The Failure of Secularism Leaves a Fertile Field
There are good reasons to believe today that Sweden is witnessing a rediscovery of the faith. The exhaustion of the Christian moral order that attempted to preserve Christian ethics after discarding Christian truth has in many ways opened the minds and hearts of young, predominantly male, Swedes to the reality of God. Yet this alone does not explain the return. The collapse of secular modernity explains the exhaustion of the old order and not the return of faith. At most, it prepares the ground. The seed itself comes from Christ.
At a small café in downtown Stockholm last fall, Pentecostal pastor Josef Barkenbom preached from 1 Kings 14 on how we should not be fooled by the temptations of life without God. After the sermon, I encountered teenage boys attending a church for the very first time.
In my native Sweden, long known for its exceptionally secular population and plummeting attendance at the Lutheran-Evangelical Church of Sweden – our effective state church – over the last half century, places like pastor Barkenbom’s newly planted Stockholm Church have begun to sprout. Baptist pastor Johnny Lithell, after a pastoral fellowship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., planted a church in Gothenburg in 2018, and has seen a steady rise in members at his congregation. Across the country, the free churches, which are any Protestant denomination outside the Church of Sweden, have seen a considerable uptick in attendees and new members over the last year, especially among young men.
An Empty Kingdom
This seed of a Swedish Awakening of faith comes after nearly a century of Christian slumber. Up until the year 2000, when the Church of Sweden officially departed from state care, all Swedes received automatic church membership at birth. In 1975, 95 percent of Swedes were members; today’s figure is 51 percent. The liberalization of Protestantism in Sweden and much of the West after the Second World War, Sweden’s expansive welfare system, and the hyper-rationalization of public discourse all rendered church life superfluous. The state became a substitute for the church. The idea that all men were created with an immortal soul was thus deemed a peculiar anachronism.
The Social Democratic party, which has governed Sweden for most of the last hundred years, incorporated the Christian concept of koinonia into its party program, but without any of its transcendent power. Solidarity became coercive through law. Moral language detached from salvation became accusatory, not redemptive. Christian moral obligations became bureaucratic entitlements.
The American Mirror
For a long time, Sweden has been susceptible to all things American. In the 1950s, author Vilhelm Moberg published the tetralogy, The Emigrants, which told the tale of Swedes leaving their famine-stricken homeland in the mid-1800s for greener pastures in America. Others fled religious persecution from the Church of Sweden, which banned Baptist, Pentecostal, and Presbyterian expressions of faith. Moberg’s story of Kristina and Karl-Oskar, who embarked for America on the ship Charlotta, is still required reading in Swedish schools. The conclusion was not the idea that America was the new Jerusalem, but rather that everyone has the right to seek better fortunes in a foreign land (which also partly explains Sweden’s generous immigration laws). America has since then become a kind of mythological place in the Swedish psyche, where great things are possible.
As a result, when identity politics came crashing down in America in the 2010s, Sweden was quick to adopt its moral assumptions. The Swedish political, cultural, and media elite enthusiastically embraced its dogmas. Legislation imposed female quotas on company boards. Governmental agencies, including the police and Armed Forces, prioritized women and immigrants. In the name of anti-racism, the spread of Islam in Sweden was seen as progress, whereas Christianity was viewed as reactionary.
Nowhere was this more visible than in the Swedish education system that heavily promoted female empowerment from a young age. Boys, who not only develop later than girls but are seen as transgressors within US-imported identity politics, were not only left behind, but also ignored. As a result of Sweden’s progressive politics, women today dominate 80 percent of all governmental authorities (which in Sweden are a staggering 450).
Male motivation to seek work was weak in a world that viewed him as unwelcome. Young women fared better in education and at work and tended to discard men of lower social status. Young Swedish women today will get married. The question is whether it will be to the shrinking number of men of high status, their careers, or the state itself. Yet, for men, in the cradle-to-grave welfare state, there is little risk that he will fall too far. He will be left well fed and warm, but empty.
