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The Nordic Churches and the Ecumenical Movement
Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2000 by Peter Lodberg
The Lutheran Reformation took place in Denmark in 1536. The state would no longer be governed according to Roman law, but according to the will of the Lutheran king. In practice, the result was a Lutheran church governed by a Lutheran king as the embodiment of the Lutheran state. The Catholic population soon became aware that freedom of religion was a principle unknown to the new rulers in state and church. In various ways the Lutheran church and the Lutheran kingdom of Denmark were protected according to the rule of the Augsburg peace agreement of 1555: cuius regio, eius religio. A political and confessional cleansing took place, and those who continued to confess their faith according to Roman Catholic practice had to leave the country as religious refugees. In 1557 the leading Lutheran bishop Peder Palladius formulated a "catalogue of heresy", which prohibited non-Lutheran Protestants and Catholics from entering the Danish kingdom. The Danish law of King Christian V, which functioned as the basic law from 1683 until the democratic constitution in 1849, gave prominence to the refusal of Catholicism: Catholics were forbidden to live in or to enter the country, a Catholic could not inherit and non-Lutheran services could not take place.
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During the period of absolute monarchy from 1660, the king did allow some non-Lutherans to enter the kingdom after the Roskilde peace agreement with Sweden. Most were soldiers hired by the king in his ongoing and unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the Swedish king. The royal military adventures had important consequences for Fredericia, built in 1650 as a fortress in the southern part of Jutland. To encourage people to move there, the king decided in September 1674 to allow "freedom of conscience for all Christians" who were willing to move and live within the ramparts of Fredericia; and in 1682 this localized freedom of religion was extended to include the Jews as well.
When liberal democratic ideas began to be formulated at the end of the 18th century, the Roman Catholic Church did not support the idea of freedom of religion, either in Denmark or anywhere else in Europe. As the true church, it did not recognize other confessional churches or ideologies as having equal rights. Consequently, the Catholics did not demand the right of religious freedom in states where they lived as minorities and would have benefited from such rights. This explains why there was no Catholic participation in the Danish discussion of the relationship between state and church and of religious freedom from 1820 to 1849. The right for freedom of religion was fought by another overlooked religious group: the Baptists.
The Danish Baptists and freedom of religion
The first Dane to address the issue of freedom of religion was P.C. Monster. On 16 July 1840, he delivered a "Demand for Full Freedom of Religion" to the free assembly of the Estates of the Realm in Roskilde.(5) According to Monster, a law on religious freedom should not apply to the Baptists -- because, in his words, "they have already taken it" -- but should include all other Danes. Monster proposed three conditions for the introduction of freedom of religion: (1) the Lutheran state church should continue to receive taxes from all citizens; (2) laws on schooling should remain unchanged; and (3) any new religious community should produce a creed to show that it had no intention of being subversive to the state. Monster contended that all parties would benefit from this solution, arguing that freedom of religion was responsible for the spiritual and economic growth of the United States. Just as America had heard the gospel and received it in the freedom of the Holy Spirit, so, too, the time had come for Denmark to listen to the free voice of the Spirit.
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