It was fully illegal to not be Christian in the Kingdom of Sweden. From 1634 onward, your choices were either to be Lutheran or leave the country. Some practical exceptions were made for Orthodox Karelians living in the eastern provinces, and I don't know to what extent individual people were persecuted, but basically the law said you belonged to the state church and that was that. They later allowed some other Christian denominations, mainly for foreigners: Swedish subjects weren't allowed to convert.
What got me reading was that I was curious as to what the status of Jews in Sweden was, and I learned that they were entirely prohibited from moving to most of the kingdom, including the Finnish provinces. In 1802 Sweden banned the immigration of Jews altogether, and although the law was soon repealed in Sweden, the Finnish provinces were lost to Russia in the war of 1808-09 and the law not only stayed on the books here, but was enforced until independence. I never knew that the Grand Duchy of Finland was so ferociously antisemitic. Jewish citizens only gained full civil rights in 1917.
So the religious situation in Finland at independence was basically that the law forced the entire population to be Lutheran. There was a small Orthodox minority, along with tiny Jewish and mostly Tatar Muslim communities, as well as some other, vanishingly small Christian churches. So officially, something like 98-99% of the population was Lutheran.
This only begins to change in 1923, when the first ever law on the freedom of religion is passed. Now, for the first time, it's possible to found new religious organizations and freely join or leave them, and even not belong to one at all. Full freedom of religion this ain't: the Lutheran and Orthodox state churches maintain their privileged positions, Christian churches get special tax exemptions, and the process for registering new religious denominations only recognizes religions that are Christian or broadly similar to Christianity. This is how the law still works: the Finnish wicca community, for instance, have been denied religious status because, among other reasons, they lack a holy book. This is a totally absurd criterion for a religion, but it's still the law.
The law came into force in 1924, so that was the first year Finnish citizens were allowed to leave the church. Since then, if I recall correctly, overall church membership has only gone down: there has never been a year in Finnish history since when the church had more members than in the previous year. Membership now stands at something like 68% and is continuing to fall.
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So what happened? Why is church membership collapsing?
A new religious freedom law was passed in 2003, which made leaving the church easier. Earlier, for instance when I quit the church, you had to actually go to a church office in person, fill out a form and talk to a priest, and if they couldn't talk you out of it, a month later your papers were transferred to the civil registry. The 2003 law made it possible to quit the church through a simple letter, which could be sent electronically. That same year, the Tampere "free-thinkers" atheist organization opened a website, eroakirkosta.fi, where you could input your personal details and they would take care of the process. As of this writing, they were coming up on 800 000 people having used the service, which you have to admit is a little bit impressive in a country of five million. But if you look at the overall graph, it's not like the trend started in 2003.
While the membership decline has been fairly steady, it's been given tremendous momentary boosts by both the church itself, of which more later, but also various public scandals involving religion. Several of those have involved Finnish Christian conservative politician Päivi Räsänen, a disgusting bigot who hates everyone different from her, and has consequently but presumably inadvertently done more to eradicate Christianity from Finland than anyone, up to and including the national hero who murdered a bishop with an axe. Whenever she shows her face on TV, there's a spike at eroakirkosta.fi. Lutherans sometimes complain about this, but the effect is real.
In my opinion, the fundamental reason behind the collapse of church membership is that the vast majority of people leaving the church were never Christians to begin with. We have no real information on how many people were actually Christian back when it was illegal not to be, because they didn't do a lot of polling back then, but also because the poll question would literally have been "do you confess to treason against God and your King".
What we do know is that in several surveys done by the church in the 21st century, the Finnish population divides into three approximately similarly sized groups. One is Christian and believes more or less what the church teaches; one believes in some kind of higher power or whatever, but not in the sense taught by the church; and one believes in nothing at all. So you could say that while some 70% of the population belongs to a Christian denomination, only about 30% say they're Christians. Suddenly the graph becomes a lot easier to understand, I think.
This also seems to be the mechanism behind the various Christian conservative-inspired brouhahas causing people to quit the church: if you don't actually believe in what the church teaches, and you see these odious bigots declaiming their hatred without any real pushback from the church, I think it's easy to see that this can lead quite a few people to ask themselves why, exactly, are they paying money to stay affiliated with this kind of activity.
As a point of interest, we have no compelling reasons to think that number of Christians was ever much higher. It may have been, but it may not have been; we have no direct way of knowing, but we can make some guesses. Until at least the 19th century, everyone in Finland had to pass an examination on the catechism to be confirmed into the church. It was never a particularly difficult examination, but in large parts of the country, people legitimately suffered with it and many were almost certainly being confirmed without passing it. This doesn't exactly make you think the average person was deeply devout.
