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« on: May 14, 2012, 02:26:57 AM »
To understand Norwegian Lutheranism, you kind of have to understand the political dynamics between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. You also have to understand Norwegian farm culture (bondekultur). Norway was in a royal union with Denmark from about 1400 to 1814. There were various degrees of Danish rule during that time, as Denmark was the major power of the Scandinavian states due to its continental location. Cutting to the chase, at the time of the Reformation, Norway was pretty well dominated by Denmark. Lutheranism was foisted upon the Norwegians as a matter of law rather than conversion. The last Catholic Bishop of Nidaros, Olaf Engelbrektsson, was eventually run into exile even as he attempted to use the Reformation as the means to inspire some sense of Norwegian nationalism and be rid of Danish rule. This, of course, wasn't entirely altruistic as there was a whole lot of land in Norway owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Engelbrektsson had such a standing as to be able to build a castle and raise a small army. Engelbrektsson tried to get Swedish allies, since Gustaf I Vasa was waging war against Denmark already. However, he wasn't fully aware of Swedish Lutheran leanings, and received no support.
The consequence of this was that Norway was forcibly converted to Lutheranism, and after Engelbrektsson was exiled to Holland, it came to the Danes to provide new, Lutheran clergy to Norway. Consequently, there was immediately a divide between the Norwegians and their own clergy, as Danish and Norwegian languages were significantly different at that point - Danish had absorbed a lot of German and Frisian influence, while Norwegian was approximately similar to modern Faeroese. So, there was a divide between Norwegians and Danes, even linguistically, for the next few centuries. Danish massively influenced the language of educated Norwegians to the point that, even today, Norway has two official written languages. Away from population centers, the Norwegian dialects are considerably older.
So, the Norwegians were tied to the Danes politically and religiously. Roman Catholic tendencies died out in Norway centuries after the Reformation, despite Danish clergy rigorously rooting out "papistry" and the like. Towards the end of the 18th century, Norway finally got a University of Theology of its own.
Pietism made its way to Norway via Danish clergy, but it took Hans Nielsen Hauge to drive the point home. Haugean pietism has taken some really strange twists and turns in the past 200 years, but it was the Haugean revival that ultimately made Lutheranism "Norwegian". Even for those who disagreed with Hauge on many things, such as H.A. Preus and most of the State Church, it's hard to deny that the Haugean revival completely transformed Norwegian Lutheranism in Norway and in the United States. He also had a large hand in kick-starting a transformation in the Norwegian economy before the Industrial Revolution arrived some 25 years after his death.
Alongside all of this, it's important to remember that the Norwegian population was mostly rural, quite isolated, and had developed it's own "Bondekultur" (farm-culture). "Bondekultur" was very old in many ways, reaching back to the age of the Vikings. Norwegian farm culture emphasized the freedom of the farmer, the strength of the farm community, and viewed the Danish kingdom as an overseer rather than an overlord. Isolated communities couldn't possibly be contained by Danish military might, and there was little reason for the Danes to attempt such a thing. They put their sheriffs and magistrates in place. The sheriffs enforced laws and collected taxes. If the population thought the laws and taxes were bad, the sheriff disappeared and another had to be appointed. Since the Norwegian nobility had been largely ended in the Black Death or subsumed by the Danish nobility, there weren't even really any regional nobles to enforce these things such as in Denmark and Sweden. Certainly, Danish nobles inherited land in Norway, but they tended to sell or rent it as they had little desire to actually live there. Consequently, sheriffs, clergy, and judges wound up being the primary Danish influence for most Norwegians. It sounds more or less like freedom, but it's important to remember that these same communities were rife with alcoholism, blood feuds, and adultery. Even as late as the mid-19th century, regionalism was pervasive in Norway, and the notion of a pan-Norwegian identity was still lacking. A lot of this changed with the Eidsvoll constitution of 1814, which made Norway a "nation" even though under the Swedish crown.
Post-Napoleonic Norway became considerably different than Norway under Danish rule. The Swedes had agreed to most of the terms of the Eidsvoll constitution with their King as ruler rather than go to war against Norway. So, Norway and Sweden shared a crown for about 90 years, although Norway was largely internally ruled over this time - the King ruled mostly when it came to foreign policy.
This is the Norway that exported hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the United States. The State Church hadn't been behind Hauge, but it benefited from the Haugean revival. The Haugean church became its own sect in the United States, even though it was ultimately just a movement in Norwegian Lutheranism. Similar movements in Sweden gave rise to large Baptist or Baptist-type movements, which were separate from the State Church in Sweden.
So, as to the question of why Norwegians and Swedes didn't get along, hundreds of years of cross-border warfare will tend to do that. The last crisis was in 1905, when the Norwegians had enough of the Swedish Crown. As to the bizarre nature of Norwegian Lutheranism, it has a lot to do with applying Lutheran Pietism to a lapsed pseudo-Catho-Lutheric population.
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