Finland's strange relationship with religion

Based on the name of this blog, you can probably guess I'm not the biggest fan of religion. While I was raised in a Christian family, for the last three years or so, I've identified myself as an atheist and even before that I doubted the whole thing for years. Also, while members of my family work, or have worked in various roles for the Finnish Lutheran Church, I've personally left the church (and btw. we still get along just fine). That being said, having been involved with this for most of my life, I can say there are some questionable aspects regarding religion in Finland.

First some general information. Finland is overwhelmingly a Christian nation, as over 70% of the population are at least nominally considered Christians. In practice however, Finland is one of the most secular countries.. The largest groups are the previously mentioned Lutheran Church, which claims about 71%  as members and the Finnish Orthodox Church, with 1.1% as members, both of which have a special status as state churches, though to be fair, they're not officially called that. Other religions make up around 1.6%, with the remaining roughly 27% being unaffiliated. The number of unaffiliated has been increasing fast in recent years, while the number of Lutherans especially has been on a decline, with a rate of about 1% a year. But, what's the reason for this?

Well, generally people in Finland don't really care for religion that much, especially with the Lutherans. Polls on this matter show that only about 20% of Lutherans actually believe what the church teaches. As I said, Finland is one of the most secular countries in the world. Being part of the church is more of a tradition than anything else: you're a member because your parents were, just like their parents and so on and so on. Essentially Lutheranism has become an integral part of Finnish society.  Whatever the reason for this is, you get the point: most Lutherans are members of the church, not because of their belief in God, but out of tradition. Most of the people are not active worshipers and, most people who are active within the church  are the older generations, who are often times more conservative compared to the younger generations. This combined with the fact that the churches administration is elected in internal elections, in return leads to the church being generally speaking being a lot more conservative than the average population. This has led to some of the more liberal members leaving in protest because of it's stances on some social issues, for example, gay marriage. On the other hand, when the gay marriage debate was on it's peak, archbishop Kari Mäkinen came out in support of it against the churches official stance on the issue, which also led to a number of conservatives leaving in protest. This puts the church in a difficult situation: the liberals view it as too conservative, while conservatives see it as too liberal. At least some of the conservatives have afterwards joined either the Orthodox Church or some of the smaller churches, which explains the slight increase in the "Others" category in recent years.

Now we get to the more questionable part: Finland's two state churches. As I mentioned in the beginning, both the Finnish Lutheran Church and the Orthodox Church have a special status as state churches, even though in legislation they are not officially called that. The fact is that both churches have incredibly close ties with the government. All religious organizations have special rights compared to other non-profits and get part of their funding from the state, but the Lutheran and Orthodox churches have a special connection with the government. Both churches have specific legislation regarding their organisation, which can't be changed without the churches permission. Also, instead of collecting membership fees in the traditional way, both churches collect them by taxing their members. With the Lutheran Church, the connection goes even deeper. All public cemeteries are taken care of by the Lutheran Church. However, it's possible for the municipalities, other religious groups and organizations and the state to have their own cemeteries, but there are not too many of them. Apart from the priests, bishops and elected laymen the churches central administrative body also includes a representative chosen by the government. Also, the churches employees are officially considered civil servants and until 2000, all Lutheran bishops were appointed by the president.

There's also the question of religion is schools. Religion is one subject in school, which, I think is one of the most questionable things about this. The problem here is that that religious education is organized according to "student's own religious affiliation", which in practice means the religion the parents are a part of. In other words, most people study Lutheranism, though there is education for minority religions and ethics courses for the non-affiliated. The most absurd part of this is, that even though any non-Lutheran person can take part in Lutheran classes, this doesn't work the other way around. This means that because of the fact I was baptized as a Lutheran, I had to take part in Lutheran classes, even if my parents had requested I take ethics classes. What does religious education mean in practice? Well, I can only tell about my experiences, but at least in Lutheran classes, our elementary school text books mostly included slightly edited Bible stories. And I don't mean the nice stories of Jesus healing cripples, but the stuff like David and Bathsheba. You know, the story where king David falls in love with a married woman, so he get's her husband killed so he could have her? What a lovely moral story for 10-year-old kids. We were also taught how to find passages from the Bible, because why the fuck not! Essentially the first few years of it is nothing more than religious brainwashing and you have no say in the matter. School is meant to give you useful information about the world, not enforce religious dogma. It's not until 7th grade you actually start learning the basics of different religions which actually is something you can probably use.

If having religious dogma shoved down your throat by teachers is not enough, some schools actually force their students to go to church. And I really mean force. The days we went to church were considered normal school days, meaning if you didn't have a reason to be absent, you would be punished. What's worse, is that in this case, not being a member of the church was not always a sufficient reason. I had people in my classes who were taking ethics classes and they had to attend church services because they didn't have anything else organized for them. In elementary school, we often times had an Orthodox priest visiting the school around Easter to hold a sermon for the whole school. Actually, having religious events was fairly common. Every once in a while, we would have employees from the local congregation holding some kind of an event. In elementary school we once had a Christian rock band performing for us. While we fairly often had religious people visiting our schools, I don't remember one time we had a non-religious person talking about their views. We never had the other side. In high school, our religion teacher did bring followers of Theosophy or the Hare Krishna Movement, but we never had free thinkers or any members of any secular organizations for that matter.

Even after everything I've said in this post, Finland still is one of the most secular nations on the planet. Honestly, that's why this pandering to religion is so embarrassing. Most people here don't give a fuck about religion. Somebody openly expressing their religion is mostly considered weird, apart from somebody wearing a cross necklace. And even that is all about the tradition part. Since most people are church members, most of them get confirmed and a cross necklace happens to be a common gift for it. Seeing people who actually go around evangelizing is fairly rare and my childhood home is right next to a Jehovah's Witness's Kingdom Hall. People here simply don't care for religion, so why is the government promoting it? The number of religiously affiliated people is dropping fairly rapidly and even within the people who still belong to a religious group, many of them don't believe what the group teaches. One day this whole system will end and thankfully, there are people fighting for it.

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