The Nordic countries are defined by secular societies. The majority of the population do not consider themselves to be religious, but most are not explicitly atheists either. Those who are religious may feel that being religious is stigmatised in the Nordic countries and that others see it as strange to believe in God.
Evelina Lundmark, researcher in sociology of religion at the Uppsala University, leads a NordForsk-funded research project that is part of the relatively new research field of non-religion studies. The research field is interested in those who tick ‘no religion’ in religious studies surveys.
“The field started by studying explicitly non-religious movements such as atheism, humanism and scepticism. Now the focus is mostly on those between atheists and religious people. It wants to find out what it means to have ‘no religion’ and how these people relate to religion and existential questions”, says Lundmark.
The project Banal (Non)Religion: Secular Imaginaries in Contemporary Pop-Culture explores how a secularised worldview is conveyed through popular culture in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.
“Popular culture can tell us something about the conscious and unconscious assumptions that exist in a society, based on the assumptions those who create this culture make about their audience. For example, to create a TV programme, you have to assume that the audience looks a certain way and expect that they have previous knowledge about certain things”, says Lundmark.
Afterlife in the secular age
The project uses films, TV series, podcasts and stand-up comedy shows as material for the study.
“What we have already looked at is how death and funerals are portrayed in Nordic film and television. For example, the Norwegian team examined the Norwegian TV programme Takk for alt in which a comedian staged his own funeral and made parody of funerals.”
The research project is based on the book A Secular Age by Charles Taylor who, among other things, argues that a major difference between the present and the early Middle Ages is the perception of time.
“According to Taylor, in the early Christian worldview, as in pre-Christian times, there was an idea of sacred time. For example, at religious holidays, ordinary time stopped for a moment, and one existed in a different time and space. Nowadays, secular time is constant without break, and we have seen this reflected in Nordic films about death. The afterlife is very rarely depicted, but when it is, it is often shown as a happy part of the everyday life the person lived before death. The afterlife can be, for example, a place that was important to them in life. There seems to be no idea of something eternal or a God”, explains Lundmark.
The fact that the afterlife rarely appears in Nordic film also shows that there is a general assumption about the Nordic people, that they do not believe in an afterlife, or at least that the afterlife is not important enough to speculate about.
“What is interesting and important to us in the Nordics is the here and now, what we do with our time while we are alive, and how we relate to our loved ones, as portrayed in Nordic film”, says Lundmark.
The church as a cultural and moral institution in the Nordics
The project also examined the portrayal of priests in modern Nordic films. According to the results, priests are often portrayed more as experts in grief or morality rather than as facilitators of contact with God.
“It reflects how people see the role of the church in society today. We haven't looked at it specifically in the project, but I think, for example, many Swedes see the Church of Sweden as a cultural or moral institution. They want the church to reflect what they consider to be Swedish values. When you go to church at Christmas, you see it as a cultural activity rather than a religious activity”, says Evelina Lundmark.
Although all the Nordic countries have experienced the same trend towards more and more secularised societies, the national churches in Denmark, Norway and Sweden have chosen quite different paths in response to people attending mass less often, something Lundmark finds interesting.
“For example, the Church of Denmark has been more in favour of the idea of being a mediator of Danish cultural heritage and cultural religion. On the other hand, the Church of Sweden has been more cautious in relation to seeing itself as a mediator of cultural heritage and towards terms like cultural Christianity. But fewer Danes are leaving the church, while the Church of Sweden has lost the most members of all former state churches in the Nordic region.”
Next, the project will investigate podcasts about the brain and mental health to see what assumptions are being made about what is rational. The project also aims to create a methodology to investigate the influence of social media on the secular worldview in the Nordic region.
