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Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before.
T.S. Eliot, Chorus from The Rock
NORDEN IS THE MOST secular region of the Western world. Church attendance is extremely low while membership is high; religious beliefs are vague, held with low intensity, and the level of nonbelief is high; religious authorities have little influence on public opinion and policy, yet there is little anti-clericalism. None of these five countries has shown signs of any renewed religious vitality in recent decades, a phenomenon some scholars of religion claim to be world wide.1 This article provides a description of the religious situation in Sweden at the end of the twentieth century and explanations of how it got that way. The Nordic countries are similar and unique in having had histories of Evangelical Lutheran state churches to which virtually all their populations belonged. Since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, they have each gone their own way, though there are two parallel state configurations in this history: Denmark/Norway/Iceland and Sweden/Finland (Gustafsson 1987, 146). The history of the relationship of state to church in Denmark, however, is sharply different from that in Sweden. In Sweden the separation of church and state has been an issue since the late nineteenth century culminating in their divorce on i January 2000. In Denmark, by contrast, the Church has remained closely bound to the state with only slight agitation for their separation.
A thoroughgoing secular society has been imagined by Alan D. Gilbert, historian of religion and secularization in Britain, as
one in which norms, values, and modes of interpreting reality, together with the symbols and rituals which express and reinforce them, have been emancipated entirely from assumptions of human dependence on supernatural agencies or influences. In it the natural world would be regarded as autonomous, and knowledge, values and social structures would be ordered upon purely mundane principles. (1980,9)
Formal religion would be marginalized. To be non-religious would be universal. Individuals would act and think in wholly secular, causeand-effect terms. Status or respectability would in no way be associated with religious belief or practice. This extreme formulation does not fit any modern society, but Sweden comes as close as any....