Religion in Denmark: Unholy row

Date: 28/06/03

To believe or not to believe, that is the pastor's own question

IT HAS been heralded as one of the biggest crises in Denmark's Evangelical Lutheran Church since King Harald Bluetooth was baptised in 960AD. “There's no heavenly God, there's no eternal life, and there's no resurrection,” said Thorkild Grosboel, pastor of the small town of Taarbaek, north of Copenhagen. In an ever more secular-minded Denmark, such views uttered by your average Dane would be about as controversial as confessing a love of raw herrings. But Pastor Grosboel thinks he should still keep his job. Others disagree.

Denmark's minister for ecclesiastical affairs, Tove Fergo, herself a Lutheran priest, says that “a priest should at the very least believe the gospel he has been employed to preach.” The local bishop has suspended the pastor from his duties. But some liberals within the church urge greater leniency.

For one thing, membership and church attendance are dropping, though at last count, a year ago, 84% of Danes still said they belonged to the state-backed Evangelical Lutheran Church. However, very few of them - between 1% and 3% of the population, one of the lowest figures in Europe - regularly attend services. Danes say that nowadays theirs is a “four-wheeler religion”: they come by pram to be baptised, roll up in smart cars for weddings, and are taken to their own funerals by hearse.

As a result, the ecclesiastical-affairs ministry (one of the few such government-run authorities in Europe) recently suggested that some churches could be sold. Denmark's Muslims, who are growing fast in number but still have neither a purpose-built mosque nor a cemetery of their own, have offered to buy some of them. Several of Denmark's anti-immigration politicians expressed outrage at the offer. The minister curtly turned it down; this week she said a new law may be brought in that would, in effect, prevent churches from being turned into mosques.

The row over the atheistic clergyman has stirred up other grievances. The Catholics, for instance, have taken the opportunity to complain about the fact that only the Lutherans get financial backing from the state. Anyone - including atheists, Muslims and members of non-Lutheran churches - can opt out of paying a tax towards the Lutheran church, but about 12% of its income comes from a direct state subsidy. Unfair, say the non-Lutherans.

Moreover, Catholics pay more to buy a burial plot, and must register births, marriages and deaths in a Lutheran church rather than at a registry office. So some have gone to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that this discriminates against non-Lutherans. The state may find it hard to keep giving perks to the Lutherans if their pastors can hold on to their jobs while denying the existence of God.