Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.07.2018, Page 14

14 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16— 2018
Iceland is one of seven countries in the
world that still has a national Lutheran
church. If you’ve only driven around
the country without talking much to
Icelanders themselves, you might think
Iceland was a deeply religious country.
From Reykjavík to the tiniest village
in the countryside, every municipal-
ity has its own church, often erected
at the highest elevation in the area. By
all outward appearances, Iceland is a
solidly Christian country and support
for the national church is strong.
Look just beneath the surface,
however, and the church appears more
to be built on sand than rock. The
percentage of Icelanders registered in
the national church has been falling
steadily for the past 20 years now, with
about a third of the country no longer
registered in the church. Less than half
identify as regular church-goers, and
the number of Icelanders who consider
themselves “religious” in any sense has
also been dwindling.
There are many explanations for
the modern Icelander’s growing aliena-
tion from the national church, but the
greatest threat to the church’s exist-
ence is arguably the church itself. This
can be divided into two main points
of contention: the tax money allocated
to the church, and a series of sexual
abuses scandals within the church
that were made all the more hurtful by
the church’s response to them. While
Iceland’s national church is consider-
ably more progressive than, for exam-
ple, the Roman Catholic church, there
is still room for improvement.
You cannot serve both God
and mammon
To understand how the church makes
its money, it’s important to understand
the concept of church registration. That
is to say, it’s not 100% voluntary to sign
up. Up until 2013, any child born in
Iceland whose mother was
in the national church was
automatically registered in
it as well. Today, while both
parents now need to be in
t h e c h u r c h
for automatic
registration to
happen, new
members of
the church are effectively
grandfathered in. Many
of these new members
don’t bother to take steps
to de-register, and simply
remain in the church,
whether they’re actually
practicing Lutherans or
not.
By Icelandic law, if you are regis-
tered in a religious organisation, part
of your taxes go directly to that institu-
tion. These taxes are known as “parish
fees.” Further, as government support
for the national church is enshrined
in Iceland’s constitution, there are also
budget allocations made to the church.
The most recent funding allocations
to the church total over 2.8 billion ISK,
and this is before we even get into the
individual charges that ministers might
levy for functions such as weddings,
baptisms and confirmations.
What does all this money translate
into? The average starting salary for a
parish minister is just under 600,000
ISK, and Bishop Agnes M. Sigurðardót-
tir makes 1.55 million ISK each month.
Is this because her expenses are high?
On the contrary, it seems: her official
residence, a 487m2 house on Berg-
staðastræti (in fairness, a residence
that tradition requires the Bishop to
live in) with a real estate value of 185
million ISK, charges her a rent of only
90,000 ISK per month—a price many
Icelanders would kill to pay for even a
room downtown, let alone an apart-
ment.
On top of all this, the church
continously complains that they do
not have enough money to operate
and continuously ask for
more; a complaint that was
particularly prominent
right after the 2008 crash.
When the government’s
Wage Commit-
t e e a w a r d e d
the Bishop a
21% pay rise
l a s t D e c e m -
ber, in addition to a one-
time retroactive payment
of 3.24 million ISK, this
understandably generated
considerable criticism in a
country where most people
are facing a housing crisis
and have seen their wages
rise very little, if at all, in
recent years.
The sins of the fathers
With sexual abuse within the Catho-
lic church grabbing headlines around
the world, it is easy to forget that the
Catholics are not alone in this horror,
and that even the national church of
Iceland is not innocent.
The tipping point in the discussion
came in 2010. It was centred around
one woman – Guðrún Ebba Ólafsdót-
tir, daughter of former bishop Ólafur
Skúlason. She wrote a letter to the
bishop at the time, Karl Sigurbjörns-
son, calling for the church to take addi-
tional measures to combat sexual abuse
between clergy and the congregation.
She urged the church to “come clean”
and to confront instances of sexual
abuse that have been committed within
the walls of the church.
Guðrún Ebba specifically spoke up
about the abuse she suffered at the
hands of her father, and she wasn’t
alone. Several other women have since
come forward, saying that they were
also molested by Ólafur, and that they
reported this to church officials, but
they were told to stay quiet.
More recently, it has come to light
that Þórir Stephensen, a minister within
the national church and a confessed
child molester, is still performing the
official duties of a minister within the
auspices of the church.
It is not what goes into
the mouth that defiles a
person, but what comes
out
All of these issues, from the ever-
increasing budgets and salaries to the
sex abuse scandals, might be fixable in
some extent or another. However, the
response of the Bishop to these vari-
ous issues arguably only makes matters
worse, most of the time.
When it comes to declining
church registration and attendance,
the Bishop has said that is due to an
increase in immigration to Iceland as
well as Icelanders leaving the country.
However, people who leave the coun-
try are not automatically deregistered
from the church; they have to fill out
the necessary form to do so. In addi-
tion, even if people were deregistered
upon leaving Iceland, 2014 data from
Statistics Iceland shows that only 400
more Icelanders left the country that
year than moved to the country – in
that same year, about 2,000 people
deregistered from the national church.
Further, by the same Statistics Iceland
data cited earlier, 2014 only saw an
influx of 860 more foreigners entering
the country than leaving it. By contrast,
some 12,000 people have deregistered
from the church from 2010 to 2014.
The Bishop also contended in 2015
that separation of church and state
already exists in Iceland, because the
church handed over some 600 prop-
erties to the state in 1997. Helgi Hrafn
Gunnarsson, who was an MP for the
Pirate Party at the time, was amongst
those who pointed out the strangeness
of this definition of “separation.”
In a now notorious interview that
appeared in the magazine DV late last
month, when the Bishop was asked
directly about whether she thought it
was right that a man who confessed to
molesting a 10-year-old girl should be
allowed to conduct mass, she responded
that she was not sure “whether that is
unnatural in itself,” and that while the
past cannot be changed, “We also have
something in the church that’s called
forgiveness.”
Rendering to Caesar
In fairness, the Bishop has also made
public declarations that the church has
problems, and that sex offenders within
the institution cannot be ignored
and must be rooted out. But shifting
attitudes towards religion, declining
attendance and registration, and sex
abuse scandals certainly don’t help.
Not least of all when the Bishop, while
defending the church, ends up fanning
the flames of discontent, however
unwittingly.
The Exodus From
The Church
One of Iceland's oldest institutions in an existential crisis
“Shifting
attitudes
towards
religion, declining atten-
dance and registration,
and sex
a b u s e
scandals
certainly
don’t help.
Built on rock or sand?
Words:
Andie Fontaine
Photo:
Wikimedia
Commons