How Christian Nationalism Ended in Scandinavia
Over the last few years, there’s been a surge of interest and attention—both positive and negative—in forms of “Christian nationalism.” But as countless observers have noted, it’s rarely clear what exactly is meant by the term. Does “Christian nationalism” simply mean the belief that Christian faith ought to influence politics? Well, that would turn Martin Luther King Jr., with his appeals to Thomas Aquinas in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, into a Christian nationalist.[i] If Christians believe that the Christian faith properly describes reality as such, wouldn’t they want that to be worked out in politics too?
Accordingly, there have been plenty of efforts to clarify the term. Perhaps most notably, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry’s 2020 book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States aimed to assess the prevalence of “Christian nationalism” by surveying American Christians’ assent to propositions like “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values” and “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”[ii] But that approach too hit a snag: these propositions are extraordinarily ambiguous on their face, and so it’s not altogether clear whether Perry and Whitehead are detecting a coherent antiliberal ideology or simply vague patriotic-Christian sentiment.
Stephen Wolfe’s 2022 tome The Case for Christian Nationalism, the most ambitious attempt to define the term and defend the ideal, offers a more qualitative definition: “Christian nationalism is a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.”[iii] Earlier in the book, Wolfe places the accent on the nationalism aspect of the term, making clear that this mode of political organization is a critical part of his thesis. “A Christian nation is a nation whose particular earthly way of life has been ordered to heavenly life in Christ, having been perfected by Christian revelation as grace perfects nature, without undermining that particularity but rather strengthening it so that the people might achieve the complete good.”[iv]
This is, at the very least, more illuminating than Perry and Whitehead’s definition. But it seems to me that Wolfe’s definition raises an important question of its own: wholly apart from the question of whether or not we should have one, how do we actually know when we’ve built a “Christian nation”? Put another way: what’s the “win condition,” or the plausible endgame, for Christian nationalism?
Is the endgame a formal declaration that the state, as such, is subject to the kingship of Christ? (For the Scottish Covenanters, this was in fact precisely the goal—a goal which led them to oppose the U.S. Constitution due to its lack of such a provision.[v]) Is the endgame a political institutionalization of Mosaic law, both First and Second Tables alike? That was what the theonomists of the 1980s and 1990s sought, presumably after a collapse of the contemporary state form as such. Or alternatively, is the endgame a critical mass of believers in churches on Sunday morning? I suspect most evangelicals who talk about the need for revival in America, and who count as “Christian nationalists” by Perry and Whitehead’s lights, are thinking somewhat along these lines.
Talk of “win conditions” might sound pedantic. But for Christians trying to answer a very basic question—how should our faith affect politics?—it’s not a trivial one. It’s one thing to speak abstractly about “Christian nationalism” and imagine a society where traditional Christian values were more widely espoused and practiced. It’s quite another to make tactical and strategic decisions in service of that end.
Perhaps it’s time to consider some different evidence. Most discussions of Christian nationalism today play out in a decidedly Anglo-American key, with key reference points—Calvin’s Geneva, Puritan New England, colonial Virginia, modern England—falling within the broadly Anglican/Reformed theological tradition. But this Reformed-centric discussion of Christian nationalism tends not to engage the experience of the Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
And yet all of these, historically speaking, are case studies in something very like “Christian nationalism.” They offer clues to any such program’s prospects—and limits.
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Today, the Scandinavian states are beloved by democratic socialists for their robust welfare states, and deplored by many conservative American Christians as case studies in secularity and godless liberalism. To take just one example, a 2020 Pew study found that only 22% of Swedish adults agreed that religion is very or somewhat important in their lives, with an even scantier 9% agreeing that belief in God is necessary for morality.[vi] Similarly, despite high prosperity and living standards, a majority of Scandinavian children are born outside of marriage.[vii]
And yet, perhaps surprisingly, all four of these countries have established Lutheran state churches that remain firmly integrated into the life of the polity. In Denmark, for instance, members of the state clergy are to this day considered civil servants, overseen by the state Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and funded by taxpayer dollars.[viii] Despite the apparent rise of secularity, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and religiously-inflected holidays remain fixtures in Scandinavian culture.[ix] Nor were these church establishments mere formalities. As Robert Nelson discusses, membership in state churches was politically mandatory up until surprisingly recently:
In Sweden a person was legally required to be a member of the Lutheran church until the second half of the nineteenth century—and still legally had to belong to at least some church as late as 1951. In Finland, a citizen had to belong to either the Lutheran church (the choice of the vast majority) or the Orthodox church (this option reflecting Russian control over Finland) until 1889; full freedom of religion did not arrive until 1923.[x]
Consider again Wolfe’s definition of Christian nationalism: “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.”[xi] Civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the Scandinavian states were Christian nations, by Wolfe’s standard, until extraordinarily recently. In many respects they still are—they still fund churches with tax dollars, Christian customs are still practiced throughout society, and the church is still integrated into the structure of civil law.
