Baptist Identity in a Christian Welfare State: A Swedish Case Study

ABSTRACT

The Swedish welfare state emerged during the 1950s at the same time as Swedish Baptist identity was undergoing change. Swedish Baptist identity had previously been based on the notion that the congregation was of itself a social body, but over time an ecclesiology arose which made an emotional conversion central, and thus faith became primarily an individual affair. This article argues that in the Swedish context this change was enhanced through a negotiation between the emerging welfare state and a revivalist theology. To uphold a bold Baptist identity, a contemporary Swedish Baptist ecclesiology must therefore develop a theology that both acknowledges the positive values in a welfare state and at the same time continues to argue for a radical religious freedom where the existence of various forms of alternative societal bodies is recognised by the state, particularly in the current multicultural context.

KEYWORDS:

• Baptist identity
• welfare state
• conversion
• ecclesiology
• Scandinavia
• statist individualism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Stephen R. Holmes, Baptist Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 7.

2 Wm. Lloyd Allen, “Being Born Again – and Again, and Again: Conversion, Revivalism and Baptist Spirituality,” Baptist Heritage and History 45 (Summer/fall 2010): 23–37.

3 William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).

4 Ibid., 15.

5 Jonas Qvarsebo, “Swedish Progressive School Politics and the Disciplinary Regime of the School, 1946–1962: A Genealogical Perspective,” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 49, no. 2 (2012): 217–35.

6 Joel Halldorf, Av denna världen? Emil Gustafson, moderniteten och den evangelikala väckelsen (Skellefteå: Artos, 2012), 74; David M. Gustafson, D. L. Moody and Swedes: Shaping Evangelical Identity Among Swedish Mission Friends 1867–1899 (Linköping: Linköping University, Department of Culture and Communication, 2008).

7 Halldorf, Av denna världen?, 87. My translation.

8 Gunnar Westin, Den kristna friförsamlingen i Norden: frikyrklighetens uppkomst och utveckling (Stockholm: Westerberg, 1956), 36–9.

9 Sune Fahlgren, “Baptismens spiritualitet – speglad i gudstjänstlivet: Svenskt perspektiv,” in Samfund i förändring: baptistisk identitet i Norden under ett och ett halvt sekel, ed. David Lagergren (Stockholm: Tro & liv, 1997), 111.

10 Mats Larsson, De “riktigt kristna”, deras “wänner” och “motståndare”: en lokal- och frikyrkohistorisk studie av Askers baptistförsamlings identitet och mentalitet, 1858–1887 (Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2007).

11 Sune Fahlgren, Predikantskap och församling: sex fallstudier av en ecklesial baspraktik inom svensk frikyrklighet fram till 1960-talet (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2006), 65–9; Gunnar Hallingberg, Läsarna: 1800-talets folkväckelse och det moderna genombrottet (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2010), 118–47.

12 Fahlgren, “Baptismens Spiritualitet,” 107.

13 Holmes, Baptist Theology, 7.

14 Hallingberg, Läsarna, 55–73.

15 Linnea Lundgren, A Risk or a Resource? A Study of the Swedish State’s Shifting Perception and Handling of Minority Religious Communities Between 1952–2019 (Stockholm: Ersta Sköndal Bräcke högskola, 2021).

16 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 24–30, 42.

17 Hans Dahlqvist, “Folkhemsbegreppet – Rudolf Kjellén vs. Per-Albin Hansson,” Historisk Tidsskrift 122 (2002): 446–63.

18 Ibid., 450. My translation.

19 Ibid.; Bo Rothstein, “Att administrera välfärdsstaten: några lärdomar från Gustav Möller,” Arkiv för studier i arbetarrörelsens historia 36, no. 37 (1987): 68–84. Per-Albin Hansson was prime minister between 1932 and 1946, but the first time he mentioned folkhem ‘the people’s home’ was in a debate in 1928.

20 Per Albin Hansson. Folkhemstalet. Svenska tal. Accessed June 8, 2023. https://www.svenskatal.se/tal/per-albin-hansson-folkhemstalet.pdf. My translation.

21 Lars Trägårdh, “Rethinking the Nordic Welfare State Through a Neo-Hegelian Theory of State and Civil Society,” Journal of Political Ideologies 15, no. 3 (2010): 227–39.

22 Lars Trägårdh and Henrik Berggren, “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, ed. Helena Matsson and Sven-Olof Wallenstein (London: Black Dog, 2010), 10–23.

23 Ibid., 12–13.

24 Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022).

25 I have discussed this elsewhere; see Fredrik Wenell, Omvändelsens skillnad: En diasporateologisk analys av frikyrklig ungdomskultur i folkkyrka och folkhem (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2015).

26 Cited in Björn Ryman, Nordic Folk Churches: A Contemporary Church History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 101.

27 Erika Willander and Max Stockman. Ett mångreligiöst Sverige i förändring (Myndigheten för Stöd till Trossamfund, 2020), 6–7.

28 Mattias Martinson, Postkristen teologi: experiment och tydningsförsök (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2007); Mattias Martinson, Katedralen mitt i staden: om ateism och teologi (Lund: Arcus, 2010).

29 Lundgren, A Risk or a Resource?, 330–3. See also Fredrik Wenell, Omvändelsens skillnad: En diasporateologisk granskning av frikyrklig ungdomskultur i frikyrka och folkhem (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2015), 73–99.

30 Holmes, Baptist Theology, 151–9.

31 Wenell, Omvändelsens skillnad, 127–59.

32 Ibid., 134–43. The term ‘Constantinianism’ is often employed to designate the way church has come to hold political or cultural power, where the term does not refer to Emperor Constantine as a person, but to the theological renegotiation that arose when the Christian church was legitimised by the government of Constantine.

33 John C. Nugent, “A Yoderian Rejoinder to Peter J. Leithart’s Defending Constantine,” in Constantine Revisited: Leithart, Yoder, and the Constantinian Debate, ed. John D. Roth (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013), Kindle loc. 454.

34 Daniel M. Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001); James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009).

35 Arne Rasmusson, “The Church as a ‘Creative Minority’,” in Religion and Churches in Common Europe, ed. János Wildmann (Bremen: Europaeischer Hochschuleverlag, 2012); Arne Rasmusson, “Kyrkan och kampen för ett bättre samhälle: En alternativ historia,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalstidsskrift 96, no. 2 (2020): 173–99.

36 I have developed this argument in “Jesus som förebild i ett postkristet samhälle” [Jesus as an Exemplar in a Post-Christian Society], Hybrid 2 (2024). In that article I use Linda Trikanus Zagzebskis and Stephen Fowl’s views on exemplar and phronesis. See Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Stephen E. Fowl, The Story of Christ in the Ethics of Paul: An Analysis of the Function of the Hymnic Material in the Pauline Corpus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990).

37 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fredrik Wenell

Fredrik Wenell holds a Ph.D. from Uppsala University in Systematic Theology and World View Studies. He has published widely across the areas of youth theology, free church theology, and issues concerning state and church, mostly in Swedish but also in English, with the latest article in English appearing in Ecclesial Practices 9 (2022) (co-authored with Greger Andersson).