Forgotten Roots of the Nordic Welfare State in Protestant Cultures

Thomas Mohnike, Søren Blak Hjortshøj (eds) – Brepols 2025; 264 p., Aesthetics of Protestantism in Northern Europe, vol. 2
ISBN 978-2-503-61263-8 (HB) / eISBN 978-2-503-61264-5
The present volume explores the often forgotten roots in Protestant milieus in several case studies from the seventeenth century until today, focusing on the function of aesthetics in the creation of the welfare state model.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forgotten Roots of the Nordic Welfare State in Protestant Cultures
Søren Blak Hjortshøj, Thomas Mohnike
The Nordic Welfare State, the Pastoral Enlightenment, and Franz Julius Lütkens (1650–1712), Court Preacher to King Frederick IV of Denmark and Norway
Douglas H. Shantz
Dimensions of Trust. Lutheran Pastors on the Eve of the Scandinavian Welfare State — The Case of Norway, 1537–1814
Arne Bugge Amundsen
The Role of Hymns in the Norwegian Church, Culture, and Society
Vigdis Berland Øystese
Bucolics, Public Welfare and Agricultural Progress. Models of an Ideal Economic Past in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
Bernd Roling
‘I to kan utrette store ting sammen’. The Narrative Reintegration of Protestant Thought into Norwegian Labor Movement Discourse in Two Novels by Johan Falkberget
Karl Clemens Kübler
The Price of Giving: Charity, Welfare, and Lutheran Alienation in Swedish Social and Devotional Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Some Examples
Beata Agrell
The Protestant Pastor and the Anti‑Authoritarian Rural Protest Culture in Henrik Pontoppidan’s Det Forjættede Land. Hopes and Fears of the Modern Democratic Civil Sphere
Søren Blak Hjortshøj
Work and Salvation. Selma Lagerlöf and Protestant Ethics of Welfare
Thomas Mohnike
Son of a Preacher Man. Complexity and Ambivalence in Henrik Pontoppidan’s Views on the Danish Church and it’s Pastors
Nils Gunder Hansen
A Communion of Swedes? On Protestantism in Vilhelm Moberg’s Emigrants series (1949–1959)
Frederike Felcht
From Common Prayer to Morgonsamling. Protestant Mystique in Welfare State Schooling?
Piero Simeone Colla
Secrecy, Conspiracy, Enchantment: The Conditions of (Dis)belief in 1980s Sweden
Pehr Englén
The Fantastic in the Nordic Welfare State. Secularization and rationalization in Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Maria Hansson
A Nordic Paradox. Religion in Politics
Frédérique Harry