This week the national church was placed under the Ministry of Health.
It happened quietly. No demonstrations, no grand speeches, no headlines that lasted more than an afternoon.
The Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs, which had stood for a hundred and ten years, was abolished, and the church's affairs moved under a minister for health and church, as though faith were a diagnosis one keeps an eye on. And in the new government platform, seventy-three pages long, the sentence "Denmark is a Christian country" therefore no longer appears. Just as neither church, Christianity, nor spiritual armament are mentioned.
It was not debated away. It was not voted down. It simply was not there. Like something you forget to pack, because you did not expect to need it anyway.
One can say it means nothing. That it is words on paper, a line in an organisational chart, a title that gets changed. And in a way, one would be right. For words on paper do not carry a civilisation.
What does is the story repeated across generations, until it no longer feels like a story, but like reality itself.
But then look at the rhythm.
In 2015 a centre-right government wrote the sentence in. In 2019, when Mette Frederiksen formed a government alone with the red bloc, it disappeared. In 2022, when the Liberals joined the coalition, it returned. And now, with a government that is red all the way through, it is gone again. In, out, in, out. Not as a conviction that wins and loses, but as a button that is pressed when it serves, and released when it does not.
That is where it reveals itself.
For a person who believes the sentence is true does not put it aside because it currently yields no points. One does not take what is most sacred out as a tool and put it away again.
Frederiksen has spoken beautifully of Christian values - without, by her own account, herself believing in the Christian God - when the country needed to be gathered in a crisis.
And she has let them fall when they cost nothing.
It is not hatred of Christianity. I do not think so, at least. It is something colder. It is a view of humanity that uses the Christian metaphysical claim as long as it is useful, and sets it aside when it is not - precisely as one does with something one does not oneself believe in.
And here is what should stop even the person who has never set foot in a church, and who perhaps even believes he long ago left such things behind.
For you live on it. Christianity.
You may think you have arrived at your convictions by your own power, that you yourself have thought your way to the idea that the Human Being has value, that you have worked it out, as one works out a piece of mathematics, and that anyone else with reason intact would arrive at precisely the same thing.
But the notion that the Human Being is inviolable, that it has value in itself and not only as function, that Conscience stands above Power, that the weak has exactly the same worth as the strong, these are not universal self-evidences that emerge by themselves, anywhere, as soon as people become enlightened enough.
They are, on the contrary, some of the strangest things a human being has ever conceived.
Most civilisations in history have believed the exact opposite. They placed the strong above the weak, because that was what nature itself showed them. They let unwanted children die, because they were a burden. They measured a human being by what it could be used for, which lineage it belonged to, which gods stood behind it.
That the weak and the strong should weigh equally was not self-evident. It was an outrage. A revaluation of everything one had until then considered obvious.
They all come from the same underlying foundation, on which everything standing above rests. It is an inheritance. It grew out of one particular story about humanity being created in God's image, repeated through generations, until it sank below consciousness and became the self-evidence we today mistake for common sense. And we still bear the form left by it, even long after we stopped believing in - or perhaps more accurately, were no longer given deep understanding of - what gave it form.
And once the ground is forgotten, one stops noticing that anything is being carried at all. Everything standing on top, the visible, the tangible, what can be counted and divided, slowly comes to resemble something that stands there by itself, and always has.
It is a bit like how we are currently gripped by a widespread notion that modern prosperity in society is a kind of ground state. Something the world falls back to - by itself - no matter how much one tinkers with it.
But prosperity is the visible. It is what we quarrel about, because we can see it and divide it. Beneath it lies something far less visible, which it actually rests upon. Trust between people who do not know each other. The expectation that the other keeps his word. The assumption that the human being I stand before is more than an obstacle in my way.
And this applies not only to prosperity. It applies to the entire moral language we speak. We walk around believing that freedom, dignity, justice, equality, love of neighbour are the default settings in the Human Being.
The state the world returns to, if only no one ruins it.
But they are not the default settings. They are the exception. They are what grew IN ONE PLACE, because IN ONE PLACE a story was told about the Human Being that NO OTHERS told.
Again and again and again.
And a story told long enough creates, at last, a particular kind of Human Being. A Human Being who believes in the Story. Who lives within it. Who understands both the physical, the metaphysical, and both its own and Creation's deeper origin.
Who it is.
What it is.
Why it is.
That Human Being comes with a price - for the believing Human Being is troublesome to govern. It is, because it does not let itself be reduced to biology, to a cell in a spreadsheet, to a sum of needs to be recorded and administered.
It understands it carries a value within itself that no authority has given it, and which therefore no authority can take from it either. It has its own opinion about what Truth is, what Freedom is, what Justice is, what a Human Being is for. It finds it easier to stand firm, precisely because it is rooted in something that lies deeper than the power standing before it.
And Power cannot use that sort of thing. Not because it hates it, but because it cannot grasp a human being who already belongs to something greater than the State. For it is much easier to govern a Human Being and a People who do not believe that anything in them is Holy.
But there, where something becomes easier, it also becomes tempting. The holy gradually stops being something one protects, and becomes a resistance standing in the way of smooth administration.
And once one is there, it is easiest simply to dismantle that foundation one believes is superfluous, because one is convinced the house will remain standing by itself.
It will not.
And meanwhile.
While with one hand one lets the Christian foundation quietly crumble, because it is no longer useful to mention, with the other a completely different order is growing in Europe.
A political theology that does not distinguish between faith and law and state, that has not reasoned itself out of the sacred, and which is not for a moment embarrassed to say what it is and what it wants. It stands firm. Is proud. Has practice, direction and orientation. And contains everything the Christian faith offered both the Dane and the European - but which is now quietly being dismantled and written out of our common foundation.
We currently live in a culture that has made itself empty, meeting another that is filled to the brim. That displacement has taken place under every single government, red as blue, without anyone ever voting on it. The same culture that is too embarrassed to write down its own inheritance on a piece of paper stands before something that does not know embarrassment at all.
Everyone knows it. Few understand how deep it goes.
It can be said quite simply. In the long run, the culture that has stopped believing in itself loses to the one that has not. Not because the outcome is predetermined, but because the one has set aside what made it worth defending, while the other has not for a moment considered doing the same.
And a civilisation does not disappear the day it is defeated.
It disappears the day it can no longer bring itself to say what it is.
And that is apparently where Mette is.
That is not where I am.
Perhaps you are not either?
❤️🔥🪽
