I’m thrilled to be presenting at SAR 2023 at the University of Victoria in Victoria, CA this May. The following is the abstract for my paper:
This paper explores the role Lutheran ritual plays in value formation in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools offer students one year programs that are designed to instill Scandinavian values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic work at a folk high school in south-eastern Norway, I assess how Lutheran masses held on campus were designed to bring forth one of the folk high school’s five core values, opplevelse (experience), by inviting all students and staff, irrespective of their personal relationships with Christian faith, to participate. Despite the majority of students self-identifying as “not Christian”, most of them voluntarily attended, and actively participated in, these services. This paper argues that despite prevailing stereotypes of Norwegians being predominately secular, the “hidden sacrality” of Norwegian political and social life was made visible by Lutheran rituals at the state-sponsored Christian folk high school where I conducted my ethnographic research. I argue that Christian practice, and belief, in Norway are on a continuum, and that these rituals reveal entanglements between the secular and the sacred that invites further exploration of the role Christianity plays in value formations that emerge in both Norwegian statecraft and in Norwegian social life. I suggest that this experience of lived religious practice in Norway problematizes the distinctions that have been made between secularism and Christianity in Scandinavia, and reflects tensions that emerge in a range of social and political contexts in “secular” societies more broadly.