The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Blaðsíða 13

Vol. 58 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
55
of a more liberal perspective during the
great religious debate with Pall
Thorlaksson a decade earlier, Bjarnason
now found himself defending the increas-
ingly conservative position of the Lutheran
church, which was growing closer to the
doctrinal emphases of denominational
Lutheranism in North America and away
from the relative theological liberalism of
the church in Iceland.
Even before Stephansson’s announce-
ment of the Cultural Society appeared in
Logberg, Jon Bjarnason attacked the new
organization in the pages of Sameiningin,
writing, “one should not overlook that this
society has been organized by uneducated
Icelandic farmers who have attained such
arrogance here in America that they con-
sider themselves competent to challenge
the Christian Church, the greatest institu-
tion of all time.”17 As the debate pro-
gressed, church leaders were not alone in
their concern about this new development.
Like other ethnic communities in Canada
and the United States, the church had
become an important symbol of cultural
solidarity among the Icelanders, helping
them to preserve their language and cus-
toms against the forces of assimilation.18
At the time, the Lutheran Synod was the
only significant institution, other than the
newspapers, that bound Icelanders in
North America together beyond the local
level. So even the unchurched were natural-
ly concerned when conflict arose between
the Synod and the Cultural Society, though
for cultural rather than religious reasons.
Stephansson was immersed in the writ-
ings of the leading freethinkers of his day,
for whom even Unitarianism was held to
be confining and conservative. He was
familiar with the work of Frances
Ellingwood Abbott, a founder of the Free
Religious Association, Felix Adler, the
founder of the Ethical Culture movement,
and Robert Ingersoll, who was called The
Great Agnostic. Both Stephansson and
Bjorn Petursson, the founder of the first
Icelandic Unitarian church, read The
Index, a weekly published in Boston by the
Free Religious Association under the edi-
torship of William J. Potter and B.F.
Underwood. When The Index ceased pub-
lication in 1886, its list of subscribers was
transferred to Unity, a publication of the
Western Unitarian Conference in Chicago.
While the Icelandic Cultural Society owed
much to Stephansson’s familiarity with the
freethought movement, it was not, strictly
speaking, a freethought organization,
whatever Bjarnason and the synod may
have believed. Several of its members had
withdrawn from the church but others
appear to have remained.
For the thirty-four year-old
Stephansson, the organization of the
Icelandic Cultural Society marked a water-
shed in his life. To begin with, it was in
announcing the society's formation that he
unveiled his new identity to the world,
becoming Stephan G. Stephansson instead
of Stefan Gudmundsson. Unlike some of
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