The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark: From Emancipation to Ethnocentrism?

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10.TheParadoxofSecularisminDenmark: FromEmancipationtoEthnocentrism?

Lars Dencik

D enmark, like Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, is today a highly developed society, fully committed to progress and modernization.

Individuals, as in the other Scandinavian countries, are granted extensive social rights. Denmark is also characterized by being a stable democracy organized as a comprehensive and well-functioning welfare state.1

Measured by GNP per capita, Denmark belongs among the most affluent countries in the world. The Gini-index of income is low, meaning that there is a fairly equal distribution of wealth among the population. There are no sharp divisions in terms of social class, and the population as a whole is well educated. Recent studies have also shown that all the Scandinavian countries rate among those having the best quality of life in the world.2 Other studies show that the Danes, not least its youth, rate as the world’s most satisfied citizens.3

Not only is egalitarianism highly valued in Denmark, as in the other Scandinavian countries, but these countries also have had—up until recently—an extraordinarily high degree of ethnic homogeneity. With very few exceptions:

• All citizens belonged to the same state-governed Lutheran church.

• All citizens spoke the unique language of the country, a language spoken by all inhabitants of the country but spoken almost nowhere outside the country.

• All citizens shared the experience and consciousness of a long and unified national history.

However, in the wake of the radical modernization that has taken place in the Scandinavian countries over the last decades, two processes relevant to the discussion of secularism in society have taken place:

126 SeculariSm & Secularity

1) The church as an institution, and the influence of religious thought on politics and social affairs in general, has lost influence.

2) Increased migration and cultural globalization has significantly affected the fabric of social life.

Actually, the weakened position of the church and of the influence of religious ideas in society has a longer history. It goes back to the early 1930s, to the breakthrough of rationalism in connection with building a modern welfare-state society. In the decades after World War II this process became radicalized. This did not have as much to do with the experiences of the war or of the Holocaust as with the dynamics of social modernization itself.

From a social psychological view this has meant a process of de-tradition-alization.4 In matters such as family life and childrearing, people adapted to radically modern life conditions by no longer doing what had been the “normal thing to do,” but rather felt a need to “invent” new ways they perceived as more adequate to the new conditions.

Where Tradition Had Ruled Reflection Took Over

Today, Scandinavians travel at great speed towards an ever-more radicalized modernity—unknown as to form and content, yet carried along by the same processes that created modern Denmark and the other Scandinavian welfare states: rationalization, individuation, and secularization. These processes have continued to act as transformational forces in society but now with modernity itself as the point of departure.

• Rationalization implies that effectiveness, utility, and profitability are superior considerations in all spheres of life.

• Individuation has meant that individuals have become singled out socially, and “disembedded” from their social background, as the noted British sociologist Anthony Giddens5 puts it. Nowadays they are—ideally—treated as representatives only of themselves, not of any ascribed collective, be it kinships, ethnic group, or religious affiliation.

• Secularization has opened up the opportunity for critical questioning of established values and religious traditions.

Thus, each contemporaneous modernity is in turn replaced by the changes that further modernization brings about. Individuals live in an era of continuous modernization of modernity—an “era of shifts”—that implies a constant radicalization of modernity.6

12710. the Paradox of SeculariSm in denmark

Change and shifts are communicating vessels. As conditions change indi-viduals as well as social and cultural collectives, artistic groupings as well as organizations, must continuously find new ways to cope with their existential predicaments in order simply to remain in their current positions in society. The need to find a new balance between continuously shifting orientations, strategies, and attitudes—in short, of social identity—and the need to keep one’s integrity, becomes a significant part of one’s existential game.7

This is the essence of a post-traditional world, a world in which both knowledge and traditions can be found and cultivated but no longer function as obligatory and controlling cultural patterns for the individual. Rather, there are opportunities for choice and for creating a mix that suits the individual.