I suspect that most Christian conservatives today would resist this conclusion. Most would agree that mere political institutionalization of Christian speech and norms does not capture what it means to have a Christian society. The Scandinavian state churches can talk about God and Jesus and heaven all they want, but do they even mean the same things as orthodox believers? (E.g., a bodily resurrection) For a people to be a Christian people, some degree of inner transformation—some level of real assent—is also required.
To be sure, this concern can be overblown. Consider, for instance, Baptist theologian Russell Moore’s now-notorious overcorrection in the opposite direction. Moore may be right that in certain quarters, evangelical language has been deployed “to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience”[xii]—but his argument is so concerned with the risk of hypocrisy in Christian culture that the value of Christian social engagement itself becomes questionable.
Caveats aside, though, the experience of the Scandinavian countries seems to suggest this much: the political maintenance of visible public Christianity, including laws and institutions reflecting explicitly Christian principles, is not a particularly effective means of cultivating an organically Christian social order where that order is otherwise waning (or never existed in the first place).
Rather, the direction of travel goes the other way—a secularizing public creates a state church in its own image. For instance, the Swedish government boasts of its state church that “the Church of Sweden has often accompanied liberal social change rather than obstructing it,” such that “[t]oday half of the priests are women, and women make up the majority of those studying to become priests. . . . [I]n 2009 Sweden legalised same-sex marriage and the church decided to begin performing same-sex marriage ceremonies the same year.”[xiii] Is this Christian nationalism?
Perhaps more importantly: what happened here? How did Scandinavian Christian nationalism “decay”?
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After the “Lutheran Orthodoxy” of the 1600s—recalled today by many conservative Lutherans as a sort of theological golden age—the broadly confessional theological consensus found itself “challenged on the one hand by Pietism in the eighteenth century and on the other by a growing secularization of European thought in the age of the Enlightenment.”[xiv]
Reacting against what they viewed as an ossified public orthodoxy, “Pietists accused the Lutheran church of ironically having lapsed into a new Protestant scholasticism of its own, its practice of religion having become formulaic, and its theologians generating a large volume of writings but showing little real life. . . . The religious life of the Lutheran parish had become desiccated and stale.”[xv]
In response to this alleged stagnation, Pietists sought to augment the traditional Lutheran emphasis on the recognition of the objectivity of the Christian’s justification with an insistence on a corresponding experience of internal transformation. In the words of August Hermann Francke, “[a]ll saving knowledge is experiential. And it is not enough that we know the history, but we must also feel the power of our Lord’s resurrection, not only that he is risen, but also that he is the resurrection.”[xvi] (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the emergence of pietism created a major theological fissure within conservative Lutheranism that persists to the present day.[xvii])
Historically, pietists also tended to emphasize the interiority of the Christian life and downplay its political outworkings. But pietism—paradoxically—had major political implications. Enter, for instance, N.F.S. Grundtvig—one of the most important figures in Danish national history, who as both cleric and statesman helped lay the political foundations of modern Denmark.
