An asterisk to Hansen’s law
You remember Hansen’s Law: “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.”
It was first promulgated by University of Illinois historian Marcus Lee Hansen in a lecture, “The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,” given at Augustana College in 1938. Hansen, himself the son of Norwegians who settled in Wisconsin, maintained that ethnic identity and culture were qualities that the children of immigrants tended to want to ignore and even cover up, but that the children of these children (the “grandson” in his law) sought to preserve that culture and identity.
By now many Pietisten readers are fourth-generation Swedish- or Norwegian- or (maybe even) Irish- Americans, the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of immigrants. So I think that Hansen’s Law needs at least an asterisk by way of an update. I offer that here, based upon my long observation of Swedish-American friends and their families. The update goes like this: what the son might want to forget and the grandson to remember, the great-grandson (more likely great- granddaughter) wants to celebrate — at least in certain respects. As of yet, the people at Augustana have not invited me to lecture on my update, so I’ve decided to deal with the issue here in Pietisten instead.
Many Pietists of my generation have grandchildren with distinctly Scandinavian names: boys are “Per-Olaf” or “Dag-Knut.” Girls, who once were called “Karen” (as in Care-in) are now named “Karen” (Car-in), and even “Karen” (Core-in). “Kerstin” (Kerstin) has become “Kerstin” (Sherstin). You don’t run into a “Randy Peterson” or “Susie Anderson” among the children of serious fourth-generation Scandinavian-Americans. And, as often as not, when the fourth generation makes the pilgrimage to visit the ancestral farm or village in Skåne or Hälsingland, little Karl-Lars and Maj-Britt are taken along. Sometimes these kids later attend Swedish-American colleges where, after a year of what one of my erstwhile colleagues at Augustana (who taught it) called “Kiddie Swedish,” they take a junior year, or at least a summer, in a college-sponsored program in Sweden for outlanders who want to know and understand modern Scandinavia.
It’s either on the trip to the ancestral home or more likely on the program in situ where the “celebrate” — at least in certain respects — comes in. The twist is that the Sweden to which the fourth or the fifth generation “return” is often a surprise. It’s maybe a little like what it must be for a pious Catholic Quebecois who goes “back” to France. Maybe she has grown up in one of the beautiful villages along the St. Lawrence, a town whose great church dominates its stretch of the river valley. Getting to France, the French-Canadian discovers that “in the meantime” the Revolution has taken place, and that, over the intervening centuries since the founding of French Canada, la patrie itself has turned secular with a vengeance. It can hardly be said to be a Roman Catholic country any longer.
In the case of Sweden, the land which one wants to celebrate is what the California sociologist Phil Zuckerman, in his book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2008), identifies as one of two most secular countries on the globe — possibly the least religious in all the history of the world, he says. (The other one is Denmark; France, of course, also makes the top ten.)
As ever, there is a back story here. Sweden’s move (or descent) to secularism seems to have been relatively rapid, taking place, at least in an outward sense, in just over a century. For once the Swedes were quicker than the French. The secularization of the European North was marked by some notable moments and episodes. By the end of World War I, a survey conducted by a Swedish newspaper revealed that on any given Sunday barely 10 percent of the residents of that Lutheran nation attended church. Anecdotes back that survey up.
In Sweden during a sabbatical, an Augustana historian wrote home to the college’s president in 1939 that the churches he attended were barely half-filled on Sundays and that Swedes, old and young, assured him they never prayed; they “were too intelligent for such superstition.” That historian, O. F. Ander, told that president, Conrad Bergendoff, that “it has hurt me so deeply that some nights I have been unable to sleep.” And after the war another scholar of Swedish-American life, George M. Stephenson of the University of Minnesota, wrote Bergendoff about the “present state of impotency of the Church of Sweden.”
What those two American immigration historians saw was the commonplace evidence of fundamental changes taking place in Scandinavian life, culture, and politics. Swedish church historians tell us that in the inter-war period the Social Democratic governments of Hjalmar Branting and Per Albin Hansson adopted a policy of studied indifference toward the efforts of the State Church to reassert the powerful position it had enjoyed in the 19th century. Not quite willing to go at the Church of Sweden head-on, the Social Democrats, in classic passive- aggressive Scandinavian style, simply refused to respond to those assertive efforts from the nation’s bishops and ecclesiastical assemblies. True, as World War II broke out, a national unity government was formed, adopting the slogan, “The Swedish way is the Christian way.” It was part of the relatively successful effort to keep the support of all elements of the country for neutrality. But as soon as the war ended, the shift to secularism proceeded apace.
Many instances of that continuing shift might be adduced. I mention two. In 1949 the Uppsala philosopher Ingemar Hedenius published Tro och vetande (Faith and Knowledge), a work in which he claimed that contemporary Swedish Christian theologians failed to meet the elementary standards for objective scholarly work. As these theologians presented it, the Christian faith contained assumptions and ideas which could not be rationally proved; it involved internal contradictions; it could not be convincingly communicated to any neutral person. Hedenius’s small book provoked a debate carried on in the newspapers. Both Christian and secular historians have concluded that the Uppsala philosopher got much the better of the Lund theologians whom he’d debated. A prominent Swedish intellectual historian writes, “Where the theologians were surly and confused, Hedenius was brilliant and jolly.”