Understanding individuation is necessary to understanding secularization. A seemingly paradoxical tendency occurs in the wake of radical modernization: some people evince a propensity to religious and/or national fundamentalism—what I in another context have labeled the tendency towards “neo-tribalism.”8

Individuation is one side of a psychological coin, the other side of which is a yearning for belonging. Thus radicalization of modernity from the point of view of the individual tends to create two seemingly contradictory but, in reality, deeply connected tendencies. On one hand, the individual becomes increasingly socially “disembedded,” free to, but also forced to, choose among an increasing number of life options. On the other hand and by the same token, the individual also becomes increasingly “existentially lonely,” prone to involve her or himself in anything that glimpses at an experience of belonging, a sense of “we-ness” —such as a family, a gang, a nation, or a religious grouping.

Secularization

Now to the issue of secularization. How is this defined in the modern Scandinavian welfare states? Three partly overlapping points cover the common understanding fairly well:

• Social affairs should be handled in a “rational” way, meaning that no religious or other “metaphysical” belief systems should be allowed to interfere with—not to say govern—political decisions. Nor should religious values, feelings and interests be given special considerations in the handling of social affairs.

• There should be no interference of religion in the political, social, educational, and scientific fields.

• Religion is privatized and should be regarded and handled by citizens purely as a question of a person’s “inner” beliefs.


Yet in this context a remarkable fact is that during the whole process of modernization the state-church system in Denmark and Sweden has remained intact. Denmark today maintains a state church, and Sweden separated church from state only at the turn of the millenium. The present state-church system in Denmark implies:

• According to the constitution (§54) the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the Danish People’s Church (Folkekirke) and is as such supported by the state, which means that the Lutheran religion and its institutions and churches are given a favored place among religions in Danish society. All tax-paying citizens, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, thus contribute to the priests and bishops of the Folkekirke.

• According to §56 of the constitution the King (or the Queen if she is the Head of State, as is presently the case) has to belong to the Lutheran Church.

• The governmental system includes a “Ministry for the Church” headed by one member of the Danish government (at present the person in charge is also the Minister for Education). The Danish government appoints the leading officials of the Folkekirke, such as the Archbishop and the bishops.

• Every year the official opening of Parliament is accompanied by a Lutheran religious service in the annexed church (Slotskirken).

• Practically all citizens are automatically members of the Folkekirke from birth. Not to be so included requires that the citizen takes an initiative to leave the church. At present 83 percent of the Danish population belong to the Folkekirke.

• The public community schools (Folkeskolen) all teach “Christianity classes.” Only when pupils reach the senior classes are they taught about other religions. When the children reach the 7th or 8th grade they are given 48-56 lessons at their school in order to prepare for their religious confirmation.

• Most, if not all, official holidays in Denmark, such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Christ’s Ascension, etc. follow the Lutheran Church calendar.

There rests a strange paradox in this: from one point of view Denmark is clearly a Christian country—as are by more or less the same standards the other Scandinavian countries. Looked at from another point of view, however,


Denmark, as well as Sweden, is a highly secular society. In the wake of the infamous publication in the fall of 2005 of the Muhammad

cartoons in Denmark’s largest daily newspaper, Jyllandsposten, there arose an intense debate about the status of religion in Danish society. The Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmusen, leader of the liberal-conservative coalition government, is one of President Bush’s closest allies on the international scene. According to several serious analysts his behavior on the diplomatic scene following the publication of the caricatures was an active cause of subsequent events in the Muslim world:

On February 15, 2006, he made the following statement on Danish Public TV: “We shall be careful not to allow religion to fill up too much in the public space.” A little later, he clarified his position in an article titled “Keep religion indoors” in the leading Danish daily newspaper Politiken. In that article he stated:

We shall keep religion and politics separate. In the Danish State of Law it is the laws proclaimed by the Parliament that rule—not the Bible, the Koran or other holy texts.

He continued:

Less religion in the public space implies that the believers keep their dogmas for themselves—and allows others the right to believe and think something else.

And he added:

Religion may release human beings from freedom and responsibility: This is particularly true when holy texts are presented by legalistic religions that prescribe in detail how the individual believer shall lead his or her life.9

In a speech given at the occasion of the Danish Constitution Day, June 5, 2006, he elaborated on this matter, saying:

Religion is and remains a personal matter between the individual and the God the person may believe in.... In Denmark neither the Bible nor the Koran nor any other holy book is elevated above public debate.... It is dangerous when personal beliefs become substituted by a religious law according to which the individual human being should subordinate himself to prescriptions that are thousands of years old. And society be arranged according to religious decrees.


