In 1953, a young Swedish filmmaker named Ingmar Bergman chose to include a glimpse of Harriet Anderssonâs naked breast in his new film, Summer with Monika. Whatever the artistic merits of the choice, it shocked audiences and catapulted the film to international attention. Along with a number of increasingly licentious movies, it gave rise to talk of âthe Swedish sin,â an expression that captured a trend among moviemakers as well as a general cultural mood in the Nordic capital. Sweden was rebranding itself.
In only a few decades it moved from a Lutheran, agrarian, and anything-but-egalitarian to a modern, enlightened identity.1 Secularization played a role in this shift, which saw the exchange of traditional morality for âsexual liberation.â Academics, politicians, and the cultured agreed: modern Sweden ought to be rational, scientific, liberal, and individualisticâan identity that was contrasted to religious and traditional.
Today, Sweden is firmly positioned in the top right corner of the World Value Study map: more characterized by the so-called secular-rational and self-expression values than any other country in the world. It might be heralded as a beacon or regarded as a cautionary tale, but the image of Sweden as a secular nation is seldom questioned.2
It might be surprising to learn, then, that in the twentieth century, Sweden was also home to what was, for a time, the largest Pentecostal church in the worldâFiladelfiakyrkan. But it wasnât an accident, for Filadelfia belonged to the Swedish Pentecostal movement that emerged in the early 1900s and quickly became one of Europeâsâand the worldâsâstrongest and most influential Pentecostal movements. The man behind Filadelfiaâs explosive growth was the same person who led the countryâs Pentecostal movement through seven decades and also started a prominent Christian political party. His name was Lewi Pethrus (1884â1974). A former factory-worker and seminary dropout, he indelibly shaped the Swedish religious, social, and political landscapes of the twentieth century.
In this book, I chart how Pethrus led the Pentecostal movement, tried to shape modern Sweden with it, and guided the people that critics commonly referred to as âfanaticsâ through an increasingly secular culture. This is a story seldom told, a story about a person who defied a host of prejudices about modern Swedes, but also about Pentecostals and their political engagement. Hopefully, the book can broaden the perception of both.
A Working-class Pentecostal
In 1973 a journalist asked Lewi Pethrus which of his many achievements he valued the most. âI think,â the eighty-nine-year-old leader of the Swedish Pentecostal movement began, âthat I without any doubt can say: my work among the poor and downtrodden. Those who I have helped back on their feetâthat is the greatest of all. I will cling to that on the day of judgment.â3
When he began his work in Stockholm in the 1910s, it was a city of poverty and desolation. People escaped the penury of the countryside only to end up in the city slum. There was no welfare to speak of, and in 1917 food scarcity led to bread riots. Pethrus and the Filadelfia Church, which he pastored, ran homeless shelters and soup kitchens to alleviate the need. Many, especially among the poor, came to prefer life in the Pentecostal congregation to the misery of the capital. The early twentieth century was a time of political, economic, and social disorderâbut when modernity hit, Pentecostal churches functioned as airbags offering material, communal, and existential support.
While Pethrusâs social work is by no means unique among Pentecostal communities, his turn to professional politics a few decades later was ahead of the curve. Pentecostals in the global south and the US became involved in this kind of politics from the 1970s, but Pethrus involved himself in the public debate through the founding of a daily paper in the 1940s, started a political lobbying organization in the 1950s, and a political party in the 1960s.
Much changed throughout his long life, but one thing remained the same: the preferential option for the poor. Pethrus became a Christian politician with conservative values who embraced the welfare state. Near the end of his life he described economic justice as a âwonderful blessingâ and lamented that the labor movement in Sweden had not retained a stronger connection with Christianity: âIt belongs in the church,â he concluded.4 Pethrus himself was brought up in the working class, and âthis is where I have always seen myself as belonging,â he wrote in his memoirs. He held this opinion his whole life: âChristianity and social justice are intimately connected.â5
Saints in a Secular World
When Swedish historians tell the story of the twentieth century, it belongs to the labor movement. The Social Democrats held power without interruption from 1932 to 1976. The atheist element of the movement was always there, and after World War II they and other parties actively promoted a secular agenda and shaped society accordingly. The Swedish Pentecostals were an odd bird in this secular landscapeâand deviation came with a price.
The works of social psychologist Stanley Milgram shed light on their situation. Milgram is best known for his infamous psychological experiment from the 1960s, where study participants were instructed to give painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to students when they gave wrong answer to a question. The test persons were told that the experiment had to do with memory and teaching. But the students, who sat behind a screen and could be heard but not seen, were in fact collaborators in the study. Their groans of pain were faked; the electricity never reached them. Instead, the test measured an individualâs resilience toward pressure from authority.
The disheartening result was that most of the subjects agreed to electrocute their students. They bent to the authority of the white-robed leader of the experiment, and his assurance that this was necessary for science, rather than to their own conscience or the studentâs cries for mercy.6
Milgram was interested in the force of social norms. Under what circumstances is it possible for an individual to challenge these norms? In a less malevolent experiment he gave his own students an assignment that allowed them to experience this force themselves. They were to approach a person on the subway, look them in the eyes, and, without providing any justification, ask for his or her seat. Milgram assumes that this is an easy taskâand compared to electrocuting someone it certainly is. But then he tries it himself. He gets on the New York subway and approaches a fellow passenger, ready to make the requestâbut finds that he cannot: âthe words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge. I stood there frozen, then retreated.â He is, it turns out, unable to go through with this socially awkward act. So he retreats, takes a deep breath, and makes another attempt. This time, he is able to utter the words:
At the next station, Milgram rushes off the subway, away from the situation, and the anxiety evaporates. The experiment shows, he concludes, how strongly we react to social norms. They are not only external rules. We internalize them and are thus patrolled by an âenormous inhibitory anxiety.â7âExcuse me, sir, may I have your seat?â A moment of stark anomic panic overcame me. But the man got right up and gave me the seat. [âŠ] Taking the manâs seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish.
A society is governed not only by laws and regulations but also by norms: that which is considered normal behavior. To deviate from accepted norms makes us uncomfortable, something that is a challenge for minorities of all sorts, including religious minorities in secular societies. In this respect it makes little difference that the society is liberal and democratic, for even if no law prohibits their activities, they are still differentâdeviant, apart, outliers. And that comes with a price: anxiety.
This is one of the paradoxes of modernity. The appreciation of freedom and authenticityâthe right to be and express your true selfâseems to be combined with homogenization. Twentieth-century philosophers and sociologists spoke of the advent of the mass society. When individualism eroded the social fabric, this created homogenization rather than freedom, they argued.8 The reason was that the absence of strong local communities made it much more important to fit into the one community that counted: the nation state.
This would be true in any western society, but Sweden is a particular case in point. It is not only one of the most individualistic countries in the world but also very homogenous,9 not only in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity but also with regard to norms and values.10 This has a historical underpinning. Sweden is a small nation, isolated in the north of Europe, seldom invaded, and untouched by large waves of migration. While the US is founded on some degree of diversity, especially religious pluralism, Sweden has been shaped by a religious unity, strongly enforced at least since the Reformation. The result is what is commonly described as the Swedish consensus culture: a culture that focuses on compromise and consensus. Swedes are agreeable because they like to agree, and this has shaped Swedish political life. There have been no violent revolutions. Swedes have preferred negotiation as a means to reach nuanced agreements between parties. But this consensus culture is based on an assumption of underlying agreement in terms of core values and goods.11
The Pentecostals challenge the Swedish story of secularization, not just by their numbers but also through their vitality. They defied consensus and refused to adapt. The...