Contesting Religion

The Media Dynamics of Cultural Conflicts in Scandinavia

Knut Lundby, Knut Lundby

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110498912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As Scandinavian societies experience increased ethno-religious diversity, their Christian-Lutheran heritage and strong traditions of welfare and solidarity are being challenged and contested. This book explores conflicts related to religion as they play out in public broadcasting, social media, local civic settings, and schools. It examines how the mediatization of these controversies influences people's engagement with contested issues about religion, and redraws the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion.

FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
Lynn Schofield Clark, Professor of Media, Film, and Journalism at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA
Marie Gillespie, Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK
Birgit Meyer, Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Part I: Contexts

Knut Lundby, Pål Repstad

Chapter 1 Scandinavia: Traits, Trends and Tensions

Abstract: The Scandinavian welfare societies depend on strong states to provide public services and to redistribute income. Scandinavians enjoy comprehensive welfare systems that offer citizens social security within open economies. Scandinavia combines international market capitalism with government regulation. The political–economic crisis in Europe influences Scandinavia as well, with pressure from globalization and immigration, and new political divisions that are articulated by right-wing populism.
The Scandinavian countries are built on egalitarian values and practices and the level of trust between people is high. However, the countries are finding that these egalitarian values also have unintended, problematic consequences, especially as these once relatively homogenous societies experience growing diversity. Today, there are peculiar contrasts in the Scandinavian cultural–religious landscape, between old churches with large majorities of the population as members, and levels of secularity in Scandinavian societies that position the region as the most secular corner of the world.

Keywords: Scandinavia, welfare state, welfare society, homogeneity, equality

The Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, are known as welfare societies that are based on cultural homogeneity and the ideals of social equality. Scandinavia, with its surveyable population of 21 million (2017), is small in scale, but it scores high on several indices of social and economic performance.1 There is a widespread self-understanding of liberal open-mindedness, and secularity is often taken for granted. Equality between the sexes is a core value. Conflicts are usually handled in negotiations within a neo-corporatist system between strong states and collective institutions, or in open public debate (Engelstad et al. 2017b; Hilson 2008). These conflict-solving mechanisms extend to the media system. The Scandinavian countries are on top in world press freedom rankings2 and have strong public service media (Syvertsen et al. 2014).

Within this seemingly harmonious framework cultural tensions are evolving. The political–economic crisis in Europe also influences the Scandinavian countries. The above Scandinavian characteristics are under pressure from globalization and immigration, with new political divisions being articulated by right-wing populism. Public tensions over radical Islamism and immigration from Muslim countries ignite discussions about Islam as a threat, although the Muslim population makes up small minorities in the Scandinavian countries. Global influences contribute to contested religion in Scandinavia. Growing diversity in the religious field, as well as in the media landscape, forms part of the conflicts that are arising. This is the core issue in the present book, to be researched throughout the following chapters. The tensions and conflicts are often framed as being cultural, but they may instead be social, economic, and political.

This chapter tries to map how these tensions are spelled out in the domains of religion and media in Scandinavia, as well as in the relations between media and religion. We do not go deep into analysing the issues, as we also need space for giving some basic, but relevant information about social and cultural frameworks in Scandinavia. The main aim of the chapter is to work as a background for the specific case studies to come, and we provide many references to the analyses in the following chapters.

1.1 Scandinavia and the Nordic Region

There is a distinction between Scandinavia and the Nordic region. Scandinavia is part of the Nordic region, which also encompasses Finland and Iceland, as well as Greenland and some smaller islands. There is geographical, cultural, and political proximity between Scandinavia and the wider Nordic sphere. All five Nordic countries are built on egalitarian values and practices. But all five countries experience unintended challenging consequences as these once relatively homogenous societies become more cultural-religious diverse.

Immigration implies a demographic challenge that is causing cultural tensions. Sweden has been the most open to immigration. Of the three countries, Sweden has the biggest population but this amounts to no more than 10 million people. The two other countries are smaller – and more restrictive on immigration. Denmark has the highest population density, with more people (5.8 million) than the more spacious Norway (5.3 million).3

Figure 1.1 Scandinavia is geographically positioned ‘on the top’ of Europe.

