It can be argued that the particular Danish welfare state is an expression of Christianity, having permeated every corner of society, daily life and social life. We are Christians without saying we are Christians—and almost without going to church.
–Editorial in the Danish newspaper BT, April 14, 2006During the past ten to fifteen years, a small group of researchers systematically investigated and discussed the relationship between religion and the development of the welfare state. Among other things, they studied religious actors outside the government framework (not least Christian philanthropy)Footnote 1—or described the role of religion in political ideologies and as “civil religion.”Footnote 2 Other scholars focused on Christian-Democratic parties and their role in conflicts, ruptures, and compromises.Footnote 3 Kees Van Kersbergen and Philip Manow conclude that “differences between Catholicism and Protestantism as well as differences between various forms of Protestantism are important if one is to understand why different countries chose different paths of socio-political development.”Footnote 4
A similar discussion about the importance of Lutheranism for the development of the Nordic welfare model can be found among Nordic researchers, who adopted a historical-institutional perspectiveFootnote 5 or discussed the importance of Lutheranism for Nordic political culture.Footnote 6 In a Danish context, interest has been oriented toward actors connected with the church, including religiously inspired economists,Footnote 7 church organizations in a broad sense,Footnote 8 or leading theological thinkers and social debaters.Footnote 9 Attempts have been made to outline a particular Nordic, Lutheran welfare model that typically emphasizes the classic Weberian argument about Lutheranism's particular work ethic,Footnote 10 points to the importance of Pietism in the building of the Danish state model,Footnote 11 or promotes a specific form of secularized Nordic Lutheranism.Footnote 12
To a great extent, these explanations are at a high level of abstraction, and tend to focus on a historical period prior to the emergence of the modern Danish welfare state. They are of so general a nature that it is difficult to determine how and on what basis the argument could be falsified.Footnote 13 Sociologist Sigrun Kahl attempted to develop this discussion further, so that it forms a stronger link between the modern version of the welfare state and the content of religion—the “social doctrines” of the various Christian creeds.Footnote 14 Kahl's point is that religion should be seen as a key concept in understanding the diverse forms of welfare states:
Religion has influenced welfare state development by structuring the way actors construct what is a problem and which solutions are considered good and just, because, once “elected,” these values are part of countries' institutional traditions. The repertoire of what was considered possible, just and efficient in a given historical situation comes from the past, and elective affinities guide the political decision about reform. . . . In short, a (but not the) reason that construals of “good” solutions to social policy problems differ is that institutional traditions are embedded in different cultures.Footnote 15
There are problems, however, in transferring Kahl's argument to Nordic relations and interpreting the welfare state as a child of evangelical-Lutheran thinking. First, there is a question of whether variations in “faith-conditioned social doctrines” exist between Catholicism, Lutheranism, and reformed Protestantism. In Catholicism, there is an official text corpus that defines social principles and moral teachings, derived mainly from papal encyclicals.Footnote 16 It is debatable whether one can speak of a similarly formed, evangelical-Lutheran social doctrine. The Danish church does not have any uniform character or any synod-like institution able to formulate or approve “statements of principle.” A few researchersFootnote 17 have tried to derive a social doctrine from Luther's writings, but since these are inscribed in a sixteenth-century context, it is difficult to relate them in meaningful way to contemporary discussions of the welfare state (though they can certainly be included in any general understanding of the roots of the welfare state). Second, we lack a precise definition of “welfare state.” Researchers in this tradition very seldom deal with developments after the 1890s, when what could be called modern social legislation took shape.Footnote 18 In other words, the emphasis in their “explanation” is on historical developments at a time when the term “welfare state” was unknown, much less a public social security system of the kind developed in the post-1945 era. A search for the “roots of the welfare state” must be carried out without resorting to an unjustifiable retrospective projection.
This article offers an alternative approach to the question of the relationship between religion and the welfare state. It focuses on that period when religious thinking (by individuals and institutions) and welfare politics actually encountered each other. In the 1950s and 1960s, Denmark developed into a modern welfare state in the classic social political meaning of the word.Footnote 19 How did the Danish church, or Danish “church people,” react when the welfare state was placed on the societal agenda during the early 1950s? Isolated investigations of religious reactions to welfarism in neighboring countries of Great Britain, Norway, and Sweden reveal a degree of skepticism about the welfare state on the part of church people.Footnote 20 Here we will focus on reactions in Denmark. If the welfare state was indeed a child of Lutheran Christian preaching, one would expect “church people” to have had a more positive reaction than the population in general. Consequently, a closer study of Danish church people's attitudes toward the welfare state is an important new contribution to the academic discussion on church, Lutheranism, and the welfare state.
In the following, we examine Danish church people's reactions to the emerging welfare state during the first post-World War II decades—a period often referred to as the “breakthrough years” or as the “golden age” of the welfare state.Footnote 21 As mentioned, the Danish church does not have any formal or unequivocal attitude toward social development. Hence, we have decided to use the concept “church people” as an overall category for those who speak “on behalf of the church,” and to include in our investigation the four major positions articulated in the Danish church debate of the time: (1) the Indre Mission (The Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark), which since the end of the nineteenth century had been involved in various forms of social work; (2) the Karl Barth-inspired theoretical and more socially critical theological position associated with the journal Tidehverv; (3) Grundtvigianism, which had a strong position in the Danish state church; and (4) church philanthropy/social work. Finally, we also examine certain leading individuals.
Since we chose to focus on the most influential groups within the Danish Lutheran church, we rule out other Christian churches such as the Catholic Church.Footnote 22 It also means we address the groups as ideological or theological positions rather than as individuals representing institutional (within or outside the church) or political positions. In some rare cases, links to political parties or political ambitions probably influenced positions vis-a-vis the welfare state. Professor Hal Koch is the most obvious example, and some church people have probably been active in political parties. In the end, however, we find no clear pattern. We will return to this discussion in the conclusion of the paper.
By way of introduction, we will start our tour by taking a look at the formal position of the church in general, and the historical development of the church-state relationship throughout the twentieth century with special emphasis on social work and social policies.
I. Church, State, and Welfare in DenmarkFootnote 23
In Denmark, the Reformation was carried out with great violence, having the character of a coup d'état on the part of the king. In August 1537, King Christian III was crowned the legitimate Christian king, but without use of the traditional rites of the Catholic Church. A month later, the king signed the Church Ordinance. The Ordinance was clearly Lutheran. It obliged the priests to own Luther's sermons and catechism and the Melanchthon's Loci Communes and the Augsburg Confession. During the 1600s, the church entered into a close cooperation with the monarchy. The clerical elite legitimated the kings' political position, while the priests carried out essential administrative tasks such as the registration of births, administration of laws and decrees, census-taking in connection with tax collection, and so forth.Footnote 24
Until 1660, Denmark had an electoral monarch. Nobles and the clergy elite elected the king. This was changed when, after a coup d'état, Frederik III was hailed as the heir to the throne. With the Absolutist constitution from 1665—the King's Law—the king became de facto head of the church on earth, with unlimited power over the clergy. The church was thereby robbed of its independence and its own jurisdiction and was now viewed as a part of the state. Christianity, in its Lutheran incarnation, was the state-bearing and state-legitimating religion. The argumentation was theocratic. The king ruled as sovereign, together with God alone. In return, the priests received enhanced social position by being made into royal officials.Footnote 25
Within the absolutist state church, the next 150 years revealed changing theological-religious movements (pietism and later on, Enlightenment ideas), which challenged the dominant power relations and the church's state-legitimating function. In greatly simplified terms, one can say that the first part of the nineteenth century saw a conflict between “the old system” that fought against congregations, priests, and evangelical movements that rose up against the state-church order, and a new era based more on popular movements and a dawning churchly view of freedom.