Given the context, the Prime Minister’s implicit attack on “legalistic (law) religions” clearly refers to Islam. It is noteworthy that in the article quoted above, the prime minister also proclaimed both that the Danish state does not have— and shall not have—any religion, and that he is a warm supporter of the existing Danish state church system, the Folkekirken. Thus he wrote:

Religious beliefs of course affect a person’s attitudes to many of the topics that are debated in the public space...in that way religious faith influences both attitudes and actions...in that respect religion will always be present in the public space.... The Danish history and culture and Danish society is penetrated by Christian thinking—simply because most Danes are Christians…. In that regard religion and politics can not be separated.

On the same occasion the speaker of the Danish Parliament,10 a member of the same political party as the Prime Minister, in his speech stated:

Denmark is an old Christian country. This has been imprinted in gen-erations. We see it in the arts and in the literature. We can note it in our flag —the cross-banner.

The Vice Prime Minister and leader of the Danish Conservative Party, Bendt Bendtsen, on the same occasion reiterated the same line of thought and warned that:

Pushing our religion—Christianity—into the backyard.... We enjoy religious freedom in this country, but religious freedom does not mean equality among religions. Christianity has and shall have a favored position.

Two days later, the vice prime minister, in an interview in the largest Danish morning newspaper, elaborated on his position:

Christianity is under pressure…rather than abolishing religion in the public space it may be timely for us to strengthen the Christian foundations of our society.... Denmark and Western Europe rest on a foundation of values that build on Christianity.... Christianity is in the public space, and I acknowledge the values that Christianity give me as a person and as a politician, and I don’t want to hide that.11

It should be noted in this context that neither the prime minister nor the vice prime minister approve of the idea that religious symbols—be it a Christian cross or a Muslim hijab—should be prohibited in public.


“We have a society based on Christianity, and this means that there is room for Muslims to cultivate their religion. I do not approve of prohibitions and law regulations on this field,” he said.12

It may be noted here how sharply the Danish, and in a larger context, the Scandinavian, interpretation of secularism, differs from the more well-known French understanding of this, as summarized in the concept of laïcité.

A Secularized Lutheranism

In Denmark, as in the other Scandinavian countries, an institutionalized Luth-eran Christian belief system today exists in symbiosis with dominating secular values. In these countries the values and system of democracy have strong popular backing, as do the ideas of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to individual choice—for instance in religious beliefs and practices. These “secular” notions extend to the ideas of gender equality, children’s rights, and that each individual has the right to choose romantic partner(s) and to shape his or her sexual life style according to personal preferences.

This amalgamates into what I, for want of a better notion, label a dominant cosmology of secularized Lutheranism. Although Denmark (and Sweden) is a country in which most of the citizens by tradition belong to the Lutheran state church Folkekirken, Christianity as a practiced religion does not characterise the life of a large segment of the population.

The number of churchgoers on any regular Sunday is below 5 percent of the adult population13 and even on the religious holidays (with the exception of the traditional Danish Christmas Eve service) doesn’t rise much above that. A good 80 percent of the population can be characterized as “secular” in the sense that religious practices do not have any place at all in their daily lives. Nor do they in any substantial part support the Christian-Democratic political party—in Denmark that party attracts hardly 2 percent of the voters in general elections (in Sweden a little over 4 percent).

Paradoxical as it may seem, still most of the citizens are members of the Folkekirke. The church is used by a large majority of the citizens only for lifecycle events—entry and exit services—birth/baptism, confirmation, weddings (to a lesser extent) and death/burials.

However, even if religious practices have a remarkably weak hold on the vast majority of Danes and Swedes, and even if secular values are strongly held, the everyday world view and daily life ethics of most Danes and Swedes are profoundly coloured by certain Christian, or rather Lutheran, values: the Protestant ethics14 of hard work and diligence, combined with a preference for handling human affairs in a “rational” way. In an analysis of the formation of


the modern Danish and Swedish welfare states three intertwined processes have been pointed out: rationalism, secularism and individuation.15 Religion is regarded as purely a question of private inner beliefs.

