Håkon Larsen

11 The Return of Religion in the Public Sphere? The Public Role of Nordic Faith Communities

The public role of religion has been a recurrent topic of debate in the sociology of religion. This debate gained momentum with José Casanova’s book Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) in which he claimed that a worldwide deprivatization of religion was taking place. Only a few years later, Peter L. Berger (1999) argued that large parts of the world were characterized by desecularization, even if Europe continued to be secular. In 2006, Jürgen Habermas labelled modern, Western societies as postsecular (Habermas, 2006). The question that forms the title of Titus Hjelm’s (2015) book Is God back? is indeed pertinent in debates on the public sphere in Nordic countries. During the past decades, new interfaith infrastructures have emerged in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland that enable a great variety of faith communities to participate as civil society actors in the public sphere. Whereas the Nordic Lutheran majority churches previously had hegemonic positions in the public sphere as it related to religious issues, new channels of communication have developed that change the ways in which faith and worldview communities act in the public sphere. The emergence of the new religious infrastructure also seems to have implications for the type of religion that is present in the public sphere. This chapter will map these developments and attempt to explain them. In the following, we outline the Nordic religious landscapes and the theoretical perspectives that are used. The development of the Nordic interfaith infrastructure is then described, including some critical issues that this development has raised. We then conclude with a discussion of various explanations for the institutional changes that are outlined.

13 Afterword: A Viable Model of the Public Sphere?

At the end of the Introduction a generic theory of the public sphere in institutional perspective was sketched (Engelstad, Larsen, Rogstad & Steen-Johnsen, this volume). Seven main dimensions, or building blocks, aimed to describe variations in the shape of different public spheres, were pinpointed. The foregoing chapters demonstrate that combinations of values on these empirical variables appear in clusters. It is widely outside the scope of the present volume to treat the totality of relevant elements, but the empirical studies presented here yield some significant indications of what one such cluster looks like. It should be borne in mind that the Nordic model is an ideal type. Its fruitfulness rests on a high degree of correspondence, but in no way identity, with the empirical Nordic societies. Conflict, inconsistencies and compromises are also necessary parts of societies labeled under the Nordic model. The ability to cope with such conflicts determine the viability of the model.

The Public Sphere in the Nordic Model

© 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Hakon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-JohnsenThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

Introduction: The Public Sphere in Change. Institutional Perspectives on Neo-corporatist Society

© 2017 Fredrik Engelstad, Hakon Larsen, Jon Rogstad, Kari Steen-Johnsen This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivs 3.0 License