Finland

Situated in the northernmost part of Europe, Finland is a country of little more than 5 million inhabitants. Before its independence in 1917, Finland was from the 1320s onward a part of the Kingdom of Sweden and from 1809 to 1917 an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. Finland's religious history has been dominated by Christianity, with religious pluralism and multiculturalism emerging only at the end of the 20th century. The indigenous Finnish pagan religion was supplanted by Catholicism, spread by Swedish crusaders, from the 12th century onward. Catholicism, in turn, was replaced by Protestantism when the king of Sweden declared Lutheranism as the state religion in 1527. At the same time, an Orthodox Christian minority culture developed predominantly in the eastern parts of the country neighboring Russia.

Like the rest of the Nordic countries (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), Finland has a strong Lutheran church. Although Finland became officially religiously neutral with the implementation of the Freedom of Religion Act of 1923, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the Orthodox Church retained a special status. For example, the churches are financed by a “church tax” collected by the state from the members of the churches. Similarly, the Freedom of Religion Act's provisions concerning the legal status and registration of religious communities do not apply to either of these churches, whose legal standing is defined in other laws. These statutes remained unchanged in the new Freedom of Religion Act of 2003.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland currently claims a membership of 82% of the population, with roughly 2% belonging to the Orthodox Church and to other religious communities. The fastest growing group, constituting 16% of the population, has no religious affiliation. These membership figures, however, tell very little about the religiousness of Finns. Only a fraction of the members take part in weekly Mass, which implies that, for many people, membership is more a social custom than a question of devotion. In the context of different social rites of passage, such as baptism and marriage, the church is still seen as important, but belief in the central tenets of faith or traditional mores is increasingly contested or ignored among the membership. Balancing this are strong revivalist movements that, unlike in many other countries, have mostly remained within the Lutheran Church.

Contemporary Finnish religiosity has been described as “new popular religiosity”—that is, an individual faith practiced outside religious institutions. Recent years have also witnessed a pluralization of the religious field in Finland with the emergence of immigrant religions, especially Islam, the emergence of alternative spiritualities, and the growth of independent charismatic Christian groups.