Fréttatilkynning/Press Release

Believing without Belonging or Belonging without Believing?

asks Canon Professor Grace Davie

In a paper presented at the first session of the Porvoo Theological conference, presently meeting at the Skàlholt conference centre in Iceland, Canon Professor Grace Davie of the University of Exeter in England, provides a context for subsequent papers at the conference by outlining the patterns of religion in Northern Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In her paper, entitled from " From Obligation to Consumption ", Professor Davie suggests that we are seeing a situation where both believing without belonging and belonging without believing are evident in various geographical areas of Northern Europe at this time, and suggests that we are also seeing a transition from obligation to consumption.

In the paper, Professor Davie, in referring to the perception of a situation of believing without belonging, says:

There exists, first of all, a set of indicators which measure firm commitments to (a) institutional life and  (b) credal statements of religion (in this case Christianity).  All of these display a marked reduction in Europe as a whole, but most of all in the Protestant states of Northern Europe.It is clear that a manifest reduction in the 'hard'indicatorsof religious life has not, in trh short term at least had a similar effect on rather less rigorous dimensionsof religiousness. It is precisely this state of affairs, moreover, which is captured by the phrase 'believing without belonging'. However, if it is true that the churches as institutions have declined markedly in the post-war period, the same is true of almost all parallel activities in the secular life of Northern European (and indeed other) societies - believing without belonging is a pervasive dimension of modern European societies, it is not confined to the religious lives of European people.

However, Professor Davie has also identified a situation of 'belonging without believing' that she labels 'vicarious religion':

By vicarious, I mean the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but quite clearly approve of what the minority is doing..  Nordic populations, for the most part, remain members of their Lutheran churches; they use them extensively for the occasional offices and regard membership as part of national just as much as religious identity.  More pertinently for the churches themselves, Nordic people continue to pay appreciable amounts of tax to their churches .This does not, of course, mean that Nordic populations attend their churches with any frequency, nor do they necessarily believe in the tenets of Lutheranism.  Indeed, they appear on every comparative scale to be among the least believing and least practising populations in the world. 

An iceberg may provide a helpful analogy.  It is easy enough both to measure and to take note of the part that emerges from the water.  We have endless studies which have done precisely that and concluded that the visible tip of the religious iceberg in Northern Europe is getting smaller and less significant almost by the day.  But this is to ignore the vast mass under the water which is invisible for most of the time, but without which the visible part would not be there at all. 

Prof. Davie suggests that the mass of the iceberg is seen at times when, a "normal ways of living are suspended and something far more instinctive comes to the fore" and cites the example of the sinking of the Baltic ferry Estonia in 1994 with significant loss of life:

.almost without hesitation, the Swedish people went to their churches not only to gather, to light candles and mourn privately, but also in the correct anticipation that someone (the Archbishop in fact) would articulate on their behalf (vicariously) both the sentiments of the people and the meaning of the tragedy for human living.

Prof. Davie cites the response to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 as another example of this. However, while she remains "convinced that vicariousness still resonates in Europe in the early years of the twenty-first century and will do for the foreseeable future" she further suggests that two other things are also happening in the religious life of northern Europe:

On the one hand, the historic churches - despite their continuing presence - are losing their capacity to discipline the religious thinking of large sections of the population (especially amongst the young).  At the same time, the range of choice widens all the time as new forms of come into Europe from outside religion. What until moderately recently was simply imposed (with all the negative connotations of this word), or inherited (a rather more positive spin) becomes instead a matter of personal choice.

In closing, Prof. Davie sums up her paper by saying:

Vicariousness may indeed cease to be the norm; it is much too soon, however, to predict the demise of either the European churches themselves, or of the latent support that is given to them by significant sections in the population.  And well before that happens, innovative forms of religion may begin to emerge, both inside and outside the traditional churches.  Such groups may be numerically small but they will, I think, be capable of sustaining forms of religion that become one crucial variable among others in the competing claims of Europeans in their public as well as their private lives.

END Friday, September 24, 2004