If Tro och vetande were not enough, a decade and a half later the reception of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Vägmärken (Markings) made it even clearer that Sweden was indeed working its way toward the top of the world’s secularity scale. The UN secretary general’s mysterious death in a 1961 African plane crash left him a hero in his country. But when Markings, published posthumously, revealed him to have been a man of mystic Christian piety, the country’s intellectuals were surprised and dismayed. So were its politicians. Prime Minister Tage Erlander wrote in his daybook, “Hammarskjöld’s posthumously published book has frightened me!…Has [he] so formed his Jesus-identification that he has become a really dangerous person? Supermen are dangerous, not least he who lets his dreams of superman be crystalized into a God before whom men humbly bow their knees.”
Lest one suppose things in Sweden have recently shifted back toward religion, there is a piece in the March 1, 2015 Dagens Nyheter, the Stockholm daily, which quotes with ill-concealed satisfaction the news about the most recent World Values Study: “A clear result is that the more religious the population of a country, the higher is it in general corruption and the lower is the [common] perception that ‘people in general’ can be trusted.” With characteristic Swedish grace the article’s author, a Göteborg professor, forbears to mention his own country as clear evidence of the corollary: that in secular lands like his corruption is lower and trust among people higher.
So the land in which fourth- generation Swedish-Americans search for ancestral roots and children’s names is hardly at present a model of the Christian society. That creates certain problems for the Pietist who might on some level still be looking for an earthly homeland as well as a heavenly. One is left to wonder about the possible reactions that the confrontation between American Scando-nostalgia and contemporary Swedish reality might produce in Christians with family roots in Nordic Europe.
Of course, one response would be to write the “homeland” off. I recall a Vietnam-era editorial in the Moline (Ill.) Dispatch. The editor wondered how Sweden could so strongly oppose America’s justified involvement in the Southeast Asian war. His answer was simple: most of the sensible people had left Sweden. Many of them were now living around Moline.
Another possibility is get a book of Carl Larsson paintings of the idyllic countryside from which one’s ancestors emigrated, fix your summer cottage up with Swedish trundle beds, and maybe fly a blue and yellow flag off the deck (to remind passing Norwegian-Americans water-skiers who you are). So long as one doesn’t let one’s ethnic identity go much beyond that, no serious issues of a Christ-culture nature need emerge. Past that, however, questions do arise.
Pietists generally tended not to share the values and assumptions of wider contemporary society, though the impulse to works of charity and mercy was also pronounced in their movement. (That was the “mission” in Mission Friends.) Historians of the Augustana Synod such as G. Everett Arden or George Stephenson remind us that the Swedish-American Lutheran Church was also strongly Pietistic, especially in its early decades.
To use a category elaborated by the German theologian and historian Ernst Troeltsch, these Pietists tended toward the “sect” type, a gathered group of reborn true believers who saw themselves as separate from the world and its ways and values. So both Covenanters and many Augustana Lutherans shared a sense of alienation from the culture they emigrated from, often for religious reasons. When they settled in America, they were not pining for life in the society they left, any more than they felt completely at home in the New Land either. They were “pilgrims and strangers” here on earth.
But many contemporary Americans with both religious commitments and roots in Sweden are not ready to dismiss the land their great-grandparents or grandparents sailed from, even if it has turned away from its religious history. So perhaps one must examine the connection which Phil Zuckerman and others see between Sweden’s low crime rates, its social stability and welfare, and its egalitarianism on the one hand and its pronounced secularism and a-religiosity on the other. You might, though many Swedish intellectuals would strongly disagree, even argue that the compassionate and level character of modern Sweden is a residue of its Christian past, the works of the Gospel without the faith that generated them.
Or you could do some further sorting out: what are those qualities in contemporary Swedish life that are, whatever their motivating origins, worth examining and even emulating? That kind of sifting might produce tricky questions. One difference between Swedish Pietists and their American cousins is often their politics. The Swedes tend to embrace socialism; the Americans seem often to abhor it when it threatens to rear its leftist head here. But are capitalism and Christianity, as the American evangelical right claims, in fact corollaries? Or, as both contemporary Scandinavia and, of all people, the current pope remind us, are there troublesome differences between Christianity and capitalism when it comes to matters of social ethics?
Well anyway, there is no more Swedish Covenant. As of 2011 it has joined with Methodists and Baptists to form a group of about 70,000 free churchmen and women, now calling itself Ecumeniakyrkan. On this side of the ocean, leaders of the Evangelical Covenant are careful not to celebrate their denomination’s roots in Sweden in any way that leaves non-Scandinavians feeling they do not fully belong in “the ECC.” One hears that these leaders speak of historical traditions, not a single tradition. As for Lutherans, the Church of Sweden is now disestablished and the Augustana Synod long gone, merged in stages into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, where even nostalgia for roots in Sweden seems to be fading.
So the once Swedish-American churches probably won’t address the matter of figuring out secular modern Sweden and relating it to our own self-understanding as heirs to the grand tradition of Swedish Pietism. The job is left to thoughtful individuals. Such persons may or may not wish to validate my asterisk to Hansen’s Law by giving their children Scandinavian sounding names. But the task of anyone who finds much to admire in modern Sweden, but who also treasures the memories of that country’s historic religious culture, is to seek an understanding that might manage to embrace both. As I said, it’s a tricky business; it could steer you toward religious-political-economic combinations regarded as heretical in some quarters. Other than that, you can decide for yourself whether to call your granddaughter “Karen” (as in Care-in) or “Karen” (as in Core-in).