The democratic June constitution of 1849 introduced religious freedom. The cohesion of the state-church order and civil rights, which had marked absolutism, ceased. The Folkekirke, the People's Church, replaced the state church. The 1849 constitution declares that “The Evangelical Lutheran church is the Danish People's Church and is supported as such by the state.”Footnote 26 The formulation reflected the idea there is no equality of religion because the state supported the People's Church. The vast majority of the population were de facto members as the constitution, in a later paragraph, adds that “the constitution of the People's Church is ordered by law.” It is the so-called “promissory paragraph,” which means that the church must have its own constitutional organ. However, agreement has never been reached about this; hence, the formulation reappears in the revised constitution from 1953.
The Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs administers the People's Church, but the ministry deals only with the clergy's official duties (for example, the registration of births) and with economic matters relating to the church. It does not interfere in matters pertaining to religious interpretation or preaching. Within this area, bishops and church officials can take up controversial cases with an individual vicar, although this is extremely rare and normally causes quite a sensation. The Danish church has no synod-like institutions (as in other countries) which could issue guidelines or represent the official standpoint of the church vis-a-vis issues of principle and political matters. The Danish People's Church is thus a kind of umbrella organization, under which one can find several very different interpretations of the nature and meaning of Christianity. In this article, we will focus on four significant groups within the Danish People's Church: Inner Mission, Grundtvigianism, Kirkeligt Centrum (“Church Center”), and Tidehverv (“Epoch”). We also discuss the importance of Christian philanthropy and more independent theological thinkers.
“The Association of Inner Mission” (Inner Mission) was established in the early 1850s with the dual goal of maintaining the church and of “awakening life into those who are sleeping in sin.” After a somewhat chaotic beginning, the young priest Vilhelm Bech took charge of the movement, and in 1861 re-named it the “Churchly Association for Inner Mission in Denmark.”Footnote 27 Inner Mission was strictly organized with a self-supplementing national board. Great emphasis was placed on the distinction between the unbelievers and the faithful. The movement was marked by factionalism between the national mission and, especially, the Inner Mission in Copenhagen, which stood for a more socially engaged and open line, with significant emphasis on Christian philanthropy and social work. Particularly, Harald Stein emphasized the special conditions that prevailed in the capital city. The Church could not focus on the spreading of God's word alone. It also had to carry out “the work of love,” so that it did not lose contact with the most disadvantaged segment of the population. Beck attacked Stein, seeing priests' evangelizing and religious duties that engaged in social issues as dangerous. Their main work should be the message of conversion and salvation for the repentant sinner.
Along with Inner Mission, Grundtvigianism also played a role as a predominant stream of thought in Danish religious life. Grundtvigianism is a social, cultural and ideological doctrine inspired by the theologian and poet N. F. S. Grundtvig, with the emphasis on emotion and sincerity that marked the first half of the 1800s.Footnote 28Grundtvigianism has taken on many forms and has had great influence on the understanding of politics, society, popular spirit (folkelighed), and religious belief. Its key features have been the separation between religious belief and political conviction, emphasis on church freedom and the “living word,” that is, the oral dissemination, and the specific, concrete community. It is not until around 1860 that one can speak of Grundtvigianism as a movement whose “bright Christianity” was seen in contrast to the “dark Christianity” organized within Inner Mission. This tendency garnered support from many segments of the population, but its main adherents were found among the relatively well-to-do farmer class. The cultural and ideological significance of Grundtvigianism in the 1800s was related to its association with this farmer group and its growing influence at many social levels, especially in the folk high school (that is, adult education) and agricultural cooperative movements. The difference between Inner Mission and Grundtvigianism was also partly political, because conservative tendencies came to dominate Inner Mission, while Grundtvigianism became linked to the liberal agrarian party, Venstre. Within both movements, however, there were hawks and more pragmatically minded members, where for example, the “Left Grundtvigianism” tendency placed much emphasis on political and cultural questions (especially freedom of thought) and sought to exempt the priests from surveillance by the bishops, opening the possibility for congregations to select their own priests and psalm books, for civil marriage, and so forth. In order to combat these fragmentary tendencies, the rank and file Grundtvigians created the Church Society of 1898 (Kirkeligt Samfund af 1898). The main goal of the Church Society was to protect church unity in order to counter the divisive forces. At the religious level, Grundtvigianism has been decisive for the notion of the Danish People's Church as an inclusive church, which rests on the individual's faith and recognizes both the priests' freedom to interpret the faith and the churchgoer's freedom to choose the congregation and priest that suits their own faith. Politically, Grundtvigianism played a crucial role in the modern Danish understanding of popular rule and its administration through pragmatically interpreted ideals of freedom and free thinking.
Nevertheless, there were also those who desired a more conciliatory tone between the parties, so that emphasis could be placed upon church unity and Christian faith. This group at times referred to itself as “the Third Stance” (den tredje retning). In 1904, this centrist group established Church Center (Kirkeligt Centrum), which never obtained the same popularity as the two larger tendencies. Among priests and theologians, the effort at brokering became a forum for several larger church debates and confrontations during the early years of the twentieth century. These debates focused on the role of church councils, church constitutions, priests' doctrinal freedom, and the authority of the bishops.
Tidehverv (“time-recruiting,” “Epoch”) arose in 1926 as an intellectual youth rebellion within the Christian student organization.Footnote 29Tidehverv became the name of the journal published by a group of younger theologians with the prison chaplain Niels Ivar Heje at the forefront. A common theological foundation, from the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, marked Tidehverv. It also promoted the “demythologization” of the idea of an absolute difference between God and Man that became the core of Tidehverv thinking, which also found clear inspiration from Søren Kirkegaard. Existential theology became the counterweight to the established Christianity, which emphasized the individual human being's moral and Christian conduct of life. Tidehverv was a rebellion against the church establishment, Grundtvigianism, and Inner Mission, all of which were regarded as trying to erase the distinction between God and Man. These latter tendencies sought to allow Man to work for his own salvation, while Tidehverv saw the individual as a sinner who could only hope for God's mercy and could do nothing to ensure their own salvation. Tidehverv's views gradually won popularity, and in the 1950s they were a prominent voice within the Danish church. The rebellion was therefore also a confrontation with cultural life and humanism, which Tidehverv theologians viewed as having become an ersatz religion, an effort to create heaven on earth. This led to a breach between Tidehverv and the prominent theologian and philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup, who believed that Christian charity (næstekærlighed) had its roots in Man, and that Christianity and humanism was ultimately the same thing. The dispute about the relation of Christianity to humanism subsequently came to play a great role.Footnote 30
Alongside these theological groupings there was also another and only partly related distinction referring more to different understandings of church liturgy, such that the “high church,” for whom the church was an institution and the correct liturgy was crucial, can be said to lie to the right, while the “low church” leaned more to the political center. Some Grundtvigian priests, because of the emphasis placed on the congregation, baptism, and Holy Communion can be called “high church,” while Inner Mission and Tidehverv generally have “low church” status.
