Parliament has been assigned a chaplain.
Ida Auken took the initiative, and the response came immediately - resignations from the party, talk of "a serious slide", of the divide between democracy and religion now being dismantled from within.
One writer felt so unwell from seeing Auken rejoicing in a ministerial car that it kept him in a foul mood for days. And beneath it all runs one claim again and again, carried forward as the self-evident, which no one needs to justify - that democracy and religion are opposites, that one must be protected from the other, and that anyone who believes the church played a role in the emergence of democracy and the welfare state simply hasn't read enough history.
The last point was stated directly, by a man who kindly suggests that those of us who believe Christianity stands behind humanism, the Enlightenment and democracy, read up a bit more on the subject - preferably somewhat more broadly than what the priest managed to convey during confirmation preparation.
It's a good suggestion.
So let's read up. Together. Slowly, and in sequence, because it's the sequence that matters. If one wants to understand how and why everything is stacked on top of everything else and can't just be separated.
So let's rewind to the beginning of this Story.
Year 30, approximately. A carpenter's son in a Roman province has a coin thrust in his face and is asked whether one should pay tax to Caesar. He answers - "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's". It sounds at first like an evasion. But it isn't. It's the first time in history anyone divides the world into two authorities - one political and one spiritual - and refuses to let one swallow the other. In Rome, the emperor was himself the high priest. In virtually all civilisations before and since, power and sanctity are the same thing. The crack between them is not a given. Someone struck it. With a coin in hand. Now you know who.
Twenty years later, a tentmaker writes around to small communities by the Mediterranean, that here there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. Antiquity's three deepest divides - ethnicity, class, gender - are here declared invalid before God. Not abolished politically, for that naturally took centuries. But undermined in principle. And a principle works slowly, but it works. And it did.
The 300s. Basil of Caesarea builds one of history's first hospitals for the poor and strangers - not for soldiers, not for citizens, but for human beings as such, because every human being bears an image that cannot be lost. Emperor Julian, who spent his reign attempting to roll back Christianity, complains in a letter that the Galileans don't just support their own poor, but ours as well. It's a hostile witness. The best witnesses are always hostile.
Year 494. Pope Gelasius writes to the emperor in Constantinople that the world is governed by two powers, and that neither owns the other. The crack from the coin in year 30 has now become doctrine.
1075 to 1122. The Investiture Controversy. A pope and an emperor fight over who appoints bishops, and for the first time in European history a king loses to a principle. The king is desacralised as they nicely put it - he is power, not sanctity - and because the dispute must be settled with arguments and law rather than sword alone, something new emerges - legal science. So in Bologna in 1088 the University is the church's invention, a legal person with its own freedom. Harold Berman - jurist at Harvard, not preacher - has shown that the entire Western legal tradition is born precisely here, in the church's struggle that power must not be total. Read that again if you didn't catch it.
The 1200s. Thomas Aquinas. Nature can be explored because it is created by reason - by Logos - and therefore is itself reasonable. Whitehead, mathematician and anything but a believer, pointed out that modern science's instinctive trust in nature's order is an inheritance from precisely that medieval theology we have learned to look down upon. Copernicus was a canon. Mendel was a monk. The man behind Big Bang theory, Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. These are not exceptions to the pattern. They ARE the pattern.
The 1500s. In Salamanca, theologians like Vitoria and Las Casas raise the first universal human rights argument in history - that the Indians in the new world have soul, reason and rights, and that no king may take their land or freedom. The argument is made in theology's grammar, against their own crown's interests. There exists no Greek or Roman parallel. There exists no parallel whatsoever. Anywhere.
Year 1521. Luther stands in Worms before emperor and empire and refuses to recant, because it is neither safe nor advisable to act against one's conscience. He wasn't himself tolerant - let's just say it as it is 🙂 - but he moved authority into the individual person, and that move no one could undo since. And because each person now had to meet the Word themselves, each person had to be able to read. The universal priesthood became universal literacy.
Then Denmark. 1536, the Reformation. 1736, confirmation - and with it the requirement that every child in the country must be able to read their catechism. 1814, we were among the world's first with universal school laws. Danish literacy is not a secular achievement that the church delayed. It's a byproduct of the fact that peasant children had to be able to spell their way through Luther. Read that once more, so I'm sure you caught it.
The 1800s. The religious awakenings. Peasants who learn to speak in assemblies, organise themselves, stand upright before authority - decades before anyone gives them the vote. Same period with Grundtvig's incomprehensibly insightful "Human first, Christian second". The folk high schools, the assembly houses, the cooperative movement - Danish democracy's musculature was trained in awakened environments, and when the Constitution in 1849 wrote religious freedom in, a priest sat at the table and pulled in that direction.
