{"id":1656,"date":"2009-02-28T13:50:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T21:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2009-02-28T13:52:32","modified_gmt":"2009-02-28T21:52:32","slug":"scandinavia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/scandinavia\/","title":{"rendered":"Scandinavia!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was difficult to read this <\/a>New York Times<\/em> piece without feeling just a little cheered\u2026<\/p>\n

Mr. Zuckerman, a sociologist who teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., has reported his findings on religion in Denmark and Sweden in \u201cSociety Without God\u201d (New York University Press, 2008). Much that he found will surprise many people, as it did him. The many nonbelievers he interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label \u201catheist.\u201d An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church. Though they denied most of the traditional teachings of Christianity, they called themselves Christians, and most were content to remain in the Danish National Church or the Church of Sweden, the traditional national branches of Lutheranism. At the same time, they were \u201coften disinclined or hesitant to talk with me about religion,\u201d Mr. Zuckerman reported, \u201cand even once they agreed to do so, they usually had very little to say on the matter.\u201d Were they reticent because they considered religion, as Scandinavians generally do, a private, personal matter? Is there, perhaps, as one Lutheran bishop in Denmark has argued, a deep religiosity to be discovered if only one scratches this taciturn surface? \u201cI spent a year scratching,\u201d Mr. Zuckerman writes. \u201cI scratched and I scratched and I scratched.\u201d “And he concluded that \u201creligion wasn\u2019t really so much a private, personal issue, but rather, a nonissue.\u201d His interviewees just didn\u2019t care about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I know the feeling.<\/p>\n

The piece can also be seen as an\u00a0interesting examination\u00a0of the way that the state churches of protestant northern Europe (the Church of England – as opposed to ‘Anglicanism’ – is another example of this phenomenon) still\u00a0represent a strong and largely benign\u00a0national\/cultural\u00a0presence in countries\u00a0where the majority population has retained little or nothing in the way of\u00a0formal religious belief. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was difficult to read this New York Times piece without feeling just a little cheered\u2026 Mr. Zuckerman, a sociologist who teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., has reported his findings on religion in Denmark and Sweden in \u201cSociety … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}