Abstract
In this book, Halldorf analyzes the life and leadership of the Swedish Pentecostal leader Lewi Pethrus (1884–1974), a monumental figure in modern Scandinavian religious history, while focusing on the politics of the Swedish Pentecostal movement. In this, he engages the work of Max Weber and draws particularly on Luke Bretherton’s understanding of the concept politics as wider than merely party politics. Here, politics is determined by the understanding of the nature of the common life; the structures that sustain this common life; and the relational and communicative practices that enable a common life that includes friends, strangers, and enemies. Pentecostalism is often understood as an apolitical movement that turned to politics in the 1970s and then partnered with right-wing parties. If that account holds true for US Pentecostalism, it does not for the Swedish Pentecostal movement. Halldorf illustrates how Pethrus, the father of the movement, became politically involved as early as the 1940s and started a political party in 1964. Unlike his later American counterparts, though Pethrus was culturally conservative, he favored a progressive economic politics. The strength and vitality of Swedish Pentecostalism challenges the image of Sweden as the world’s most secular country.
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Notes
- 1.
See Elisabeth Björklund and Mariah Larsson, eds., Swedish Cinema and the Sexual Revolution (Jefferson: McFarland, 2016). On the struggle to define modern Swedish identity, see Martin Wiklund, I det modernas landskap (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2006). For an overview of Swedish modernization from an economic perspective, see Lennart Schön, Sweden’s Road to Modernity (Stockholm: SNS förlag, 2017). A philosophical and cultural perspective is offered in Ola Sigurdson, Den lyckliga filosofin (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2000).
- 2.
For a presentation and analysis of the World Value Studies, see, for example, Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 19–51. For discussions of Sweden’s position in this study, see Lars Trägårdh, ed., State and Civil Society in Northern Europe (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). There is a tremendous amount of literature on secularization in Sweden, see, for example, Grace Davie, “The Changing Nature of Religion in Northern Europe,” in Welfare and Religion, ed. Anders Bäckström (Uppsala: Diakonivetenskapliga institutets skriftserie, 2005). Lately David Thurfjell has contributed to new perspectives; see David Thurfjell, Det gudlösa folket (Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei, 2015). See also Ann af Burén, Living Simultaneity (Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2016) who describes modern Swedes as “semi-secular.”
- 3.
Ivar Lundgren, Lewi Pethrus i närbild (Stockholm: Den kristna bokringen, 1973), 84.
- 4.
Ibid., 61.
- 5.
Lewi Pethrus, Den anständiga sanningen (Stockholm: C. E. Fritzes Bokförlag, 1953), 288.
- 6.
Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1964): 371–378. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (London: Pinter and Martin, 1974).
- 7.
See Stanley Milgram and Thomas Blass, eds., The Individual in a Social World (London: Pinter & Martin, 2010). The experiment is discussed in Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019), 473–474.
- 8.
This perspective goes even further back to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. After World War II, Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt reflected further on this theme.
- 9.
On the historical and political roots of the Swedish statist-individualism, see Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, Är svensken människa? (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2015). See also Lars Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” in The Cultural Construction of Norden, eds. Bo Stråth and Øystein Sørensen (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997).
- 10.
In his classic study of Swedish culture and politics, Childs notes “the remarkable homogeneity of this people.” See Marquis William Childs, Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), xii. For an overview of studies of Swedish culture, see Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, Är svensken människa? (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2015), 29–42. It is also a feature noted by Jenkins; see David Jenkins, Sweden and the Price of Progress (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968), 134. A recent study discusses the difficulties of religious pluralism in Sweden due to its homogeneity of values; see Eli Göndör, Religionskollision (Stockholm: Timbro, 2017), particularly 21–22, 112, 132–133.
- 11.
Olof Petersson, “Democracy and Power in Sweden,” Scandinavian Political Studies 14, no. 2 (1991): 173–191. Abby Peterson, Håkan Thörn and Mattias Wahlström, “Sweden 1950–2015,” in Popular Struggle and Democracy in Scandinavia, ed. Flemming Mikkelsen et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Eli Göndör, Religionskollision (Stockholm: Timbro, 2017).
