Major steps toward the dis-establishment of Norway’s state church, the (Lutheran) Church of Norway, were passed by the government on March 16 in its weekly session with King Harald V.
Expected to be adopted by the Parliament (Storting) in May or June this year, the proposals will make changes in the country’s constitution as well as in other church legislation, the Ministry of Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs announced.
“I hope we have now prepared a good basis for the Church of Norway to be an open and inclusive national church, also in a multicultural and multi-religious setting,” Minister Rigmor Aasrud (Labour Party), said in a news release.
MY nephew was a foreign exchange student who made several different visits to Norway about twenty-five years ago.
As a practicing Lutheran from the USA, he was interested in Chrisitianity in Norway. His observation was, at that time, that Norwegians were divided into two religious groups, “believers” and “non-believers.”
When you look at what different natioanal groups do and practice as opposed to what they say, it is possible to come to the conclusion that the Scandanavians, the Dutch and the northern Germans have never fully shed themselves of their pagan roots. That for many of them Chrisitianity may have been only a ‘skin deep’ belief system.
If you read the article you will see that this hardly amounts to disestablishment, only reorganisation. Clergy are still to be state employees, always a bad idea. Other churches have been growing fast in Norway. When the boat people were fleeing Vietnam many were taken on board by Norwegian tankers and other ships and taken to Norway; the refugees were mostly Catholic and have produced many vocations and are well integrated. At the same time people from Poland and the Philippines have arrived in Norway, adding to Catholic numbers to the extent that the Catholic Church has a hard time keeping up with growth and finding funds (although Germany helps a lot in this respect). Pentecostals are doing well also.
I spent a happy Christmas one year in Oslo. Christmas Eve at the Church of Norway church was magical, and I gamely croaked away in the Norwegian liturgy, which actually was completely familiar, so I managed to keep my place in it; but when it came to singing Det är en Ros Utsprungen, I knew exactly where I was, and was transported.
The immigration of Chrisitans from other countries to a secularizing Norway (and Sweden for that matter) can only help.
However, the secularization of Scandinavian natives and the other peoples of Western Europe is a sad sad fact.
“If you read the article you will see that this hardly amounts to disestablishment, only reorganisation.”
Absolutely true, and just the same thing as in the disestablishment of the Church of Sweden in 2000. One main point of both “processes” is to ensure that the to-be-disestablished church remains controlled by those who, even if not believers, involve themselves in church affairs out of a sense of “civic duty” and who embrace the bien-pensant liberal social consensus on, e.g., homosexual “marriages.” A Swedish Gov’e minister declared some years ago that the Church of Sweden, as a “producer of ideology” has to reflect the “social consensus,” and when the first woman bishop was appointed in the Church of Norway in 1993 a Norwegian Cabinet minister (responding to questions about why she was appointed when in the polling of diocesan clergy she came in last) spoke of the need to oppose “dark forces” in the church, and concluded that “the state must lead, and the church must follow.”