A distinct aspect of the church-state relationship concerned the social problems of the Danish society. The clergy and other church people have been an active and at times even dominant force in the Danish socio-political debate, beginning with the poor laws of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesFootnote 31 through the first wave of socio-political reforms in the 1890s.Footnote 32 From the outset, there was internal disagreement whether church related social work (that is philanthropy, charity, and the like) was to be an alternative to state-welfare or to be cooperating and supplementing the public welfare initiatives. Grundtvig, who also was a member of parliament, was not alone with his view that public social assistance broke with “the natural relation” where receiving and contributing were based on voluntariness, gratitude, and willingness.Footnote 33 Furthermore, Christian philanthropy and state social policy had quite different justifications or were based on different conventions. The Christian philanthropists had from the outset a religious, missionary aim while state social policy often had as its point of departure a more rational and partially economic justification.Footnote 34
From the late nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, Christian philanthropy had a distinct autonomy and status as a system parallel to the emerging public social security system. In that period, Christian philanthropy had a strong missionary dimension. Gradually, however, as public welfare policy became institutionalized, philanthropy had less elbow room, and the conception that philanthropic measures alone could manage all social issues grew weaker. This created a delicate balance for the Christian philanthropist. On the one hand, they had to maintain a good relation to the public welfare system, but, on the other hand, they had to maintain their Christian identity and autonomy. In a report from 1904, the clergyman and child welfare philanthropist Alfred Kaae noted precisely this delicate balance:
To get to the heart of the matter, one has to have a close relation to the municipal authorities, which directly and indirectly have so many unhappily situated children to take care of [. . . .] and serve them by, for a suitable remuneration, placing and supervising the children and supporting their upbringing. Despite this, a foster association must not become a municipal association, but must assert itself as a free charitable association that also accepts other children than those who are under public assistance.Footnote 35
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a compromise was established between Christian philanthropy and state welfare—cooperation between equal partners to ensure efficiency and coordination and to maintain the work and insight that existed in the more professional section of Christian philanthropy. This change developed because the philanthropic sector to a growing degree came to rely on financial support from state and municipalities. This altered the balance of power between the two parties, as financial support and regulation normally went hand in hand. Even though the Social Reform Act of 1933 was based on the idea of social rights (as opposed to alms based on local discretion) and strengthened the statist character of Danish social legislation it also explicitly stated that philanthropic and other voluntary initiatives were supposed to play an important role in the future. This was most visibly the case within the field of family policy and child welfare. However, in the post-1933 phase the state tightened its grip on Christian philanthropy, which to a greater extent became a welfare producer on the premises of the state. The main ideologue of Danish Christian philanthropy, Alfred Th. Jørgensen, realized this when, in 1939, he stated that
the stronger factor in the cooperation, the state, has at times, in gentle or at times less gentle ways, taken over management and command. It often merely starts with the state wishing to introduce a certain amount of supervision of the private institutions, but gradually evolves into the state issuing directives, and ends with the state either purely administratively or via legislative powers taking over management of the voluntary work.Footnote 36
Jørgensen and like-minded church men maintained the difference between the right based public welfare system and the more normative Christian social work anchored in Christian love of one's fellow-man; however ideas about the Christian alternative came under pressure.Footnote 37 The fast growth of the welfare state especially after 1945 and what we might call the “ideology” of public welfare became a fundamental challenge for the church people: should they embrace, accept, or reject the modern welfare state?
II. The Danish Welfare Debate after 1945
When we move forward to the post-war period, the welfare views of church people cannot be viewed independently of the general welfare state discussion that took place in Denmark from the early 1950s onward, when the concept “welfare state” gained a foothold. This discussion culminated between 1954 and 1957, at the same time as the political clashes over the introduction of the universal old age pension. With this connection, two observations are worth mentioning. First, the term “welfare state” had a late entrance into Danish public rhetoric, appearing long after it did in the United States and Great Britain, where the discussion mushroomed in the years 1949–1951. Parts of the Danish discussion, therefore, may be directly or indirectly inspired by the Anglo-Saxon discussion, which also included “church people.” Second, critical voices initially dominated the debate in Denmark (like that in the United States).Footnote 38 These criticisms expressed three broad themes. One was liberal, economically conditioned, and characterized by a fear that the welfare state would lead to uncontrolled growth of the public sector and increased taxation with negative side-effects. Certain church people also mentioned this theme, indicating that the boundary between religious and more political arguments could be blurred. The second critique was of a moral character: the welfare state was seen as a threat to the individual and civil society. This theme included a general fear of modernization in which Christianity was derided as mere humanism. Here the contribution made by church people was, of course, considerable. The third critique of the welfare state was Marxist: the welfare state was viewed as an integral part of the capitalist system and, hence, an instrument of the ruling class.
Naturally, there were also those who spoke in favor of the welfare state—especially those connected with the Social Democratic Party and Social Liberals (Det radikale Venstre), who had a history of close cooperation with the Social Democrats. The two parties found it quite difficult, however, to translate the content of the concept into a positive program and vision. The overall picture in the 1950s and early 1960s, therefore, is surprisingly critical. Supporters of the welfare state were very much on the defensive. In retrospect, this seems rather strange—not least in light of the subsequent political consensus that saw the welfare state as a positive name for a new era: “make good times better” was the slogan on a Social Democratic election poster in 1960. Among the “church people,” there were many critics who feared that the changes would weaken the role of the church and its status in society. This was certainly also the case in Denmark.
III. Bishop Eyvind Berggrav and the Norwegian Welfare State
The church discussion of the welfare state was far from being an exclusively Danish exercise. Similar discussions about the relationship between church and state had already started in the interwar years among German theologians,Footnote 39 and from the late 1920s through the following decades, there was a lively debate, particularly among British church people.Footnote 40 For instance, Bishop William Temple published several best-selling books on the role of the state in modern society, and it is no coincidence that welfare research has credited Bishop Temple with coining or popularizing the concept “the welfare state.”Footnote 41 In Britain, this discussion also continued after 1945, as exemplified by the 1948 Lambeth Conference, which brought together 349 Anglican bishops to the Archbishop of Canterbury's residence at Lambeth Palace.Footnote 42 Triggered by the emerging Cold War, a major theme at the Lambeth meeting was the relationship between the individual, the state, and the church. One of the resolutions emerging from the meeting addressed the relationship between the church and the development of a welfare state:
We believe that the state is under moral law of God, and is intended by him to be an instrument for human welfare. We therefore welcome the growing concern and care of the modern state for its citizens, and call upon Church members to accept their own political responsibility and to co-operate with the state and its officers in their work.Footnote 43
Even though the Danish church people were not present at the Lambeth Conference, and even though the Danish church did not issue Encyclical Letters and resolutions, it seems that the British debate had some influence on the Danish one.
It was, though, via Norway that the discussion came into Denmark.Footnote 44 As early as 1948, the Christian newspaper Vårt Land (Our Country) had an editorial entitled “The Welfare State” which argued rights and justice could never be a completely satisfactory replacement for compassion.Footnote 45 This theme was raised several times in the paper's editorials, all of which expressed the view that social need was fundamentally spiritual and moral and, therefore, could not be combated exclusively by material means. In 1951, the prominent Norwegian theologian Olav Valen-Sendstad brought the welfare state under debate.Footnote 46 He praised the welfare state as a “social security state” that was based on a materialistic ideal of security. But this state could not stand on its own, he said. It needed an anchoring and a depth that only Christianity could provide. It was not the expansion of the welfare state that worried him, but the values on which it was founded. Neither liberty, equality, nor fraternity could have a normative effect on society unless they were anchored in Christianity. In themselves, they could not justify or legitimate a common morality. Precisely for this reason, the welfare state was in danger of degenerating into a totalitarian system that, via coercion, would supplant religiously based morality.
The welfare state is an expression of the titanic attempt to create a heavenly kingdom on earth by uniting and realising the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The welfare state thus represents a climax of modern political thought, carrying all the trademarks of the West European secularisation that wants to retain principal Christian moral ideals whilst freeing itself from and doing away with every Christian religious outlook.
Even though Valen-Sendstad's position, as a Christian, was positively disposed toward social security and the welfare state as concepts, he worried that the state was deifying itself. If the welfare state project was not to be derailed, it had to recognize the true position of the church in society as the moral and spiritual educator of the people. If the welfare state did not recognize the church's God-given right and duty to manage issues of spiritual and moral education that affect the soul of the people, or recognize members of the church as rightful practitioners of a spiritual authority that the state is not to interfere with, then the church would have to adopt a skeptical attitude to the welfare state project. As with the discussion in Great Britain, the stage was now set for an open cultural struggle between church and state.
We find a similar line of argument used by the renowned Norwegian bishop Eivind Berggrav. In his 1945 book Staten og mennesket (The State and the Individual), Berggrav advanced a critique of Western intellectual life and cultural history. One such criticism he called “the line of sovereignty.” The state, he said, was attempting to be a law unto itself, since it tells all “unauthorised persons” to stay within their “own areas.” The state refuses to allow that which is sacred to apply to its own area, even though it applies to other areas. The other critique he called “the line of secularization.” Here Berggrav bemoans the fact that the sacred is constantly toned down, not only as binding on the state but also as a cultural reality. The line of sovereignty leads to a separation of the sphere of the state from that of the sacred, while the line of secularization tends toward denying everything other than what is materially real. The inter-war ecclesiastical discussion of the state and the limits of state power strongly influenced the Norwegian bishop—along with many Danish church people. They attacked the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms, and the question of the limits of state power was becoming increasingly important in the discussions. For those who argued in favor of limits on the sphere of state power, the constitutional state was the answer. For them, it was crucial that the Lutheran doctrine had been formulated in a completely different historical context with a clearly Christian authority, which made it inconceivable to consider the possible right of Christians to resist a totalitarian state power that would act as providence and place itself in God's stead. This group was especially worried about the ever-increasing state influence on education and socialization in the broadest sense. It also saw a real danger in a welfare state that “at a superficial glance” might seem extremely attractive—also from a Christian point of view. Admittedly, such a state might seem to be democratic, humanitarian, compassionate, and governed by welfare, but it had within it the seeds of a totalitarian and completely secularized state. They considered this kind of state, however benign, a threat to a free church.
