Introduction

While the concept of religious literacy has gained attention in the Anglo-Saxon world (Dinham and Francis, 2015), it is still new and hardly used in Nordic debates about religion. However, given the fact that the Nordic countries are often characterised as being at the forefront of secularisation (Welzel, 2013), one might anticipate that the Nordic countries should be at the forefront of debates about religious literacy.

In order to explore understandings of religious literacy in the Nordic countries, this chapter focuses particularly on the field of welfare and religion that has been recognised as an important arena to explore the changed role of religion between public and private spheres (Bäckström, 2014). The first part argues for the welfare perspective by presenting recent research in the sociology of religion that describes the interface between religion and the public sphere as Nordic complexity, and by referring to studies in Political Science highlighting the significance of religion for the formation and organisation of (European) welfare systems. This discourse about the role of religious organisations in welfare overlaps partly with the discourse about the role of civil society organisations in the Nordic welfare society. The second part explores Nordic studies about welfare and religion, pointing to a specific Nordic approach to the concept of religious literacy. The third part deepens this question with the help of two examples from Nordic case studies, a Swedish and a Norwegian one, that come from two recent Nordic research projects about the role of religious organisations in welfare and civil society. These examples illustrate that religious literacy should not only be thought of as the skill development of individuals and different groups of professionals, but also include an organisational perspective. Moreover, they also raise the question as to what kind of religious literacy is needed in Sweden and Norway.

Nordic complexity

Changes in the religious landscape

Nordic researchers in the field of religion tend to underline how complicated the religious situation in their countries is. The situation of religion in Sweden has been characterised as complex, based on more than 10 studies that were conducted with the aim of capturing the preconditions and possible effects of the transition of the Lutheran Church of Sweden from a state church to a free folk church in 2000 (Bäckström et al, 2004).