among the speakers at Young Church meetings before World War I was professor Nathan Söderblom, who served as archbishop 1914–1931, and thus as the clerical head of the Church of Sweden. As one of the leading churchmen of his time, his views on the role of the Church in society deserve attention. Much of his work as archbishop focused on international and ecumenical dialog, for which he became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1930. His own views on internationalism were based in a view of nations –and of national churches –as separate parts of a plurality that made up a larger whole (Blückert 2000). God had given a ‘special task to every people in the peaceable community which is formed of the Church of Christ, a task which no other people can fulfill’(Söderblom 1922, quoted in Blückert 2000, p. 300). The historical task of the Swedish people and its Church 636 T. Harding was closely associated with the Lutheran reformation and with freedom of belief, as well as with international dialog. Many of these thoughts can be considered related to later secular ideas about a special role for the Swedish nation-state in world politics, as a voice for democracy and as a model welfare state (cf. van den Breemer et al.2014). Within Swedish society, the Church should, according to Söderblom, remain independent of political parties, but nevertheless stand for solidarity and a Christian spirit (Blückert 2000, Claesson 2004). As an archbishop, he rejected conservative politicians who sought to protect the Church for purely traditional reasons, without ‘taking personal notice of her message of judgment and salvation’(Söderblom quoted in Ekström 2003, p. 23). This stands in some contrast to the Young Church Movement’s emphasis on the Church as a link between the present and the past in Swedish history. Sweden had, according to Söderblom, historically managed to avoid both supranational papism and national Caesaropapism, i.e. both the dominance of a supernational church institution over the nation and the total dominance of the state or the king over the national church. The Church had thus remained autonomous, but at the same time firmly connected to the nation-state (Blückert 2000). The central role of the Church in society was to offer spiritual support, Christian teaching, and the sacraments to the Swedish people, requiring the presence of the Church in parishes in every part of the country. This perspective was further developed by, among others, bishop Einar Billing, into the ecclesiological concept of the Folk Church, the ‘People’s Church’or ‘Church for the People’,a concept that still has a central role in the self-image of the Church of Sweden (Eckerdal 2012). This perspective can also be understood as based on the earlier Lutheran doctrine of the Two Realms, according to which the Church as an institution was part of the earthly realm –not the heavenly –but where all earthly government was exercised by divine right and the Church had the specific responsibility of guiding every Christian in living according to divine law, regardless his or her vocation or social status (Lange 2014, Witte 2014). Söderblom’s view of independent religious denominations in Sweden can also be related to his belief in the national Church: Swedish free churches could have a role to play as bearers of new thoughts and impulses, but this role was, as pointed out by Blückert (2000), understood within the larger community of the Church of Sweden, i.e. Christianity within the Swedish nation state. Denominations originating outside of Sweden –especially the Roman Catholic Church –were merely foreign, and had nothing to add to the ‘special task’of the Swedish people and its Church. In contrast to his view of autonomous denominations within his own country, stands not only Söderblom’s internationalist ecumenical work, but also his, and the other Church of Sweden bishops’, position that Church membership should no longer be mandatory, a change that they considered to be necessary for the Church to continue to function as a community of faith (National Synod 1929). Views within the SAP While the Social Democrats had been involved in the formation of several governments in the instable political climate of the recently democratized Sweden of the 1920s, it was in 1930s that they started to dominate Swedish political life. With the exception a few months before the election of 1936, all Swedish governments from 1932 until 1976 were headed by the leader of the SAP. International Journal of Cultural Policy 637 the Church when concerned with heritage than concerning explicitly religious matters, and therefore motivating less demand for autonomy. Something that we do not see as a major position in the Swedish material from the interwar years is a view of the Church of Sweden as a denomination among many. Such a perspective would become more common in Sweden at a much later date, and may indeed be the reason why a new consensus concerning the need to separate the Church of Sweden from the state emerged in the 1990s. When, today, the Church of Sweden is beginning to enter the public sphere as a part of civil society, this process has to be analyzed keeping in mind its current double role as one religious denomination among many –even if it is by a large margin the largest –and as a keeper of tangible and intangible national heritage. It is worth noticing that the Church of Sweden in its search for a new role as a civil society actor, does not appear to focus primarily on its role as a maintainer of a national heritage, but rather on its roles in, for example, social policies, human rights issues, and spirituality (e.g. Wijkström 2014). A role presently claimed by the Church of Sweden which appears to be closer to those discussed earlier in this article is its role as a maintainer of churches as rooms for spiritual refuge, contemplation, and prayer. A similar role was emphasized in the government deliberations and decisions that preceded the changes made in church-and-state relations in 2000, when the Church of Sweden ceased to be a state church: Through the historical position of the Church, it has come to both, mirror and constitute an essential part of the history of Sweden. We are concerned with a living cultural heritage, which through the centuries has continuously been used, and is still used, for the same purposes. This is also a cultural heritage which is available for all, regardless of, for example, church membership, age, gender and citizenship. Everyone has the same possibility to experience the church buildings and their contents as historical and antiquarian memories and monuments, to take part of art and architecture, to listen to church music, or to search for a moment of tranquility and peace. (Prop. 1998/99:38, p. 134) The statement in the government bill quoted above contains some echoes of the spirituality of von Heidenstam, and even Engberg, in its concerns for making the churches available for those searching for tranquility, peace, art, and historical memory, regardless of religious beliefs or affiliations, but it also has some things in common with the Folk Church emphasis on openness to the entire population of the nation, which is still espoused by the Church. The government bills preceding the reform also underlined the continued popular support for maintaining the old parish churches, as well as the continued identification with them as local cultural heritage. These, too, are ideas that we can recognize from the 1920s to 1930s. At the same time, the government considered the increasing religious pluralism of Swedish society to have undermined the legitimacy of government support for a single state church, calling instead for a more general support for a multitude of religious denominations for their general role in society (e.g. prop. 1994/95:226, prop. 1998/99:38). In contrast, the Church of Sweden receives direct monetary support from the government mainly for its role as a maintainer of cultural heritage. The Church of Sweden may thus face an increasing distance between its new self-identity as a denominational organization in civil society and the expectations placed on it by a government which continues to subsidize its maintenance of tangible heritage. The state, on the other hand, is faced with issues of how to 644 T. Harding interpret national heritage in an increasingly multicultural and multi-religious society. Meanwhile, nationalists, for example in the Sweden Democrat Party, are showing signs of reviving the old identification of church and nation, e.g. by naming the Sweden Democrat organization dealing with church issues ‘Fädernas kyrka’ –‘The Church of the Fathers’–after the hymn discussed previously in this article. These later developments –which are likely to offer parallels to developments in other societies with previously established churches –are, however, still in need of more research. Acknowledgment This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) [Dnr 2013-1908]. Notes 1. Quotes from Swedish sources have been translated by the author of this article. 2. Based on a national survey including the question ‘Do you believe in God?’(Weibul and Strid 2011). References Ahearne, J., 2009. Cultural policy explicit and implicit: a distinction and some uses. International journal of cultural policy, 15 (2), 141–153. Anderson, B., 2006. 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