The Limits of Secular Grace
The experience of emptiness often leads to resentment and despair, as we have witnessed in the rise of the nihilistic alt-right. Sin-burdened man appears capable of rejecting God’s truth as much as seeking it. But when secular modernity has lost its appeal, its promises lose their hold on the human heart and fail to offer real satisfaction. The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:17 teaches us that when we are exposed to deep hunger, the Holy Spirit often begins His work. The longing that emerges is not evidence that God is absent, but that He has made the human heart for Himself, and by His grace is drawing it back toward its true end.
Preparing the Ground
Though Swedish conservatives focus on tradition, family and culture, the question of Sweden’s Christian origin, most visible on the golden cross of Christ against a blue Nordic sky on our flag, has until recently remained neglected. The center-right government that today steers the kingdom is rationalistic. The Christian Democrats and the Swedish Democrats – our most conservative parties in the Parliament – speak often of Christian values, but rarely of Christian faith. They speak of what works, but not what is worth living for.
The collapse of secular modernity explains the exhaustion of the old order. It does not explain the return to faith. At most, it has prepared the ground for faith. The seed itself comes from elsewhere. Through God’s grace, this void is now being filled with the younger generation seeking Christ. What they seek is not entertainment or emotional uplift, but the recovery of a soulful order in a society that has become profoundly disordered. For a generation raised in schools and media that treated masculinity as a problem to be managed rather than a virtue to be formed, the free churches offer clear teaching, male leadership, and a call to responsibility. They are drawn not by spectacle or sentiment, but by the reintroduction of authority, first the authority of Scripture, and ultimately the authority of God Himself.
The Return of Authority
This is why the free churches are succeeding where the Church of Sweden falters. The latter, shaped by decades of liberalization and institutional caution, instinctively recoils from Bible-centered preaching when young men ask for it. The former, less burdened by cultural accommodation, dares to teach the Gospel, including its demands. Here the young men find a place where their hunger for structure, purpose, and moral seriousness is not pathologized but directed toward submission to Christ.
However, the Church of Sweden remains the default church for many coming to faith. Last year it recorded, for the first time in decades, an uptick in young people seeking first communion. Yet not everyone is equally welcome. In April last year, two female vicars wrote in Dagens Nyheter (Today’s News), Sweden’s largest newspaper, that young men had begun attending Sunday services asking for Bible-centered guidance. Their hunger for spiritual direction was met with suspicion. The vicars feared that Bible-centered Christianity was homophobic and misogynistic, and blamed their beliefs on American pastors from the internet.
The Gospel without Apology
Yet it is precisely these young men’s attraction to robust, Bible-centered preaching, often influenced by the witness of confessional Reformed churches in the United States, that reveals the true character of this awakening. Far from a mere cultural import or online fad, the clear proclamation of God’s sovereignty, the total authority of Scripture, and the demand of the Gospel is being used by the Holy Spirit to awaken a generation. What the liberal vicars dismiss as “American pastors” is actually the sound theological inheritance of the Reformation, now returning to Swedish soil through free church pulpits and digital voices, calling young men not to cultural conservatism but to living submission to Christ.
The Church of Sweden’s instinctive turn toward therapeutic and feminine non-confrontational spirituality risks alienating these men once again. But if the free churches continue to call them to submission to God and Scripture, they will shape a generation capable of faithfulness in a society that has long abandoned the language of command. This would in many ways mitigate the negative impact that Sweden suffers from the erosion of the mediating institutions. Tocqueville worried about the dangers of societies where there is no middle layer of institutions between state and man.
The Seed of the Harvest
This seed of awakening, still modest, bears watching not only for Sweden but for the broader West. It suggests that even the most thorough experiment in secularized Christian ethics eventually reaches its limit. The young men returning to these churches are not fleeing modernity so much as discovering, by the drawing of the Holy Spirit, that a world without transcendence cannot finally satisfy the deepest longings the emptiness of secularism has awakened. Whether this seed grows into a genuine Swedish spiritual awakening will depend on whether the churches offer belonging with burden, and whether they have the courage to speak with authority – the authority of the living God – in an age that has grown suspicious of all authority except its own.
