Seidenfaden, Tøger --- "Hard Secularism as Intolerant Civil Religion: Denmark and the Cartoon Case" [2012] ELECD 293; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Hard Secularism as Intolerant Civil Religion: Denmark and the Cartoon Case

Author(s): Seidenfaden, Tøger

Number of pages: 14

Extract:

10. Hard secularism as intolerant
civil religion: Denmark and the
Cartoon Case
Tøger Seidenfaden

On a secularized continent, Denmark stands out as perhaps the most
secularized country of them all. About half the population claims to
believe in nothing at all, and many of the Danes making up the other half
have religious beliefs which in other communities would hardly qualify as
such (`there is perhaps something rather than nothing between heaven and
earth'), and which are certainly far from theologically correct within
established religions. On the surface, things look different since more than
80 per cent of the population is still baptized into a state-supported
religion, the Lutheran People's Church. Its priests are civil servants and the
highest power in Church affairs is the Minister for the Church, an ordinary
politician who is a member of the cabinet. But surveys of public opinion
and statistics about church attendance reveal that only a small minority of
Danish Lutherans are actively religious.
One might perhaps expect that a thoroughly secularized society, in which
secularization is not the result of a political struggle ­ as in France or
Turkey ­ but a result of a gradual process of modernization with no formal
political consequences, would lead to a highly tolerant society, with reason-
able space for those minorities ­ Lutheran, Muslim or Catholic ­ with a
more active relationship to their faiths and churches.
Taking the national and international crisis known as the `cartoon affair'
as my case, I will suggest that this ...