“OBEYING GOD RATHER THAN MAN” (ACTS 5:29): CHRISTIAN FAITH IN CONFRONTATION WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN SWEDEN
“OBEYING GOD RATHER THAN MAN” (ACTS 5:29): CHRISTIAN FAITH IN CONFRONTATION WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IN SWEDEN

Summary/Abstract: At present Sweden is, like other industrialized countries, a highly secularized society. The Church of Sweden, divorced from the state in the year 2000, has lost most of its influence and has become more or less a service institution to lend solemnity to the rites-de-passage of life: baptism, weddings and funerals. Since the 1930s there has been a politically oriented change in the view of the family. The core family as the foundation of society has gradually been dissolved. The system in which the housewife takes care of her family and home with the husband as the sole provider has changed. Both husband and wife pay tax on their own incomes, rather than each paying tax on half of the family’s total income. This has made it virtually impossible to manage with only one provider. The political ideal for women was to become independent economically. With the social “revolution” of 1968, everybody was led to believe that the only way of “realizing oneself” was to get a job outside the home. The children should be taken care of in public day centers. With both man and wife fully occupied outside the home little time was left for family life. Within this completely secularized society there exist small, struggling groups whose lives are dominated by Christian ideals. I have studied one such group consisting of pietistic believers within the Church of Sweden: a remnant of the great revival that swept the west coast of Sweden in the last century and the beginning of the 1900s. They maintain a different way of life in confrontation with what is today considered as politically correct.

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