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The Delicate Work still undone in the Church of Sweden's Reconciliation Process

By | Article
October 11, 2022
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A group of delegates representing Indigenous peoples of the European Arctic standing in front of the cathedral in Uppsala, Sweden

A group of Sami delegates stands outside the cathedral in Uppsala where the Church of Sweden issued its formal apology to the Sami people in November 2021. Photo: John Last

Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Arctic since time immemorial, establishing rich regional cultures and governance systems long before the introduction of modern borders. The Arctic Institute’s 2022 Colonialism Series explores the colonial histories of Arctic nations and the still-evolving relationships between settler governments and Arctic Indigenous peoples in a time of renewed Arctic exploration and development.

The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022

The Church of Sweden must reckon with the complex and varied history of Sámi belief if it is to make progress toward reconciliation.

Last November, Archbishop Antje Jackelén took a historic step on behalf of the Church of Sweden. Kneeling before a circle of Sámi — the Indigenous people of Arctic Europe — themselves surrounded by representatives from Sweden’s dioceses and Protestant denominations around the world, Jeckelen apologized for historic wrongs committed by her church against Sámi people.

The apology, aired live on the public broadcaster and attended by hundreds of delegates and dignitaries, was a significant milestone in the Church of Sweden’s still-young reconciliation process with the Sámi. The Sámi — whose traditional territory spans parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia — were subjected to programs of forced assimilation and conversion by various churches and colonial states over the centuries.1) In Sweden, as elsewhere, Sámi languages were suppressed; cultural signifiers, like names, dress, and customs, were stigmatized and, later, fetishized in equal measure; Sámi sacred sites were destroyed; and Sámi graves were desecrated by priests and scientists alike in the search for a “proto-Aryan” race.2)

The interwoven and interdependent history of the national churches and colonial powers in Scandinavia means that these crimes were often perpetrated by church and state together. Indeed, historians have found drawing boundaries between these two actors difficult, if not at times impossible.3) But faced with a Swedish state that continues to lag behind its neighbours on reconciliation — while continuing to profit from controversial decisions on the use of Sámi lands4) — the Church of Sweden decided early to embark on its own independent reconciliation process, beginning in the mid-1990s.5)

This independent church process has presented a unique opportunity to envision reconciliation in explicitly Christian terms, something that is sorely needed in Sweden. Taking the long view of Swedish church history reveals just how interwoven colonialism, Christianity and Sámi identity have become over the centuries. In Sweden, as elsewhere, many Indigenous people self-identify as Christian, in large part due to deliberate programs of conversion that played an essential role in colonization.6) This is further complicated by the existence of subsects, like the Laestadians, which profess an authentic, Indigenous Sámi Christian tradition but are in many ways more conservative than their counterparts on topics of faith and reconciliation.7)

The unique work facing churches, then, is to reconcile their own history as agents of Indigenous erasure with the authentic expressions of Indigenous Christian belief within their own membership that have existed, in Sweden’s case, for nearly a millennium.8)

Christian missions first appeared in Scandinavia in the 11th century. Though they were initially focused on the non-Indigenous population, Olle Sundström describes a period of more than 200 years, from the 17th to the 19th century, when Sámi participated regularly in Christian ceremonies but continued to practice their own religion.9) Bjorn Norlin, in a chapter produced as part of the Church of Sweden’s investigation into its own history, describes the incredible syncretism that resulted from this period — from depictions of the Virgin Mary sewn into Sámi traditional dress to the development of joiks, sacred songs, directed to Mary and the Christian God.10)

Yet with the Reformation and the birth of the Church of Sweden, Christian hostility to Sámi culture increased dramatically, culminating in campaigns of suppression that saw dozens of sacred sites burned and the imprisonment and execution of Sámi noaidis, or shamans. The joik was banned, as was the noaidi drum, the essential “spiritual tools”, in Norlin’s language, of the Sámi faith. “By the turn of the nineteenth century,” Sundström writes, “Christianity was the dominant confession among the Sámi.” 11)

But if the expansionist period of the 17th and 18th century was defined by outright hostility to the Sámi religious worldview, this attitude began to shift as Christianity became more dominant in Sámi territory.12) In 1845, it would be challenged outright by a revival movement infused throughout by, in some profound ways, a celebration of the Sámi spiritual perspective.