A pastor himself, Grundtvig was a scathing critic of the established Church of Denmark, denouncing “the hierarchical ghost which, in recent times, like a poorly exorcised pope, returns to haunt Protestant Christianity.”[xviii] As Grundtvig saw it, the existing state church was merely a lever to be used by secular power for its own ends: “The State Church is not a church state but simply a state organisation (establishment) that the government is entitled to do with as it pleases—without any bishop, pastor, or professor having the right to murmur a protest, provided there are no breakages in freedom of conscience!”[xix]
From there, Grundtvig leveled a variety of complaints against the establishmentarian model itself. One, of course, will be familiar to anyone who’s ever debated the question of religious establishment—the need to protect the integrity of the faith. “[W]e who speak the Word of God’s mercy from the pulpit and at the Sacraments because we believe it, Grundtvig argued, “become dubious witnesses if we have committed to speaking it and receiving our livelihood only on that condition.”[xx] That is to say, it’s never good when parishioners find themselves wondering whether their ministers actually believe what they’re preaching, but have to keep up appearances to keep drawing a check. Better, rather, for faith to be disentangled from the regime. “[W]herever social relationships are truly to be born and gain stability, Christianity, as a force quite free and incalculable, must be left completely out of consideration.”[xxi]
Some of Grundtvig’s other arguments against the established church, though, are more unusual. For instance, Grundtvig highlights the reality that the state church doesn’t speak with a single voice, but harbors theological dissensus within itself. “[A]t present none of us really knows which sect is the strongest in our State-Church, whereas we all know that no one is in charge!”[xxii] What exactly does it mean for a state church to espouse a doctrine when, behind the curtain, that church is composed of warring theological factions? (This is, after all, a besetting problem of the Roman Curia.)
Most interestingly of all, Grundtvig argues that uncoupling church and state creates a climate of intellectual honesty that strengthens the practice of oath-taking and thereby strengthens the state as such. Greater religious liberty “of psychological necessity nourishes honesty and promise-keeping, which is so indispensable to the state.”[xxiii] Put differently: does it build trust for anyone to have to swear an oath in the name of a God they don’t believe in?
In the case of Grundtvig, we have the curious example of a Christian defending the secularization of the state, on the grounds that such secularization is both theologically imperative and good for the state. At the risk of employing anachronistic terminology, Grundvig makes out a Christian challenge to Christian nationalism that neither excludes religious concerns from politics nor denies the centrality of the nation—indeed, Grundtvig was an arch-nationalist whose political philosophy centered on the distinctive peoplehood of the Danes.[xxiv] From a certain point of view, Grundtvig is both a Christian nationalist and an archenemy of Christian nationalism. (Lutherans are fond of paradoxes, after all.)
It's hard to say whether Grundtvig would be pleased with the state of Christianity in Denmark—or in Scandinavia generally—today. The Pietists’ critique of the religious establishment probably attracted those who were best suited to resist the capture of state ecclesiastical organs by secular priorities, thus further accelerating the decline of those very bodies. What followed throughout the Scandinavian countries was a transition away from orthodox belief and toward what Nelson has called an “implicit Lutheranism” where the moral obligations once felt toward God were redirected toward the welfare state.
It seems to me that the experience of the Scandinavian countries allows us to venture a potential decline model for Christian nationalism. To begin with, a “Christian” polity requires deep reservoirs of preexisting public belief—what Miles Smith has recently described as “Christian institutionalism.”[xxv] That public belief cannot always be sustained indefinitely. As Grundtvig saw, faith loses “its influence on life” when churches become “dilapidated hospitals for the clergy,” as “the philosophers struggle in vain to replace the faith of the people with their ruminations.”[xxvi] Where public belief ebbs, the religiosity of the state wanes too, and its churches “become the emptiest theatre in the land.”[xxvii]
In Scandinavia, committed Christians sought alternative paths. In the case of the Pietists, existing energy found itself redirected to theological critique rather than theological retrenchment. Revival, when juxtaposed against the reality of an established church, served as a principle of secularization, not renewal. The results were powerful nations, but not Christian nations except in the thinnest imaginable sense.
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Where does this leave Christians today?
Defenders of new forms of “Christian nationalism” might respond to these concerns in various ways. Perhaps there is something distinctive about Lutheran formulations of Christian nationalism that renders them more susceptible to theological decay and state capture (maybe the general lack of a “right to revolt” theological principle?). Undoubtedly there were other political and economic dynamics contributing to national secularization and the decline of traditional Christian commitment. Or one might grasp the nettle and say that yes, this is Christian nationalism as it was meant to be—ceremonial, gentle, an open-ended part of the historical process.