Berggrav's speech at the Lutheran World Congress, held in Hannover in 1952, gave his views considerable clout.Footnote 47 In the first part of this presentation, Berggrav dealt with the church's duty to obey in relation to the state. While this position had very much to do with the actual problems facing Eastern European churches with regard to their communist rulers,Footnote 48 it was also influenced by the preceding Norwegian church struggle. Berggrav's critique of the welfare state was part of his general skepticism regarding the development of the modern state. According to Berggrav, Luther's teachings assumed that the state was founded on the rule of law, and that the sword was thus the implement of justice. An authority based on tyranny and lawlessness could not be recognized. Hence, there was no demand for obedience under every circumstance and toward every authority. In accordance with his understanding of St. Paul, it was justice and not power that underlay one's duty to obey. If, however, there was a constitutional society, Christian ideal demands could not be imposed on the secular state because a Christian did not possess better knowledge and was not a better “doer” than others in political matters. It was nevertheless a Christian and a church task to always expose the authority to a litmus test in which its deeds were held up against God's word—a view that also played a major role in the Anglican Church.
Berggrav's main point was that in actual fact there were not two kingdoms but only one: God's. Hence, there were not two authorities that had to be obeyed. Obedience to God was unconditional, whereas obedience to the authority of “this world” was conditional. It applied only if the authority represented a constitutional (democratic) state. Justice ranked above power, and if justice was trampled underfoot, a demonic state of affairs existed that justified the right to resist.
In the second part of his Hannover Speech, Berggrav turned more directly against the welfare state in its Nordic form. He claimed that the power state, emphasized by William TempleFootnote 49 as a counterpart to the welfare state, was flourishing in many countries. Typical of the post-war period was a combination of both types of state. It is no coincidence that there seem to be strong links between Berggrav's and Temple's argumentation. In connection with his work on the “Nordic Peace Plan,” Berggrav had visited London in December 1940, where he had met Temple, then Archbishop of York.Footnote 50
According to Berggrav, the welfare state was a secular state that was eager to take the place of Providence, wishing to replace the Nazi Weltanschauung by education to a “democratic sentiment.” From Berggrav's point of view, this meant that totalitarianism was also found in democracy. What was problematic about the welfare state was that it assigned itself a superior role and permeated all areas of life—threatening that the church would be ousted from social life. This risk made the welfare state demonic. While Luther had written in an age threatened by political chaos, the present day was characterized by a far too well ordered and totally regulatory state.
What the gospel wanted to give the poor or the sick in the form of a gift or a favor, the welfare state wanted to provide as a right. For Berggrav, this was a problem because the voluntary “giving of a gift” and the receiving of the gift created ties between the classes and thereby contributed to maintaining a community. In voluntary gift-giving, responsibility was in the hands of the individual. To replace the gift by a right would be a threat to social work because authority would be based solely on conditions formulated by the state. The risk, then, was that the state would assume the role of an almighty father or an omnipotent state. Berggrav feared that the secularized welfare state would supplant Christianity and replace the state in God's stead.Footnote 51 It would rule over the conscience of the individual, which would be orchestrated in such a way that everyone acted in accordance with the state way of life. Morality would be defined by the state, not the church.
The advantage of the welfare state was that it was based on popular opinion. For that reason, in combating the state's hubris, the church, in its spiritual struggle, had to shape public opinion. The church had to demand full freedom to preach its gospel and the right to exercise goodness and compassion. It must never become a tool of power politics. Bringing up children must be the parents' responsibility, and the state must never stand alone in defining good and evil.Footnote 52 Berggrav's skepticism toward the welfare state reflected his conception of the state as a secular, materialistic project that interfered with the church's good relations with the Norwegian Labour Party. Berggrav followed this with other statements, such as the critical article about welfare and sentiment, in which he combined his moral critique with more economically related points of view, based on the concept of incentive.Footnote 53
IV. Berggrav's Critique as an Echo in the Danish Debate
Eivind Berggrav was well known in Danish church circles, and a number of his papers were also published in Denmark.Footnote 54 It is worth noting that in 1952, Præsteforeningens Blad, the official organ of the Danish clergy, published Berggrav's much cited lecture at The Lutheran World Federation meeting in Hannover in 1952, where he explicitly dealt with the welfare state.Footnote 55 His critical article on welfare and sentimentFootnote 56 was published in the newspaper Vestkysten.Footnote 57 Berggrav's thinking influenced several positions in the broad Danish church.
Echoes of Berggrav's views can be seen in an article in the parish magazine for Helligåndskirken (Church of the Holy Spirit) in Copenhagen, written by its vicar, Svend Lerfeldt, D.D., who was a known specialist on Luther.Footnote 58 After having talked about the state's exploitation of its citizensFootnote 59 and the tendency of citizens to become slaves of the state, Lerfeldt concludes his article as follows:
One can clearly make out the contours of a state where people are degraded into being a workforce that is directed as desired, as if one were dealing with cattle—without taking into account if the individual becomes rootless or is ruined physically and mentally. It calls itself the welfare state, but there is good reason to ask if the modern state is not becoming a threat to human welfare. If, in its belief in itself, it is not placing itself on God's throne.
Other striking examples of Berggrav's thinking in Denmark can be found in established church people such as Paul Holt, principal of a college of education in Århus and the “official” historian of the Inner Mission. In addition to his theological career, Holt also had been an active politician. In the 1930s, he entered “Danish Unity” (Dansk Samling), a national, anti-parliamentary, and elitist ideology and quickly became part of the leadership.Footnote 60 The organization shared some ideological features with the fascist movements of the time, but without their violent and anti-democratic character. In contrast to Nazism, Danish Unity had a strong foundation in Christianity and the Danish church tradition. After the Nazi occupation of Denmark in April 1940, Danish Unity expressed criticism of the Danish government's recognition of the German occupying power, and this gradually evolved into illegal activity with a strong connection to the Danish resistance movement. This resistance activity led to Holt (similar to Berggrav in Norway) being interned in a Danish prison camp and subsequently arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. He was sent to the German concentration camps of Neuengamme and Neu-Versen. After the war, Danish Unity, inspired by the French Christian Democratic Party, sought to re-launch itself as representative of a socially responsible Christianity. The party programme from 1945 also shows clear inspiration from British social economists such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. In the parliamentary election of 1945, Holt became one of Danish Unity's four representatives in parliament, and he continued to play a leading role in the party after the 1947 election as well, although Danish Unity failed to gain any seats in parliament. Theologically, Holt was connected to the Danish Inner Mission, which had played a key role in the development of Christian charity work in Denmark. In the post-war period, he stood for both social justice thinking and a Christian critique of the state.Footnote 61
In 1955, Holt's “Christian critique” of the welfare state distinguished between democracy, which had always striven toward a welfare state—in the first instance by placing the state as the custodian of liberty (liberalism) and then by developing social care and protection of the workers (the active, democratic welfare state)—and the absolute welfare state.Footnote 62 He linked the latter to totalitarian-fascist, Nazi, and communist states—societies where the state is the only active force and is solely responsible for the welfare of its citizens. In the absolute welfare state, human need is unworthy and human existence is no longer a matter of destiny, but of politics. Holt argued that realizing material welfare is not synonymous with human happiness. Holt's distinction between a welfare state and an absolute welfare state corresponded to Berggrav's idea of the welfare state as a cross between the totalitarian and the democratic, with a risk of a movement toward the purely totalitarian.