- 12.
See the definition by J. Milton Yinger: “I suggest the use of the term contraculture wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group’s values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationship of the group to a surrounding dominant culture.” See J. Milton Yinger, “Contraculture and Subculture,” American Sociological Review 25, no. 5 (1960): 629.
- 13.
The quotes are from the main organ Evangelii Härold, when they rejoiced over the recruitment of a Lutheran priest. Evangelii Härold 2 (1916), 189. Ulrik Josefsson, Liv och över nog (Skellefteå: Artos), 299.
- 14.
On Pentecostal mission, see David Bundy, Visions of Apostolic Mission (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009).
- 15.
Andreas Thörn, En framgångsrik främling (Örebro: Örebro universitet, 2014), 13.
- 16.
On Pethrus’s influence on Pentecostalism in the US, see Joseph Colletti, “Lewi Pethrus: His Influence upon Scandinavia-American Pentecostalism,” Pneuma 5, no. 2 (1983): 18–29. Tommy Davidsson comments that Pethrus’s “extensive personal network with key leaders across Europe and the United States provided him with an unprecedented platform to promote his own ideas and limit the influence of others.” Tommy Davidsson, Lewi Pethrus’ Ecclesiological Thought 1911–1974 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2.
- 17.
Joseph Colletti, “Lewi Pethrus: His Influence upon Scandinavia-American Pentecostalism,” Pneuma 5, no. 2 (1983): 18–29. David Bundy, “Social Ethics in the Church of the Poor: The Cases of T. B. Barratt and Lewi Pethrus,” JEPTA 22 (2002): 30–44. Torbjörn Aronson, “Spirit and Church in the Ecclesiology of Lewi Pethrus,” Pentecostudies 11, no. 2 (2012): 192–212. Joel Halldorf, “Lewi Pethrus and the Creation of a Christian Counterculture,” Pneuma 32, no. 3 (2010): 354–368. There is one monograph as well: Tommy Davidsson, Lewi Pethrus’ Ecclesiological Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Pethrus also plays a big part in David Bundy’s dissertation; see David Bundy, Visions of Apostolic Mission (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2009).
- 18.
See, for instance, Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1977), 7, 430, 473. Donald Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2000), 178. Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires (New York: Orbis Books, 2007), 51, 194, 205.
- 19.
There is considerably more on Pethrus in Swedish, but neither author of the two first dissertations concerning Pethrus—Carl-Erik Sahlberg and Carl-Gustav Carlsson—have published anything on him in English.
- 20.
See Murray W. Dempster, Dyron D. Klaus, and Douglas Petersen, The Globalization of Pentecostalism (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1999).
- 21.
Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 32–35. I borrow Bretherton’s taxonomy with slight changes to make it fit my object of study. The differences have to do with the fact that I study a community within the larger body of national politics. Statecraft—politics in the second sense—then becomes the government of the Swedish Pentecostal movement, not the state.
- 22.
The perspective of church as politics is generally associated with theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas.
- 23.
William Cavanaugh, “Church,” in The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, eds. Peter Scott and William Cavanaugh (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 393.
- 24.
For more on this, see Joel Halldorf, Av denna världen (Skellefteå: Artos, 2012). The concept of multiple modernities is introduced by Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–29. His focus is however on the occurrence of different modernities worldwide, not within the western world.
- 25.
Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
- 26.
- 27.
Tommy Davidsson uses “Filadelfia Church,” and Andreas Thörn uses “Philadelphia church.” See Tommy Davidsson, Lewi Pethrus’ Ecclesiological Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2015) and Andreas Thörn, En framgångsrik främling (Örebro: Örebro universitet, 2014).
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Halldorf, J. (2020). Introduction: A Life Bent Toward Politics. In: Pentecostal Politics in a Secular World. Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47051-7_1
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