In the winter of 1845, Lars Levi Laestaedius, a Lutheran minister and child of a Sámi mother, encountered a young Sámi woman named Milla Clementsdotter who profoundly altered his faith. In the wake of this encounter, Laestadius became one of the century’s many penitential revivalists. Railing against the vice of alcoholism and drawing on Sámi cultural and religious motifs, Laestadius worked to reconcile an alien Christian message with the Sámi worldview.13)

Laestadius set himself against the Church establishment, romanticizing what he saw as the natural puritanism of pre-capitalist Sámi life.14) He incorporated Sámi stories, myths, and even sacred figures in his sermons, elevating the role of women, like the Virgin Mary and Clementsdotter (who he called Maria), in contrast to the dominant Protestant tendency to marginalize them. To some, his revivals, which inspired ecstatic trances called lihkahusat, even mirrored pre-Christian Sámi forms of worship, drawing accusations of impropriety from the Church.15)

Since the birth of Laestadianism, as his movement is known, its legacy and significance has been highly contested. Pivotal to its reception was an 1852 incident in Kautokeino, in what is today Norway, where a group of Laestadian Sámi attacked Norwegian state and church officials in an apparent uprising against colonial oppression.16) Yet even the significance of this event is contested. Laestadius disavowed it in his own lifetime;17) and revealingly, contemporary officials attempted to desacralize the uprising, treating it as a medical condition or an instance of mass hysteria they called “Sámi madness.”18)

Indeed, while some have argued that Laestadianism offered a form of “cultural defence” for Sámi during periods of aggressive assimilation,19) or else represents a “specifically Sámi form of belief,”20) Laestadius himself may have rejected such an idea. He was notorious for preaching against the colorful nature of traditional Sámi dress, and reproached scarf-wearing women as “silk whores.”21)

Today, research into the movement’s legacy in Sweden is still limited,22) though the intervening century has seen it split and take on a decidedly more conservative posture. Some branches continue to be hostile to joiking and other Sámi cultural traditions, and have rejected Laestadius’ elevation of women in favour of a more patriarchal attitude.23) Yet many Sámi Laestadians do not feel any less Sámi for their faith, and indeed reject the “homogenizing” tendency that would see “everything that arrived with the conquerors, including Christianity, [as] necessarily bad.”24)

The story of Sámi Laestadianism shows how complex and delicate the work of reconciliation within the Church of Sweden will be. The Church must engage not only on the level of acknowledging historical and political wrongs; it must engage with how it has profoundly transformed Sámi spirituality, in a way that both respects and articulates the authentic expressions of Sámi Christian belief that exist today.

But so far, it would appear the Swedish church has, ironically, been reluctant to engage deeply with questions of theology, belief, and identity. In a comparison of the Norwegian and Swedish reconciliation processes authored before the Church of Sweden’s public apology in Uppsala, Sámi theologian Helga West remarks that the church of Sweden has generally employed secularized, communitarian language when speaking of reconciliation, avoiding terms like “sin” and “guilt” that would embed the process in a Christian worldview.25)

This posture is evident even in the decisions of the most recent general synod, which ran concurrently to the apology service. While supporting a motion to ensure its vast forest holdings in Sámi territory are managed in a “spiritually sustainable” way,26) the church council rejected motions that would have more profoundly reconsidered the “intrinsic value” of the forest as proof of God’s loving creation, a viewpoint more consistent with traditional Sámi religion.27) Another motion that would have seen the church reckon with the meaning of its designation as a “national church” — an opportunity to reflect on its relationship to nationhood and identity — was similarly rejected.28)

Meaningful engagement with these issues may seem secondary to the acknowledgement of historical wrongs, but they are essential to reconciliation. In her essay, West uses the phrase “spiritual destruction” to describe the damage caused by the banning of joiking and the drum, by the oppression of language and the dislocation from the land, leaving some Sámi with fewer of the tools necessary to attain a spiritual reconciliation with the church.29) When the tools of religious expression and communication with God are limited to those dictated by a colonial church, what spiritual reconciliation can even be possible?

Fortunately, within the Sámi community, the work of restoring and reimagining this toolkit has already long been underway. Since Johan Märak first joiked in a cathedral in 1993, the practice has become increasingly destigmatized and re-sacralized.30) Sámi catechisms and confirmation courses, authored in the past two decades, reframe the Christian worldview, as Laestadius once did, through a Sámi lens.31) And Sámi religious concepts and symbols, like the sun, breath, creator god and female deities, are increasingly employed in the interpretation of the Gospels and recontextualized in the built environment of Christian churches.32)

The objection to these reformed practices is often strongest in those areas where Laestadians are most plentiful, where Sámi identity and conservative Christianity are not seen in opposition.33) As is often the way with reconciliation, no simple solution will present itself to Sweden’s bishops. This is the delicate work that lies ahead of the church — a reconciliation that will sustain and reflect, not overpower or erase, the richness and variety of Sámi belief.

John Last is a Canadian journalist and researcher in the history of religion currently based in Padova, Italy.

References[+]

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