And the welfare state?
No - the church didn't build it, how could it. That was done by the labour movement, and it should have that, fully and completely. But it built in an existing landscape - the parish as framework for poor relief through centuries, the school as the church's child, and beneath it all the moral premise, "that the weak has claim upon us - not because he is useful, but because he is Human". That premise is not a neutral discovery one makes with a measuring instrument. It is inherited property. Even universalism, the particularly Nordic - that welfare applies to all and not just members - mirrors a national church where EVERYONE in the parish belonged, regardless of what they believed.
And yes. The church as INSTITUTION fought many times against large parts of this. Against Galileo, against freedom of the press, against democracy far into the 1800s, arm in arm with absolutism. That's true. And one should not shrink from both acknowledging and saying it aloud. Regardless of what one believes.
But look at what the critics struck it with - equality, dignity, conscience, the individual's inviolability. Voltaire attacked the church with the church's own coin. The Enlightenment didn't invent its values. It nationalised them.
But onward to 1948. Europe stands in the ruins of its own civilisational collapse and must now write down why what happened must never happen again. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens with all human beings being born free and equal in dignity. Not in utility. Not in ability. In dignity - a quality that cannot be measured, cannot be lost and cannot be justified with any instrument science possesses.
The man who held the pen on large parts of the declaration, the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik, was Christian and said openly where he believed dignity came from. Brazil even proposed that it should stand in article 1. Man, created in God's image. The proposal was withdrawn, because the declaration had to be able to be signed by everyone. The inheritance was kept. The testament was voted out.
So when UNESCO gathered philosophers from the entire world to find the common foundation under the rights, they ended with an admission that has since become famous - "yes, we agree on the rights - on condition that no one asks us why". It was honestly said. And so dignity hangs there, in the air, carried by nothing, while everyone pretends it's natural that it can. 🙂
And one doesn't need to believe me. Nietzsche, who despised Christianity like few others, called democracy and the idea of equality Christianity's heirs - that was precisely why he despised them. Habermas, atheist and Europe's most cited living philosopher, has said it straight - the egalitarian universalism that our freedom ideals and human rights spring from is direct inheritance from Jewish justice ethics and Christian love ethics - everything else is postmodern talk. And Tom Holland, agnostic, set out to write about the Romans he loved, and discovered along the way that his own values weren't Roman. They weren't Greek.
They were Christian, all the way down.
And we are absolutely, absolutely not finished with that Story yet. Because what is quite unique about the Christian language's architecture is that it keeps holding us accountable from within.
When the West today accuses itself - for the colonies, for slavery, for the hypocrisy, for everything we did to those we had power over - then the accusation is made in a particular grammar - the guilt that must be confessed, the victim who stands at the centre, the demand to be judged by one's own standard and not by one's victories. That's not a neutral way of settling accounts. It's the form of confession, lifted out of the church and made into public conscience.
NO other civilisation has made self-accusation into a foundational institution - most have done the opposite and called it Honour.
Even the reckoning with Christianity is conducted in Christianity's language - the hypocrisy is measured against the Sermon on the Mount, the abuse of power against the crucified, the church's sins against the church's own ideal. One can delete the sender. But the grammar continues running, even in those most certain they've left it behind.
So when someone today demands religion be kept out of democracy, he stands on a divide between God and Caesar that no other civilisation has struck, and defends it with concepts of equality and conscience that no other tradition has coined.
One can easily think that a priest doesn't belong in Parliament. That's an honest discussion. But the very wall one is defending was built by those one wants to keep out.
Secularity is not victory over Christianity.
It is one of its inventions.
❤️🔥🪽
....
And then one question remains, and I ask it without irony, because I genuinely don't understand it. We credit the Greeks for philosophy without being accused of wanting to reinstate oracles.
We credit the Romans for law without anyone fearing we want gladiators back in Sports Park.
We can say where numbers come from, where the alphabet comes from, where parliament comes from, and no one becomes uneasy about it.
But say where equality comes from, where dignity comes from, where the very divide between power and the sacred comes from - then something tightens in the room. Then one is suddenly ahistorical, or naive, or dangerous.
An accounting all other traditions are allowed to make in peace and quiet, precisely this one must not make. What is wrong? What is it one is protecting by not wanting to know where it comes from?
One can easily receive an inheritance without becoming a believer from it. But one cannot understand oneself if one insists one has received nothing.
And then secondarily - which values is it one wishes the country to be organised according to, if not those that align with the Christian story and worldview?
Good Sunday, friends.
Now I'm going on summer holiday for about a month, so probably won't respond until this evening when we're stationary again. ☀️