According to Holt, the problem of the welfare state, then, is due to the preaching of Christianity. Via Christianity, new ideals had been brought into the world that derived from the emphasis on the infinite value of the human individual. These ideals, according to Holt, were simultaneously the main source of the welfare state and its fundamental problem. Since Christianity naturally had to assert its absolute sovereignty, it had to oppose to the absolute welfare state, in which there is nothing above or on a par with the state. The state becomes God; politics becomes the religion; and, the ideology of the state becomes “the doctrine of salvation.”Footnote 63 If man does not live by bread alone, he must turn to welfare as the highest ideal—as a perverted Christian ideal. All attempts to redeem mankind via a welfare state are doomed to fail, because they rest on a deception. Holt directed his criticism primarily at the absolute welfare state, but the Danish “approach” was also deemed problematic. Firstly, because it tended to turn the material standard of living into a religion and something divine, and was thus characterized by emptiness and neuroses. Secondly, because it handed over personal responsibility to the state power while co-responsibility in society was “depersonalized” (a clearly Berggravian way of thinking). Holt could therefore support the welfare state insofar as it gave people the security and freedom of choice valued by the individual. However, Holt rejected the welfare state when, in its absolute form, it placed itself in God's stead.
A more welfare-positive position that has Berggrav as its point of departure is to be found in a radio-transmitted speech given at Nyborg Strand by the later bishop of Copenhagen, the then general secretary of The Cooperation of Parish Workers, Willy Westergaard-Madsen (reported in Kristeligt Dagblad, October 18, 1956). With his roots in the Christian-philanthropic tradition he represented a more pragmatic position and saw the modern welfare state as
a state that feels an obligation to care for the entire population in all its relations that determine its security, via an economic policy and social insurance, via efforts to create full employment, via a comprehensive interest in youth and finally via a cultural program that also takes the spiritual needs of the population into account.
According to Westergaard-Madsen, developments had long since transferred social responsibility into the hands of the state. There was no way back, and it was hard to disapprove of this. It made no sense, he underlined, to discuss such slogans as “nanny state” and “socialist guardian state”—concepts that so much typified the American debate in the early 1950s, although there was good reason to consider the risk of the state usurping responsibility from the individual.
Westergaard-Madsen was one of the few who attempted to define or demarcate the welfare state, placing emphasis on the state's obligation to ensure—and responsibility for ensuring—the social security of the population. Without giving it any negative emphasis, Westergaard-Madsen also included the interest for youth and the spiritual needs of the population. He adopted a balanced view of the welfare state, distancing himself from a discussion at the level of slogans. He indicated specific areas meriting closer attention. In his speech, Westergaard-Madsen clearly made use of Berggrav's contribution from 1952, which he had heard as a participant at the Lutheran World Congress in Hannover.Footnote 64 This can also be seen from formulations that, at times, had been taken directly from Berggrav's speech. Westergaard-Madsen believed that Berggrav was correct in some of his criticisms, but he could not agree with the highly bombastic and categorical delivery. One could not criticize the welfare state for focusing on material welfare. It was not the state that was to preach that man could not live by bread alone. Hence, he proposed a division of labor, with the state ensuring that the individual had solid material ground under his feet, while the church took place of social and spiritual needs.
This did not prevent him from raising a number of important questions and pointing out various risks: the risk of life in society becoming impersonal, and of the individual being considered a means of production, the risk of bureaucratization, and the risk of a weakening of Christian social work and of church involvement in social work generally. This was not a fundamental critique of the welfare state, nor was it an attempt to assert that there was something latent in welfare democracy that could assume a totalitarian nature. It was, rather, an unobtrusive point that there were problems that ought to be considered when seeking to further develop the welfare state system.
As we shall see in the following, neither the critical Holt nor the more pragmatic Westergaard-Madsen were alone in their views. Danish church people included both sharp critics and proponents of moving toward a welfare state. Holt and others had formal links to the political party system and it is of course not possible to disentangle religious and political motivation when assessing the intentions of individuals. What we can say is, that in these discussions religion seemed to play a more important role than political ideology and we do not find any uniform Lutheran thinking about the welfare state.
V. Tidehverv: A Clear “No” to the Welfare State
With a belief in the importance of heredity and environment for personal development it is not appropriate—so wrote the vicar of Tversted, Johs V. SørensenFootnote 65—to talk about responsibility and blame in the welfare state, which does not leave any decision of importance to the individual. The welfare state derives from the view that man is simply a product of heredity and environment, but such a view makes the individual as unaccountable and helpless as a baby. Society is “to blame” for everything, and that is why the state makes itself the guardian of the country's citizens. And this does not contribute to personal happiness and—packed in cotton and bound hand and foot—the individual seems not to appreciate the well-meaning efforts made to develop a brave new world. It is a point of view heavily influenced by the group of Danish theologians called “Tidehverv.” A human being can never be the intersection of heredity and environment, but must always be the center of action that must be responsible for his/her own life to God and his/her neighbor.
Prior to the Nazi occupation of Denmark, the Tidehverv group had not devoted much attention to the modern secularized state. The relation to the modern world was only put on the agenda after the warFootnote 66 and it found expression in skepticism toward the cultural phenomena that underlay the welfare ideology. This is important because at that time, Tidehverv was an influential intellectual factor, if not the dominant tendency, in Danish church life.
As early as 1949, Tage Wilhjelm had pointed to the struggle between three philosophies of life: positivism/materialism, humanism/idealism and Christianity. It was precisely positivism and humanism in general and the welfare state in particular that were in the Tidehverv line of fire. Positivism came under attack, because Tidehverv saw it as the ideological foundation of the welfare state. The indictment against positivism was that it was based on a premise that it was scientifically possible to justify both political solutions to problems that positivism itself had helped foster as well as society's norms and values. Much of the criticism made by the “church people” reflected their view that the welfare state represented an expanding state that shifted boundaries between the “religious” and the “public” domains, based on norms justified by positivism and solutions consisting of material welfare.
Seen from Tidehverv's point of view, the welfare state had become a false idol in people's consciousness. In their belief in material progress, society put their trust in the welfare state and expected all good things to flow from it. The supporters of the welfare state naively believed—according to Tidehverv—that there were political solutions to all questions, provided that experts were given a free hand to implement the most functional solution models. There is a clear link here with Berggrav's idea of the demonization of the modern state.
Johs. Horstmann, who replaced K. Olesen Larsen as vicar of Esajaskirken in 1964, was the person who most clearly articulated Tidehverv's view of the welfare state. Horstmann was what one could call a “straight talker.” The welfare state, Horstmann argued,Footnote 67 can use the church in its purely “technical” humanitarian efforts and to provide political/social life with a religious buttress, which is similar to Berggrav's idea of Christianity as camouflage. This support was intended to justify society's will to provide civil security and physical and mental wellbeing as the absolute goal of human life, which is every man's duty to seek to attain. And this can be done, Horstmann and Tidehverv said, if the church is willing to accept society's dream of political and social welfare as the true aim of human life or if it is willing to identify the command to love one's neighbor with that of working for one's fellow man and thereby also for one's own earthly happiness. It is perfectly possible, Tidehverv argued, for “socially oriented clergymen”—especially those seeking to make a career for themselves—to throw themselves into such a venture, but if they do so, they will not be representing the “cause” of the church.