Despite different histories, and even previous internal armed conflicts, the Scandinavian countries are closely knit together (Kouri and Olesen 2016). They are all parliamentarian democracies and formally monarchies. The Scandinavian languages are close and usually people understand each other’s writing and speech, although immigrant languages and the use of English are on the rise. The three countries have many cultural traditions in common and thus have easily shared stories. This is slowly changing, with the growing ethnic and religious diversity and the fragmentation of the media landscape.

The Scandinavian countries have chosen different paths in international economic and political cooperation. Denmark and Sweden are members of the EU, while Norway is not, although it is integrated into the European economic market. Denmark and Norway are members of NATO, while Sweden is neutral. The three countries, however, work together in Nordic institutions, with Finland and Iceland included, and have long shared passport-free movements across their borders.

Taken together, the three Scandinavian countries have no more than approximately one-fourth of Germany’s population, or about the same number of inhabitants as the US state of Florida. The small scale has been a favourable condition for the development of the Scandinavian welfare system. Changes, like recent immigration, are creating tensions.

1.2 Welfare States in Transition

The Nordic welfare societies, built after World War II, depend on strong states to provide public services and to redistribute income. In return for relatively high taxes the Scandinavians get free public education through the university level, a national health care system mostly for free, guaranteed paid leave from work for both mothers and fathers of infants, and subsidized child care, among other benefits. The Scandinavian neo-corporatist states are characterized by ‘a seemingly unlikely combination of a basic liberal orientation with a high degree of state intervention … upheld due to the long term development of democratic institutions, in tandem with a growing inclusion of groups excluded from the public sphere and fields of power’ (Engelstad 2017, 265). Peasants’, workers’ and women’s organizations are among the social movements that have made their way into institutionalized negotiations and helped shape the modern state (Aakvaag 2017). Even if some movements in a neo-liberal direction have taken place in recent decades in the Scandinavian countries, they still fit better than most countries into the Social Democratic type in Esping-Andersen’s typology of welfare capitalist regimes, and more so than into the two other types, Liberal and Conservative. The main reasons for this are that many welfare benefits are still universal and are not subject to means testing, and, secondly, that many welfare benefits are distributed to people in their capacity as citizens, and are not only reserved for occupationally active people (Esping-Andersen 1990).

Scandinavians, then, enjoy comprehensive welfare state systems that offer the citizens social security within open economies. They combine international market capitalism with government regulations and coordinated negotiations between strong employer’s associations and strong unions. Gender equality and women’s participation in work are underlined as key values. This way of organizing society has been termed the Nordic or Scandinavian model (Barth, Moene, and Willumsen 2015; Hilson 2008).

The economic base has primarily been industry in Sweden, agriculture in Denmark, and fish and oil in Norway. All three countries experience pressures for change in open, globalized economies. Wage differences have been relatively small, but gaps in income have expanded somewhat over the last 30 years, in Sweden more than in Denmark and Norway, and the gap is even wider in wealth than in income.4 This implies a growing potential for social tensions, which counter the Scandinavian ideology of equality and small social differences.

1.3 Lutheran Background in Strong States – Deconstructed

The Scandinavian states have since the 1500s been legitimized through state churches: These majority Evangelical Lutheran churches have their roots in the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago. As the religious landscape slowly became more diverse, particularly since the 1970s (Furseth et al. 2018), tensions have grown over the privileged position of the majority church. Sweden dissolved its state church in 2000. Norway cut the confessional link to the Lutheran religion in the Constitution in 2012, and took further steps to split church and state five years later. Denmark still has a state church, a liberal ‘folk church’. In all three countries, state recognition is extended to other registered faith communities and worldview organizations. All three countries give financial support to the majority church as well as to other registered communities, through different national arrangements (Kühle et al. 2018). Such economic funding still seems to have broad political support. However, some politicians argue that violation of human rights should make it possible to withdraw such funding schemes, and voices arguing for secular arrangements across institutional sectors are becoming more vocal. A few politicians, both left-wing and right-wing, even ask why the state should automatically sponsor religious organizations, as long as other voluntary cultural work is not automatically supported. Still, the imprint of the long Christian tradition on the fabric of society is there, e. g. almost every holy day in the Christian calendar is a national holiday in Scandinavia.

1.4 Homogeneity, Equality, Similarity, and Trust

The Scandinavian countries, with their relatively sparse populations, have often been considered to be relatively homogeneous. The populations have limited the potential for dive...