Sweden: religion
Before the 11th century, people of Sweden adhered to Norse paganism, worshiping Æsir gods, with its centre at the Temple in Uppsala. With Christianization in the 11th century, the laws of the country were changed, forbidding worship of other deities lasted until the late 19th century. However, ancient paganism has slowly but subsquentially returned in Swedish life by forms of Germanic neopaganism during the "pagan revival" of Europe in the 20th century. Today according to some Swedish demographers, neopaganism claims over 100,000 adherents in the Asatru rite, another 100,000 in Odinist sects and 50,000 in other Viking-based faiths have animist, pantheist, polytheist or spiritualist theology. Sweden is behind Iceland and Norway in percentage and the number of European neopagans, but they represent a tiny segment of the Swedish population. [citation needed]
After the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s the Church and State were separated, abolishing the authority of the Roman Catholic bishops, and in the long run allowed only Lutheranism to prevail. This process was not completed until the Uppsala Synod 1593. During the era following the Reformation, usually known as the period of Lutheran Orthodoxy, in the 17th century, small groups of non-Lutherans, especially Calvinist Dutchmen, the Moravian Church and Walloons or French Huguenots from Belgium, played a significant role in trade and industry, were quietly tolerated as long as they kept a low religious profile. The Sami originally had their own shamanistic religion, but they were converted to Lutheranism by Swedish missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Not until liberalization in the late 18th century, were believers of other faiths, including Judaism and Catholicism, allowed to openly live and work in Sweden, although it remained illegal until 1860 for Lutheran Swedes to convert to another religion. The 19th century saw the arrival of various evangelical free churches, and, towards the end of the century secularism began attracting attention, leading people to distance themselves from Church rituals. Leaving the Church of Sweden became legal with the so-called dissenter law of 1860, but only under the provision of entering another denomination. The right to stand outside any religious denomination was established in the Law on Freedom of Religion in 1951.
Today about 78% of Swedes belong to the Church of Sweden, but the number is decreasing by about one per cent every year, and Church of Sweden services are sparsely attended (hovering in the single digit percentages of the population). The reason for the large number of inactive members is that until 1996, all children became members automatically at birth, if at least one of their parents were a member. Since 1996, all children that are baptised become members. Some 275,000 Swedes are today members of various free churches (where congregation attendance is much higher), and, in addition, immigration has meant that there are now some 92,000 Roman Catholics and 100,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians living in Sweden. Due to immigration, Sweden also has a significant Muslim population. As many as 500,000 are Muslims by tradition[18] and between 80,000 - 400,000 of these are practicing Muslims. (See also Islam in Sweden)
According to the most recent Eurostat "Eurobarometer" poll, in 2005, 23% of Swedish citizens responded that "they believe there is a god", whereas 53% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 23% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force". Sweden ranks aside with France and Russia on having a large minority of its citizens who have no religion, despite recent trends of new and renewed religious practices in the country.[citation needed] Independent of these statistics, it is gererally known that Swedish society, collectively, is not particularly religious.
Source: Wikipedia