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I Religiösa skrifter och psalmer samlas Topelius andliga arv: tidningsartiklar, böcker, kyrkosånger och nedskrivna tankar. I Blad ur min tänkebok (1898), som utgavs postumt, samlas texter där Topelius formulerar sin kristna grundsyn och de värderingar som genomsyrar hans författarskap. I Evangelium för Barnen (1893) riktar han sig direkt till barn och förklarar kyrkoårets predikotexter kortfattat och begripligt, på ett barns nivå. Topelius engagemang i flera psalmbokskommittéer gjorde stort avtryck i den psalmbok som antogs 1886, och tretton av hans originalpsalmer finns fortfarande i dagens psalmbok. Utgivare Magnus Nylund, vetenskaplig inledning av Erika Boije, Anna Maria Böckerman & Birgitta Sarelin. Religiösa skrifter och psalmer ingår i utgåvan Zacharias Topelius skrifter som belönades med finska statens pris för informationsspridning 2023. 

What should characterize the people of a nation? The answer to that question has varied in different historical contexts, but in the Nordic countries, the answer has often been sought within a Christian frame of reference, since Christianity has long been a part of nation-building and societal change in the Nordic countries. This is especially evident in times of crisis when the characteristics of the nation and its people have been negotiated and renegotiated. We argue that the study of the societal circulation of knowledge, especially religious knowledge, within the nation and between nations in times of crisis is crucial to the understanding of how religious ideals were implemented into grand national narratives and also images of ideal citizens. In this paper we want to acknowledge the role of Christianity in Nordic nation-building and the later development of the democratic welfare state by taking a closer look at three examples that highlight religion as a relevant factor in the formation of Finland and Sweden in the 19th and the 20th centuries: the Finnish author Zacharias Topelius and his nation-building, the promulgation of a new curriculum for Swedish primary schools during the interwar period and the second World War crisis for the Swedish nation in terms of threatened political independence, national identity and culture. We will examine how concepts of Christianity and morality circulated within and between Finland and Sweden during these different historical contexts that could be described as times of crisis. 

Föreliggande text är skriven för den statliga Sannings- och försoningskommissionen för tornedalingar,kväner och lantalaiset inom ramen för ett avtal mellan trossamfundet Svenska kyrkan och Teologiskainstitutionen vid Uppsala universitet. Uppgiften är enligt detta att kyrkohistoriskt undersöka hur ochförklara varför Svenska kyrkan och dess företrädare bidrog till assimileringspolitiken gentemotmeänkielitalande.I följande artikel kommer jag därför att analysera hur och varför Luleå stift medverkade iförsvenskningen av en språklig minoritet. Nya fakta om stiftsledningens kontakter med företrädare fören särskild form av språknationalism kommer att läggas i dagen. Innan jag börjar den egentliga studienär det dock först viktigt att sätta den kyrkliga språknationalismen i norr i ett större kyrkohistorisktperspektiv.

Im 17. Jahrhundert sind detaillierten theologischen Erlösungsmuster, die Gnaden- oder Heilsordnungen von Theologen der Lutherischen Orthodoxie ausgearbeitet worden. Der Begriff „Ordo Salutis“ ist als Ausdruck für ein kohärentes, von Heiligen Geist gelenktes Geschehen verstanden worden, das zur Seligkeit führt. Begriffe wie Bekehrung, Erleuchtung und Wiedergeburt waren verschiedene synonyme Ausdrücke für ein einziges Phänomen. Um 1700 ist die Heilsordnung laut der Pietismus-Forscherin Carola Nordbäck jedoch immer mehr als Ausdruck einer linearen Sequenz aufgefasst worden. Die Begriffe folgten demnach aufeinander nach einem vorgegebenen Schema. Der Glaube wurde eher psychologisch als ein Aneignungs-und Umwandlungsprozess verstanden, der aus unterschiedlichen Stadien einer Innere Reise besteht. 

Das Schema des 18. Jahrhunderts wurde nach David Hollazius’ (1648–1713) ausgeformt. Seine Ordnung sollte in verschiedene verkürzter Formen die pietistisch beeinflussten Katechismen in den Norden dominieren. Auf diesem Grund entwickelte sich auch neue Schwedische Varianten von „Ordo Salutis“ von pietistisch beeinflussten Verfassers als Anders Norborg (1725–1767) und Henric Schartau, (1757–1825). In dieser Vorlesung werde ich diese in Schweden weit verbreitete Varianten der Heilsordnung problematisieren und sie mit der entsprechenden deutschen Entwicklung vergleichen. Sind die Schwedische innere Wege der Heilsordnung auch Sonderwege?