But to my mind, the history and trajectory of Christian nationalism in Scandinavia is highly relevant to these debates. In many ways, these countries seem to be Christian nationalist proofs-of-concept that, due to pressures internal to the Christian tradition (as Grundtvig’s example indicates), became something quite different in the course of time. Concerns like these—what philosopher Kevin Vallier has framed as, in the context of Catholic integralism, stability-related objections[xxviii]—are undoubtedly relevant to the question of what sorts of contemporary Christian political engagement are viable or optimal. And if nothing else, they are fascinating chapters of Lutheran history that are mostly unknown today.
[i] See John Fea, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian Nationalism,” Current (Feb. 6, 2021), https://currentpub.com/2021/02/06/martin-luther-king-jrs-christian-nationalism/.
[ii] Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 17.
[iii] Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022), 181.
[iv] Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, 174.
[v] See Jerome E. Copulsky, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 81.
[vi] Christine Tamir, Aidan Connaughton, and Ariana Monique Salazar, “The Global God Divide,” Pew Research Center (July 20, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/the-global-god-divide/.
[vii] Joseph Chamie, “Out-of-Wedlock Births Rise Worldwide,” YaleGlobal Online (Mar. 6, 2017), https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-births-rise-worldwide.
[viii] Robert H. Nelson, Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy: A Different Protestant Ethic (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017), 92.
[ix] See, e.g., Swedish Institute, “Religion in Sweden,” Sweden (June 12, 2024), https://sweden.se/life/society/religion-in-sweden.
[x] Nelson, Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy, 92.
[xi] Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, 181.
[xii] Russell Moore, “Can the Religious Right Be Saved?,” First Things (Jan. 1, 2017), https://firstthings.com/can-the-religious-right-be-saved/. See also Russell Moore, “Is Christianity Dying?,” Russell Moore (May 12, 2015), https://www.russellmoore.com/2015/05/12/is-christianity-dying/ (“We don’t have Mayberry anymore, if we ever did. Good. Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah does. But Christianity didn’t come from Mayberry in the first place, but from a Roman Empire hostile to the core to the idea of a crucified and resurrected Messiah.”). Wolfe very effectively critiques this mentality. See Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, 224–27.
[xiii] Swedish Institute, “Religion in Sweden.”
[xiv] Nelson, Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy, 98.
[xv] Nelson, Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy, 162.
[xvi] August Hermann Francke, “On the Resurrection of Our Lord,” in Pietists: Selected Writings, ed. Peter C. Erb (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983), 129.
[xvii] Cf. Russell P. Dawn, “Piety vs. Pietism,” The Lutheran Witness (Mar. 15, 2018), https://witness.lcms.org/2018/piety-vs-pietism/ (“In a nutshell, then, Pietism is simply an oversized and out-of-place emphasis on works. It is a confusion of Law and Gospel in which a human work (a decision or emotion), rather than the cross of Christ alone, brings the assurance of salvation.”).
[xviii] N.F.S. Grundtvig, “An Impartial View of the Danish State Church,” in Human Comes First: The Christian Theology of N.F.S. Grundtvig, ed. Edward Broadbridge (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018), 117.
[xix] Grundtvig, “An Impartial View of the Danish State Church,” 117.
[xx] N.F.S. Grundtvig, “My Relation to the People’s Church,” in Human Comes First: The Christian Theology of N.F.S. Grundtvig, ed. Edward Broadbridge (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018), 229.
[xxi] N.F.S. Grundtvig, “The Reign of Terror in France,” in The Common Good: N.F.S. Grundtvig as Politician and Contemporary Historian, eds. Edward Broadbridge and Ove Korsgaard (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2019), 75.
[xxii] Grundtvig, “An Impartial View of the Danish State Church,” 120.
[xxiii] Quoted in Ove Korsgaard, N.F.S. Grundtvig—as a Political Thinker (Copenhagen: DJØF Publishing, 2014), 40.
[xxiv] Cf. Korsgaard, N.F.S. Grundtvig—as a Political Thinker, 25.
[xxv] See generally Miles Smith, Religion & Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2024), 24.
[xxvi] Grundtvig, “An Impartial View of the Danish State Church,” 125.
[xxvii] Grundtvig, “An Impartial View of the Danish State Church,” 126.
[xxviii] Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 165–98.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow with the Davenant Institute, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.