An Analysis of the Impending Disestablishment of the Church of Sweden

An Analysis of the Impending Disestablishment of the Church of Sweden* I. INTRODUCTION There is a contemporary trend in some European countries to strengthen the relations between one or more preferred denominations and the state, at the expense of other religions. Austria, for example, recently "passed a new law creating a second class of religions that are not entitled to the full benefits and protections afforded traditional religions."1 The state of Austria recognizes only twelve religions.2 Other denominations are not considered religions but are only identified as "Confessional Communities."3 Before being recognized as a religion, the new law requires that an association have at least 16,000 members, that its "teachings are not considered dangerous by the government," and that it spend ten or twenty years as a Confessional Community, depending on whether the association already has applied for recognition as a religion.4 The Church of Sweden, originally a Catholic province, became a state church through the Reformation.5 It was decided in 1593 that the new state church would be of an evangelical-Lutheran nature and that strong ties between it and the state should be developed.6 Subsequently, the Church of Sweden Act of 1686 provided that the secular state, especially the King, should be responsible for and should regulate the Church, which was to be the official religion to the exclusion of all other denominations. However, in contrast to its fellow European member states, the Swedish government presented, and the parliament passed, a proposals in 1995 which created a vehicle for the disestablishment of the Church of Sweden by January 1, 2000.9 This proposal did not attempt to resolve all of the problems that naturally will occur when changing a nation's fundamental structure, system and laws. Instead, when the governing body of Sweden decided as a matter of principle that the Church of Sweden should be disestablished by the year two thousand, it only suggested solutions to some questions. It left other concerns to be investigated, debated and resolved before completing the separation between the Church and the state. Many nations enact legislation to regulate how religious associations may obtain legal entity status. Such regulation may be enacted for honorable or dubious purposes, however. To illustrate, Russia and the individual states of the United States have enacted laws governing the legal status of religious associations.lo These laws appear similar in that they "characteristically describe the basic qualifications for setting up legal entities, the formalities that must be included in charter documents, description of the institutional mechanisms for processing such documents, grounds for dissolution, and so forth."ll Nonetheless, at least one author has made a distinction between the underlying purposes of these laws: [I]n the United States, the primary impetus of such laws is to facilitate religious activity by making flexible entity structures easily available to religious groups so that a religious association can use these vehicles to carry out its religious mission. In Russia (and much of Eastern Europe, for that matter), there is a much greater tendency to assume that the purpose of such laws is to effectuate control of religious organizations and to prevent troublesome groups from obtaining legal entity status.12 The question is whether the motivation for the Swedish reform is honorable or dubious. At the time this article is written, less than one year remains until the ties between the Church of Sweden and the state will be dissolved. The state-church relationship has developed over hundreds of years, and cannot easily be discarded. As will be seen, even though the governing body has decided to put the Church of Sweden on equal footing with other denominations-a very commendable objective-it is not easy to create one law that equally governs all faiths, particularly when there are strong historical ties between the state and one or more denominations. …