Late medieval personal belongings such as jewellery, costume details, weapons and tools are sometimes provided with direct and indirect prayers for help and protection, images of Christ and saints relating to motifs in the church interior and in prayer books, and image composition giving associations to altar-screens and shrines. Taken altogether these objects explicitly have a devotional character, which has been further strengthened through analysis of written sources such as exempla and preserved more extensive prayers. This point towards the relevance of talking about these objects as instruments of small-scale and everyday devotion. People were in constant need of help and protection from everyday threats. By relating to preserved prayers and exempla from late medieval Sweden, the article shows that these objects with prayers and holy images were regarded as transmitting divine help, protection, consolation and blessing. Due to the small size and portability of the personal objects carried on the body, divine intervention could take place irrespective of time and space. Lived religion and everyday devotion could therefore be performed anywhere, including on the move.

This dissertation outlines continuity and change in how national socialists in Sweden incorporated ideas of Christianity into their political project to establish a national socialist society from 1925 to 1945. The study includes national socialism into the political family of generic fascism – a genus of political ideology, often expressed as a worldview, whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of revolutionary, anti-egalitarian radical nationalism. The study focuses on Christian national socialism as a current within the Swedish national socialist landscape, showcasing a variety of conceptions pertaining to race, culture, society, history and theology. The study builds on a theoretical framework, which departs from ideas and their context being interrelated and that actors construe thought-figures (tankefigurer) in order to create order and coherence vis-à-vi their surroundings. The actors analysed in this dissertation are: the magazine The Nation, the political parties the Swedish National Socialist Party and the National Socialist Workers’ Party/Swedish Socialist Coalition, the organisation the Manhem Society, and the priests Ernst Ålander and Nils Hannerz. They sought in their political operations to reinforce ideas of a supreme but lost past followed by a degenerated present by desiring a struggle for a pervasive revolutionary national and/or racial revival. Ideas of Christianity were part of their racial interpretations of Swedish society – but in various ways, e.g. in how they related to Norse mythology. In conclusion, Swedish national socialists generally aspired, when issues regarding Christianity were concerned, a racial form of liberal theology interwoven with the Nordic racial soul and “liberated” from alleged Catholic and primarily Jewish elements. The national socialist state they sought to establish would include a folk church (folkkyrka) based on Jesus’ ethical teachings anchored in notions of Nordic racial supremacy.

Although the myth of Atlantis is intimately linked to the “Nordic” in Nordic fascism, research on its ideological implications within the movement is lacking. This chapter analyses interwar Nordic esoteric fascist notions of a mythical continent once located in the extreme north as the origin of the Nordic race and how such ideas served to reconnect that race with the divine. It identifies the idea underlying this aspiration as the Hyperborean narrative, a racialised variant of the myth of Atlantis based on the divine unity of the Nordic race and its racial soul, and outlines the racialisation of interpretations of Atlantis from Plato through Blavatsky's Theosophy and the diverse racialised esoteric current of Ariosophy. It then highlights the Swedish Manhem Society [Samfundet Manhem] to show how this narrative was applied among Nordic fascist actors and in the early years of the National Socialist German Ahnenerbe research institute, in connection with its quest to find the Holy Grail. The chapter concludes that the Hyperborean narrative as delineated by esoteric fascists depicted Atlantis as both grandiose past and future utopia and that the “Nordic” in Nordic fascism refers to both a geographical region and an aspired re-instalment of a paradise lost.

This article aims to analyse how national socialists in interwar Sweden construedand utilised ideas of a “Nordic spirit” and “race psychology” in relation totheir racial conceptions of the north. After briefly depicting the emergenceof various race theories with a particular emphasis on Nordicism, I highlighthow the Manhem Society (Samfundet Manhem) construed ideas of a Nordicspirit, and then display how the National Socialist Workers’ Party (Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet) elaborated on issues relating to race psychology. Iargue that racial conceptions of the north were part of how interwar Swedishnational socialists navigated the contested terrain of what was then modernrace thinking in order to determine the alleged racial foundations of a Nordicsense of being. The Manhem Society’s racial conceptions of the north werelargely based on ideas of a Nordic spirit comprising an alternative trinitarianbelief that was considered hidden but present in the Swedish people’s bloodand soil, whereas the NSAP elaborated on how the internal (soul) related tothe external (body). I conclude that a premise for studying relations betweenesoteric ideas and fascist/national socialist thought in an interwar Scandinaviancontext is to focus on careful historical contextualisation and avoid popularoversimplification.