Abstract
Social reconciliation has received much attention in Christian churches since the late 1980s. Both the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway initiated reconciliation processes with the Saami (also “Sami” or “Sámi”), the indigenous people of Northern Europe, at the beginning of the 1990s. As former state churches, they bear the colonial burden of having converted the Saami to Lutheranism. To make amends for their excesses in the missionary field, both Scandinavian churches have aimed at structural changes to include Saaminess in their church identities. In this article, I examine how the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway understand reconciliation in relation to the Saami in their own church documents using conceptual analysis. I argue that the Church of Sweden treats reconciliation primarily as a secular concept without binding it to the doctrine of reconciliation, making the Church’s agenda theologically weak, whereas the Church of Norway utilizes Christian resources in its comprehensive approach to reconciliation with the Saami. This article shows both the challenges and contributions of the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway to the hotly debated discussions on truth and reconciliation in the Nordic Saami context.
Highlights
Churches Confront Their Participation in the Colonial Oppression of the SaamiOn 25 March 2001, an intriguing act took place in the Undersåker1 district, in Jämtland County, Sweden
The theological crux of the argumentation for reconciliation goes as follows: (1) since all human beings are created in the image of God, every person is valuable and discrimination has no theological grounds, which leads to the affirmation that indigenous peoples have suffered from violations of discrimination; (2) through incarnation
The Church of Norway is clearly aware of the risk by treating reconciliation comprehensively as the basic approach to the Saami people in general (Church of Norway 2011, p. 36; Church of Norway 2019, p. 10): The Church of Norway’s concern for dialogue and reconciliation cannot be reduced to isolated events, but must be seen as a comprehensive approach in which dialogue and reconciliation are applied to all aspects of the Church of Norway’s consideration of issues related to the
Summary
On 25 March 2001, an intriguing act took place in the Undersåker district, in Jämtland County, Sweden. Research on the Church-Saami reconciliation processes so far has primarily focused on processual steps, examining which historical events and ideologies led to the stages, while theorizing on the different stages (Johnsen 2017; Lindmark and Sundström 2016; Nordbäck 2016) This is of utmost importance; this approach has been insufficient to answer the question of how the churches as institutional bodies conceptualize a process that is so relevant for Christian theology and ecclesiology—reconciliation. This article argues that the two neighboring Lutheran folk churches share many characteristics with each other regarding the Church-Saami reconciliation processes, they differ greatly in how they perceive reconciliation towards and with the Saami
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