Similarly, Finnish folk religion persisted well into the 20th century, and was only really wiped out by the elementary school system. While it incorporated lots of Christian language and ideas, it was still fundamentally a pagan belief system which the church tried to eradicate for centuries - in vain. Despite considerable efforts, the church also failed to impose Christian systems of gender and sexuality on the broader population; homophobia and strict bourgeois gender roles only became anything like universal in the 20th century through public education and conscription.
So we have no real reasons to believe Christianity was ever particularly popular or widespread in what later became Finland, in terms of things people actually believed in, whatever their nominal (compulsory) allegiance was. Again, I feel like this makes the decline in membership seem like a return to normality.
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Finally, there is a core reason for the collapse in church membership that it's considered taboo to really talk about. It's that what the church teaches is complete nonsense. The Bible is, in parts, an interesting collection of books with some historical value. As an actual guide to organizing your life or thinking about, well, anything germane to living in the 21st century, for the vast majority of us, it is useless. The Finnish Lutheran church officially expounds doctrines like the Trinity, which is pseusophilosophical garbage, and the resurrection, which is a very silly fairy tale. The question isn't really why people are leaving an organization that professes to believe in this blather, but rather why anyone would join it in the first place once they're no longer being forced to by state violence.
Education in what is now Finland was a church monopoly until the 1860s, and the modern school system was founded in the 1920s. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the quality of secular education improves, membership in organized superstition declines. Or in other words, when the church loses access to the coercive power of the state, and critical thinking skills become more widespread, church membership begins to collapse. Obviously it is a more complex social phenomenon or series of phenomena than just this, but if we're going to pretend that broadening access to high-quality education doesn't matter at all, well, that's a pretty big choice to make.
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So what will happen in the future? Who knows. A fellow theology freshman told me in 2012 that maybe god will send a new reformation to Finland. Who am I to argue?
Most commentators, even from the church, reckon that the membership decline will continue. If you think that the previously cited figure of 30-ish percent of the population being Christians will stay that way, then maybe church membership will drop to around that number.
A church with a membership around 30% will be quite a different organization from the state religious bureaucracy it is today. At that point, the church will probably no longer be able to discharge its remaining public functions, like burial services, and considerable state subsidies to a minority religion will hardly be a sustainable solution. As with schools, at some point in the not so distant future, the public sector will have to reclaim the rest of the public services the church has monopolized.
Even now, with a declining membership and massive pension burdens, the church is in a somewhat perilous financial position. They also have great swathes of real estate that may prove somewhat difficult to unload; who do you sell a cathedral to in Finland? The state already directly subsidizes the church to the tune of over a hundred million euros a year, not without controversy. There are those who think that the church is headed for financial collapse; I remember a panel at the faculty of theology where one provocative participant told the attending students that none of us would ever retire from the church, because it will have gone bankrupt by then. He may not be wrong.
The church may also collapse because there will no longer be any demand for it. So-called mainline protestantism has been in a global decline for quite a while, and the same seems to be happening in Finland. Roughly speaking, as more and more people are leaving organizes religion, the influence of the extremist bigots in churches is increasing. Maybe the most spectacular instance of this is the way white USian Protestants are rallying around, of all people, Dolan fucking Trump. The more influence these fanatics gain over their denominations, the more repulsive they will appear to the general population.
The strategy of the Finnish Lutheran church has been to sit on the fence as long as possible. They triggered one of the bigger waves in membership loss by their uncompromising opposition to women in the priesthood in the 1980s, and went on to resolve the issue in such a stupid way that clerical misogyny is rampant to this day. They're now doing a similar thing with same-sex marriage, which is accepted by the state and not the church, and the church's homophobic bigotry is one of the main reasons members are quitting. At the same time, the opposite side of the culture war professes to believe that the church has sold out to cultural Marxism or whatever they're calling it now, and bigots are also leaving the church.
It's easy, and not entirely wrong, to say that the church is choosing the worst possible alternative by equivocating. The truth may be that there's simply no position they can take without potentially catastrophic consequences. If the church came out in favor of gay marriage, against racism and inequality and so on, they would not only alienate quite a large portion of their members, but according to what we know about their opinions, most of their staff. Similarly, for the church to come down even more firmly on the right of the culture war would be a complete disaster for them in terms of not only popular support but potentially even their official position as a state church. So it's not at all clear that they can actually do any better.
The final dilemma for the church may be that there just isn't any real demand for a national mainline Lutheran denomination. When both the liberal and fundamentalist believers are minorities in a large church, they can coexist. It's the middle between them that's falling out of the church, and if this keeps up, it'll be just the extremes left. Who, at that point, is the former state church for?
Anyway this is all premised on current trends continuing, so if something new and unexpected happens, all bets are off.
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So this is the kind of thing that happens when I'm working and in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave where it's impossible to do anything except lie down in front of a powerful fan. I hope you've enjoyed these random thoughts on the Finnish state church and their membership problems.
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