According to Horstmann, when an authority imagines that they are able to organize life in society precisely as they feel inclined, to reshape society according to their own conception of what human social life should be like, then that authority is placing itself in God's stead and ceases to be the power that serves God. That authority becomes demonic because it seeks to deify human values. Conversely, it is the task of the church to take the belief in politics away from people, so that they do not believe they can find salvation for themselves and others through politics. Once again, there is a clear parallel with Berggrav's views. When the church preaches the gospel, it makes each person responsible for his neighbor's earthly necessities of life. It is the social task of the church, then, to make sure that no one commits idolatry when it comes to responsibility for one's neighbor. It is not the task of the church's social work and charity to do away with poverty. Nor may it call on the authorities to do so. Rather, the church should point to everyone's poor neighbor and make it clear to the individual that he or she is responsible for that person. If this message is not preached, care of the poor will become a divine act—a badly concealed form of guardianship, where one seeks to change the poor person, re-create him in one's own image and elevate him to one's own level. This is not service. It is tyranny. And the modern welfare state has precisely this tendency to turn into a demonic tyrant because it overestimates what it is capable of giving. According to the Tidehverv group, the welfare state becomes a chance for the strong to rejoice in their strength because of the weakness of the weak. One must serve the poor person for the person he is and where he finds himself, give him what he needs because he is in need of it. We must not try to turn the poor person into a happy, harmonious and satisfied individual, nor seek to give his life meaning. The desire to do away with poverty—or, more correctly, wanting to do away with the poor—and wanting to leave them to their own devices in their poverty are equally demonic.
The welfare state, Horstmann said,Footnote 68 is not a political but a religious phenomenon, because it promotes the faith in the welfare state as the absolute goal of humanity. In that sense, the political demand made by the welfare state is totalitarian. Beneath the gleaming, smiling face of the welfare state, which wants the perfection of mankind, lurks despair. The church's effort to create a minimum of humanity in an inhuman world makes it inhuman. For this reason, the church must say loud and clear that the aim of the welfare state is destined to fail. The welfare state's responsibility for one's neighbor is seen as justified on religious and Christian grounds. If the church does not protest in such a situation, it is guilty of becoming a guarantor and legitimator of the welfare state—of supplying it with divine authority. Horstmann refers to this as “social pietism”—not Christianity. Clergyman (and later parliamentarian) Søren Krarup further developed this point of view from 1960 onward in several books and articles. For Krarup, the welfare state and democracy had become a religion, because those in power wanted to deify themselves.Footnote 69
VI. Church Social Work, Philanthropy, and the Welfare State
One of the areas where the church and the welfare state really came into practical contact with each other was the church's social work. This practical social work had begun in earnest during the final decades of the nineteenth century, and from the early twentieth century had become increasingly organized and professionalized.Footnote 70
Generally speaking, philanthropists placed more importance on practical action than on theological discussions. Not surprisingly, the pragmatic views articulated by Westergaard-Madsen concerning the role of church social work in the welfare state exerted an influence on the Danish church people.Footnote 71 Since the welfare state had an underlying secular set of values, many church people saw the welfare state as having an undermining effect on church social work, even though many of those involved in such work saw a possibility for greater interaction between church-based social work and public efforts. This was the position adopted during the inter-war years by the chairman of The Cooperation of Parish Workers, Alfred Th. Jørgensen,Footnote 72 a position maintained by philanthropic leaders during the post-war years. It is clear, however, that the extremely rapid growth of the welfare state also led to criticism from those involved in philanthropic work.
Even before Westergaard-Madsen's radio-transmitted lecture (1952), Jens Jacob Jensen had expressed anxiety that the church's social work would be impeded by the expansion of the state's welfare activity, fearing that welfare policies would promote an already advancing secularization. He was clearly influenced by Berggrav's above mentioned criticisms:
The welfare state, however, is a secularised state that believes it has the right to intervene everywhere in human life. Welfare states will also rule over people's consciences. Young people must be brought up in the way the state regards as being right and proper.Footnote 73
Other voices also spoke out. In Indre Missions Tidende, J. D. Christensen emphasized that humane help lacked the word that refreshes the soul and that quickens hope in sorrow and death, that God's heart is behind it, not just human sympathy.Footnote 74 For that reason, church social work could not be replaced by public care. Inner Mission historically had played an important role in establishing church-based Christian philanthropy and insisted on the importance of this also in the era of the welfare state. Public care (that is, the welfare state) is pharisaic, according to Christensen; it does not bear witness to God's goodness, but to its own. The welfare state does not spring from humility, but pride. It therefore loses its way and will one day cease, since it is not based on the loving heart, as we saw in Nazi Germany and still see in communism.Footnote 75
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s the philanthropic movement still played an important role, especially as it concerns child welfare. A majority of infant homes, orphanages, and many day-care institutions were run by non-state entities, often with a more or less explicit Christian background.Footnote 76 However, the state gradually came to play a more and more important role. These institutions were losing their autonomy, as the need for public funding was followed by “state recognition,” control, and regulation of both the formal and practical affairs. In philanthropic organizations' internal debates, we see one group expressing skepticism about the state crowding out Christian values and institutions; while another group argues that cooperation/coexistence with the state is necessary in order to have an effective child welfare sector. The Danish church people had of course vested interests in this discussion of the borderlines between state and philanthropic initiatives.
At a Nordic meeting for deaf clergy, the Danish delegation expressed anxiety about the development of Christian work in a welfare state where care work was first and foremost the responsibility of the state, which, being responsible for the “institutions,” sought major decision-making power.Footnote 77 Other delegates were less skeptical. In the opinion of Principal of the Deaconess College in Århus, Folmer Tange Jensen, the problem was that the church had not yet seriously placed social work on its agenda. Jensen believed that even with a dominant welfare state, there would still be a place for church social work:
The fact of the matter is that social need, which cannot be alleviated by using money, is greater now than ever before. That the welfare state can never become a pillow for the church, but that, precisely because of its inevitable accumulation, its barracking of care in establishments and institutions and “homes” and the like—not to say urban communities—means that it has created an almost insatiable need for nursing and care, understanding and personal help.Footnote 78
Tange Jensen's successor as principal of The Diaconal College, Jens Nørgaard, represented a middle-of-the-road position and viewed the welfare state as having been partially created by the preaching of God's word.Footnote 79 Nørgaard posed the question of what would happen if the church had solved its task, so that church social work no longer had any legitimate role to play in a welfare state. Societal demands meant that the state now defined the aims of welfare work. In that case, there was no place for “compassion.” Compassion was replaced by social policy. At the same time, it was problematic that the state only viewed people as production potential that had to be made to function efficiently. Once the formal conditions were rectified, so would the individual. This was the prevailing welfare state ideology. For Nørgaard, the task of the church, as the less endowed provider of social care, was to encourage the welfare state, so that the state did its utmost and did not become complacent, since there was no one else to challenge the state's authority. In other words, Nørgaard had a notion of interaction between public welfare and care on the one hand and church social work on the other, where the church should draw attention to unsolved social problems and provide the meaning and more personalized services that the welfare state system could not provide.Footnote 80
A similar point of view is to be found in the writings of the theologian Otto Krabbe, leader of the Christian settlement house in Vesterbro, Copenhagen.Footnote 81 He saw the role of the welfare state as one of ensuring the basic needs for social security and to fight social problems. Everything beyond these concerns—questions of wellbeing, happiness, and inter-personal relations—was the responsibility of the individual person and his or her morality and beliefs. Hence, even though he applauded the welfare state for providing material support to those in need, Krabbe remained skeptical toward some of the possible ethical consequences. He was concerned that that people had become spoiled and pampered by the welfare state, that they had relinquished their moral responsibility to society. They wanted to enjoy welfare benefits and make demands, and all the time they became increasingly bad-tempered and aggrieved—but did that have anything to do with the welfare state? For Krabbe, the welfare state was nothing more than a “money distribution affair,” where the individual paid in when times were good and received money when times were bad.Footnote 82 In this sense, the state held the purse strings, and in a free society, it ought not to be master of much else. Hence, in a moral sense, the welfare state was supposed to be a neutral institution without any purpose regarding human satisfaction. It was a valuable foundation on which to build, but more building had to be done using something else than material services and welfare guarantees. It was precisely by ensuring material needs that it became possible to
mobilise our own heat sources as a counter-move, to warm up, liven up, make each other feel happy and secure—also those who, despite good material provisions, were unable to establish a community and friendship with others—the lonely, those who found it hard to adapt.
The idea that love of one's neighbor is something more than just social care, and that the welfare state is thus no hindrance to caring for others, is also found in an earlier exchange between two clergymen.
