Frederick V of Denmark religion or worldview Lutheranism
Upbringing and education
Christian VI and Queen Sophie Magdalene were deeply devoted to Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that combines its emphasis on biblical doctrine with an emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life. As a consequence, Frederick was given a strictly religious upbringing. At the age of 7, he received his own royal household with the German nobleman Georg Wilhelm von Söhlenthal as his hofmeister. Söhlenthal was an ardent supporter of the Moravian Brethren, and his home was the center of the pietistic circles in Copenhagen. He shared a deep religious piety with the king, and for a time he was Christian VI's adviser on ecclesiastical matters. However, Söhlenthal did not succeed in influencing the spiritual development of the Crown Prince, as he was an overly gentle and weak character, and in 1738 he was dismissed from his position as hofmeister.Frederick's education became rather deficient. In 1730 the king entrusted the significant and well-educated privy councillor Iver Rosenkrantz supervision of Crown Prince Frederik's upbringing, but this had no influence on the actual teaching. Rosenkrantz was a supporter of the traditional Lutheran orthodoxy, while Christian VI more and more became a proponent of Pietism and lost confidence in Rosenkrantz. The Crown Prince's education was therefore completely carried out in the German Pietist spirit that prevailed at court. Like his ancestors at the then primarily German-speaking court in Copenhagen, he only had a poor command of the Danish language, and knew German better than Danish all his life. None the less, his mother ironically referred to him as "Der Dänische Prinz" (literally The Danish Prince in German) because he occasionally spoke Danish. Apart from a certain interest in coin collecting, he only had modest cultural or intellectual interests.
faith belief system creed philosophy ideology