When considering the basis of Lutheran preaching, P. Munch Madsen, vicar of the village of Jordløse, stated that love of one's neighbor was mainly the task of society.Footnote 83 It was society that was responsible for no one being in need. Love of one's neighbor had become social care, thus making society responsible for the people with whom an individual lived. Madsen's colleague, P. Augustinus, replied with an anecdote about a woman who complained to the social security office that the money was “not given with love.” She was right, said Augustinus, but the problem was that she was asking for more than the social security office could give.Footnote 84 It makes good political sense to eliminate financial inequalities, but despite all the social measures, there is still an immense need for love of one's neighbor.
Some years later, Otto Krabbe once again entered the debate taking a closer look at many of the objections of church people.Footnote 85 In a modern society, the community has taken over a number of areas of responsibility that were formerly those of the family and the individual alone. Society had established institutions to carry out tasks that affect the lives of individuals. Consequently, he asked whether personal responsibility could survive when an increasing number of areas of responsibility had become collective. Krabbe's main point was that responsibility means saying “yes” to an obligation, and what is important is the content of the obligation rather than the private experience of the individual. When the obligation refers to all those who (for some reason or another) are experiencing some kind of social difficulty, then the burden must be shouldered collectively. When it is not a matter of one's parents and children but of all people's parents and children, an appeal must be made to the collective feeling of responsibility, which determines how society is to deal with the task. Hence, Christians have complete freedom—on the same footing as everybody else—to assume responsibility for and to influence society. This freedom does not eliminate personal responsibility in any way; on the contrary, it is a responsibility which could earlier only be borne by the few, but which has now been spread out to the many.
Krabbe also wrestled with the oft-advanced assertion that welfare and security make people pampered, demanding, ungrateful, and materialistic—that welfare causes a moral decline. He asked if it is the guardian that is opposing and seeking to curb the majority from being fulfilled. In Krabbe's view, there is anxiety at no longer belonging to a financially and socially safeguarded minority. A classic, philanthropic approach had sought to improve the moral conduct of those who were not safeguarded via their own power reserve. Krabbe's critique is clear:
If we are to talk about a Christian's particular responsibility, it is this: the responsibility for standing by our fellow human beings in objective solidarity, without any philanthropically or Christian subtlety. And then—and then he gives God his faith. This He dearly wants, but not our deeds. These he wrote off in favour of the fellow human being, because it was that person who was in need of them.
VII. Church People in Favor of the Welfare State
Danish church people expressed varying degrees of skepticism about the welfare state, from the die-hard rejection the Tidehverv group to more nuanced and pragmatic skepticism about the boundaries between state, church, and the individual. However, there were also members of the clergy who argued in favor of the welfare state. The vicar of Hviding, Torben Jørgensen, regarded the welfare state as a society that guaranteed all its citizens protection against political and financial oppression and provided for everyone from cradle to grave.Footnote 86 In their view, the welfare state was not a threat to personal liberty, and it gave the church more freedom than ever before.
Similarly, the college lecturer Johan Kleis, B.D. stressed that the welfare state did not, as its critics claimed, weaken a person's moral attitude.Footnote 87 On the contrary, it appealed to the individual's co-responsibility and sympathetic understanding. The vicar of Vor Frelser Kirke (Our Saviour Church) in Copenhagen, Carl Trock, was surprised that so many people who ought to know better from their daily work repeatedly used a Christian way of thinking as a point of departure for questioning the welfare state.Footnote 88 Although it was true that man did not live by bread alone, it was equally true that bread was a necessity. The welfare state must not be renounced—and most certainly not in the name of Christianity.
It is difficult to provide a simple characterization of the church people who spoke in favor of the welfare state. Some had roots in philanthropic (charity) work, many were not politically active, while Carl Trock, for example, was an active member of the liberal agrarian party Venstre, which in 1959, together with the Conservative Party, had launched a strong critique of the welfare state.Footnote 89 Hal Koch, D. D., professor of church history and former chairman of the Union of Danish Youth during the occupation, holds a special place in the discussion. A convinced Social Democrat, husband to Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs (1950–1963) Bodil Koch, and an active folk high school educator, Koch played a key role in post-war Denmark, especially as a figure in the public debate.
Koch viewed the welfare state and democracy as being closely interconnected.Footnote 90 In a certain way, he was an antipole of Berggrav, arguing for the necessity of a certain view of life if democracy was to be respected and to survive. A polity with a special focus on supporting the weak was, for him, not so much a political issue as a purely juridical and popular prerequisite for democratic rule. For that reason, the ideal of democratic education—the “lifestyle state” that Berggrav would probably have called it—played a decisive role for Koch, who distanced himself from Berggrav's strong emphasis on upbringing being a family concern. Koch's views were clearly expressed in a speech held at the tenth anniversary of Krogerup Folk High School.Footnote 91 In his speech, he referred to Krogerup as a “citizen school” for those who were interested in the general public good, the res publica, which was prepared to assume co-responsibility for how life among people was shaped in the family, neighborhood, workplace, parish, municipality—indeed, in the whole country. At Krogerup, Koch wanted to train students to citizen activity and a sense of social responsibility. People had to be educated to engage themselves in matters of common concern, to understand society and to develop their individual character as citizens. For Koch—as for the contemporary British sociologist T. H. Marshall—citizenship was a vital prerequisite for democracy. Citizenship assumed a common responsibility that enabled the individual to live in accordance with the welfare state, dependent as it is on people being concerned about “the whole,” the “common cause.”
Koch viewed the social-liberal welfare society—especially in its Nordic version—as an improvement of society far beyond what could have been imagined. He expressed his regret that the increase in social security and higher standard of living had not produced general happiness and satisfaction. According to Koch, the ongoing critique of the welfare state and dissatisfaction over taxes could be explained by the lack of citizen education that was a prerequisite for a well-functioning democratic society. Far too many people regarded the state as an enemy. They thought and acted in an anti-social manner, “milking” the state for as much as they could and cheating on their taxes. For him, such kind of behavior revealed society's political immaturity and placed demands on citizens' education to think politically and to reconsider their personal social development. This was a quite different conclusion than that of Berggrav, though based on the same situation. Koch argued that Danes were acting too much as “private individuals,” while the requirements made of the individual as “a member of society” had been pushed into the background. These ideas were aired especially in the autumn of 1956.Footnote 92
Koch's ideas were based on a division of labor between the two kingdoms—state and church—although he acknowledged that in practice, they were often intertwined. This distinction influenced the social reforms around 1900, where “it was the men of the church who earliest and most clearly recognized the social need and drew up a program for what ought to be done, while it was the politicians and the state that utilized the solution to the problem.”Footnote 93 Even though he could express a certain skepticism toward the concept of the welfare state—“the so-called welfare state which, strangely enough, the Social Democrats, headed by the Prime Minister, profess with such unreservedness”Footnote 94—and warned against believing that the welfare state could solve everyone's problems,Footnote 95 Koch became the most prominent churchman supporting and legitimizing the Social Democratic conceptions of the welfare state in the early post-war years.
However, Koch was not alone in thinking along these lines. Many people linked to the Grundtvigian folk high school movement in Denmark shared his views.Footnote 96 Koch saw “the popular” (that is, shared by the populus) as a “quality”—a form of life and a way of thinking that naturally found expression in the many benefits of the welfare state: security against unemployment and illness, social protection in old age, and so forth.Footnote 97 These benefits were in fact a prerequisite for liberty and humanity—the feeling that each and every human being has an immediate relation to God, and may therefore not be subordinate to anyone else. For Koch, welfare represented a “folkelighed” (popular democracy) with roots in an old peasant culture that has managed to transfer its humanity and culture into modern society. This popular democracy enabled the welfare state to become something more than just social engineering and material wellbeing.
Other leading theologians of this period picked up this discussion. In 1960, the church historian and spokesman of university dialectic theology,Footnote 98 P. G. Lindhardt, D.D., wrote a seminal article on the extent to which Christianity was compatible with a welfare state. Lindhardt's answer—if by “Christianity” one meant the Christian message that, via the gospels, went all the way back to Christ—was a definitive “no,” because the Christian message expressed no desires as to material welfare. Lindhardt had no wishes in that respect. Christianity was directed toward the individual, whose relationship to God “works” in his relationship to his neighbor—and this direct personal relationship cannot be replaced by any kind of secular political or social order. That would lead only to irresponsibility. Christianity offers and commands a love that is quite different from worldly reason. The function of the church is to preach its message, but as an institution, the church is “of this world” and therefore reflects a conglomerate of religious, moral, and political ideas.
The criticism that providing care deprived people from taking responsibility, according to Lindhardt, exaggerated the role of what the state could as well as it down-played the meaning of responsibility meant. One could just as well argue that the state's assumption of economic responsibility for social security imposed responsibility on the individual toward others that was of a higher level than merely economic. Citing the writer Villy Sørensen, Lindhardt felt that “welfare does not have to be the meaning of life because it is the most the state can achieve.”Footnote 99 The welfare state does not take responsibility away from anyone, Lindhardt argued, and does not prevent anyone from acting against the biblical edict to love thy neighbor. The welfare state simply expresses the meaning of political understandings—to take care of people's best interests and to order our mutual relations for mutual benefit. The welfare state is neither more nor less Christian than any other form of state.
In a more abstract form, we find the same ideas in the writings of the theologian and influential philosopher K. E. Løgstrup, D.D.,Footnote 100 who in a number of works, especially his main work The Ethical Demand,Footnote 101 outlines an ideal humanistic Christianity. In an extended dialogue with the jurist Poul Meyer,Footnote 102 Løgstrup develops a number of ideas about the relation between the individual ethical demand and the collective. To simplify slightly, Løgstrup believes that ethical demands such as love of one's neighbor or compassion can be anchored in societal institutions such as the welfare state. It is hard to always love one's neighbor—man is weak—but when the norm is anchored in a collective institution, we are forced at least to act as if we loved our neighbor. The welfare state is therefore a surrogate for love of one's neighbor.
VIII. Conclusion
This contribution analyzed the views held by Danish church people regarding the welfare state, as expressed in a period when the general debate on the welfare state culminated in Denmark. Earlier research on the connections between Lutheranism and the welfare state in Denmark have focused largely on the events prior to the modern social policy legislation, and on this background, developed more or less anachronistic arguments.
Since the Danish discussion got underway later than in the United States, Britain, and Norway, it may very well have been influenced by international discussions. As far as the church people were concerned, it is especially the Norwegian influence—as expressed by Bishop Eivind Berggrav—that is striking, and through Berggrav, positions from the interwar British discussions also entered the Danish debate. However, it is worth noting that the debate over the welfare state in Denmark and Norway differed from that in Britain. In the 1950s, the Scandinavian welfare state evolved into a larger, more state-centered and interventionist social security system (along with other characteristics of the Scandinavian welfare model) and a growing belief in the rationality of this model (what might be called “welfarism”). This evolution both triggered and influenced the debate.
In his Hannover speech about the church and the welfare state, Berggrav stressed that “Lutherans are a many-headed company.”Footnote 103 This is confirmed by several contributions made by Danish church people to the welfare state debate from 1945 onward. As in the general welfare state discussion, the critical voices predominate, but there are also those who do not fear the welfare state, and may even see it as a positive development. Overall, the picture is characterized by just as many different attitudes and evaluations as in the rest of the population.
At the core of the entire discussion lies a general assumption about the state in modernity. This discussion generates two derivative issues: the Christian's duty to obey the state—the doctrine of the two kingdoms—and the relation between church and state. Behind these issues lay the general European debate about the relation between a constitutional state and a power state and the fear that the constitutional state, if enlarged with tasks of welfare as a welfare state, had a tendency to demonize itself. To varying degrees, the debaters sought to find a conceptual definition of the welfare state and its basic values, ranging from a highly instrumental conception to a more negative view of the welfare state as a view-of-life state or, as one person put it: “The state as God. Politics as religion. Ideology as a doctrine of salvation.”Footnote 104 For those who did not have an instrumental view as their foundation, a central issue was the relation between the order of being of the welfare state, morality, and the source of morals. A recurrent point made in that connection was that morality has to be based on something that lay outside the state itself, so that morality did not end up being self-referential for its existence. This problem also includes the debaters' conception of the welfare state's view of human nature and their attitude toward the single individual, just as the moral basis is closely linked to the debate about compassion in the form of church social work as opposed to services laid down by law—or, more generally, the relation between love of one's neighbor and institutionalized love of one's neighbor. Finally, a number of people were preoccupied with the possible economic side effects of the welfare state. The rather scattered, predominantly critical views and attitudes call for circumspection and do not approach anything that could be called a “Lutheran welfare doctrine.” Lutherans seem to be just as much in disagreement with each other about the welfare state as people in general. In fact, it was the weakest voice in the church people's debate that triumphed institutionally. This suggests that patterns of alliance and skills at coalition building were more decisive in the elaboration of the welfare state than any kind of “secularized Lutheranism” philosophy.
As the examples show, some church people also had close links to political parties and acted politically. The most prominent example here was Hal Koch, with his close connection to the Social Democratic Party. Koch's close ties and political position was exceptional: his wife was a member of government, and Koch himself was directly involved in policy-making as chairman of a public commission. We do not find any clear party political pattern within the group studies in this article and the opinions of the church people is much better understood as church people on entering a debate that was highly politicized than as party political statements. A concern about modern society on the one hand and the legitimacy of the church on the other triggered their religiously founded argumentations. This dual nature of the debate also means that the positions cannot be reduced to a function of their positions within the church. Bishops, for example, do not appear as a unified group having a single ideological position. They are neither all public servants defending the welfare state nor are all of them conservative defenders of specific theological positions. Similarly, the group of clergymen reflects a wide variety of opinions. As we have shown, there is a tendency that people closely involved in philanthropic work are more pragmatic in their approach to the welfare state than the more academically minded colleagues in the theological milieus (for example, the Tidehverv group). This does not mean that the philanthropists are not also skeptical or that they have strong reservations. Nor does it mean that all those in the academic camp were single-mindedly critical (as the example of Løgstrup, the most academic of them all, clearly shows).
For several reasons, it is difficult to measure the significance of the church people's discussion of the welfare policy development in Denmark in any accurate way. The debates not only lead in different directions, but it is also notoriously difficult to measure the importance of ideas and discourses.Footnote 105 From the beginning of the century and onward, the church gradually lost ground in relation to the welfare state and public solutions to social problems, both when it came to setting the agenda and as provider of welfare. In a larger study of the history of Danish social policy, therefore, we do not find Christian ethics and references to Christian values playing any significant role in the political debate about concrete social reforms.Footnote 106 During the entire period, there was an internal discussion within the church (especially around the role and practice of philanthropy), but in parliament, religious arguments have largely played out their role, aside from fundamental ethical discussions on issues such as abortion (which was liberalized in Denmark in 1973). However, we find that the proponents of church philanthropy succeeded in ensuring it a continued place in the realm of social policy, especially in issues of social work and family policy. And we find a clear echo of the church people's critique of the welfare state in the broader political debate in the 1950s, focusing especially around the welfare state's totalitarian tendencies.
In terms of the larger research discussion about the church and the welfare state, our investigation shows that church people tended to be just as divided in their attitude to the welfare state as the rest of the population. When the church and the modern welfare state encountered each other in the post-war period, both parties had their guards up. This resembles the picture from Great Britain, and to a certain extent Norway and Sweden, where criticism was more vociferous than in Denmark. Hence, we must reject the hypothesis of “the Nordic welfare state” as the result of a particular Lutheran heritage and tradition. Of course, this is not the same as writing off the influence of religion or the church. Nevertheless, it gives rise to critical reflections and indicates that if one wishes to identify the role played by Lutheranism for the Nordic model, one should not choose an actor's perspective. Church-state conflicts did not become a crucial dividing line in Nordic politics, unlike in Central Europe. This does not exclude the possibility that Lutheranism may have influenced the basic values and historical roots of the welfare state. More research is needed to further elucidate this relationship.