Within the cosmology of secularized Lutheranism virtually everything is measured according to its utility, nothing is really ”holy,” and religiosity should play no role in social affairs. This penetrates the Danish and Swedish societies to the extent that the very categories by which one organises and evaluates social affairs in Denmark and Sweden are tinted by the tacit values and viewpoints of the secularized Lutheran cosmology.

Nearly a year after the infamous so-called Muhammad Crisis, when Danish embassies and flags where burned in several Muslim countries, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reiterated and underlined this attitude.

We should regard each other as citizens and as human beings and not as Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists. Religion should be erased as a criterion when organizing the activities of public institutions and in the construction of laws.16

Even if not as outspoken as in some other countries, such as the Jewish state of Israel and the Muslim Republic of Pakistan, there prevails in Denmark an intriguing relationship between religion and nation.

Looking at the Danish society from the point of view of the sociology of religion, it is quite striking that regardless of a citizen’s stand on religious issues, the vast majority of them are members of the Folkekirken. They are, of course, also Danish citizens, and also share what may be called a perspective of Danishness, referring to the certain cultural prism through which one experiences the world.

These three factors, secularized Lutheranism, Danish citizenship, and Danishness as a prism of experiencing, constitute three cornerstones of a triangle into which any Dane can be placed.

So What About Danishness?

At present in Denmark what constitutes Danishness, and how—if at all—a non-native Dane may achieve that, is a very hot issue.

In order to illustrate the mechanisms that constitute a cultural prism I want to give an example that I know from my own experience and that at present is much less disputed than Danishness—the cultural prism of Swedishness. By growing up in Sweden, by having Swedish as one’s mother tongue, and by having spent one’s formative years in a Swedish school—as I have—one acquires a Swedish way of perceiving the world.


This may manifest itself in the way one perceives society and interprets social justice, but also with a rather special affection, bordering on religious devotion, for nature as such. There is a way of appreciating wild forests, red cottages, empty landscapes, and beaming sunshine that is more or less “typically Swedish.” The fact that the songs of Swedish folklore and the special products of Swedish cuisine evoke positive associations and feelings among some Swedes is only because they are Swedish.

Over the past two decades cultural globalization has challenged whatever Danishness has meant to Danes. In particular, the migration of Muslim groups into the Danish welfare state. Today, approximately 6 percent of the inhabitants of Denmark are immigrants or children of immigrants, not all of them Muslims but most of them refugees from Turkey, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent workforce immigrants from Pakistan. Their presence in Denmark has become a major issue on the contemporary political scene in Denmark. Having for long been a country of extraordinary cultural homogeneity––the very phenomenon of a culturally “deviant” presence in the Danish society, and in particular the fact that it is a Muslim group, has sharpened the awareness among Danes of their own cultural heritage, life-style, and values.

This has, to some extent, led to a strengthened awareness of, and stress on, Denmark’s Christian heritage. Christianity in Denmark may be said to have developed into an ethnocultural demarcation sign. The situation has also meant that the Danish Government has launched commissions to define a Danish cultural canon in all fields of the arts, including stating which Danish literary works should be compulsory readings in schools.

But more significantly in this context, this has meant a sharpened articu- lation of the secular values modern Denmark celebrates: political freedom, freedom of expression (including the right to criticize and even to ridicule religious and other “holy” texts and symbols), individualism (also within the family, for instance with respect to children’s rights) and every individual’s right to live according to one’s own individual preferences, sexual liberalism (includ-ing relaxed attitudes to homosexuality, to being “daringly dressed” in public, to pornography, etc.), and women’s rights and gender equality in all spheres of life.

Not only have these secular values become more clearly articulated than before, they are nowadays also launched, at times aggressively, as values that express the very essence of contemporary Danishness. One implication is that those who, for cultural and religious reasons, cannot accept these values become targeted for being non-Danish, and at times even harassed for representing values basically antithetic and hostile to Danishness.


As in other European countries the success of what might be called “traditional secularism,” advocating the independence of politics, education, science and social affairs from religious dogmas and institutions, in Denmark has served as a vehicle for emancipation and democracy. The question is: what social role does traditional secularism serve today, given the context of cultural globalisation and migration and given the content of the secular values advocated as characterizing contemporary Danishness?

A “New Xenophobia” and the Neo-Tribalist Backlash17

Finding an answer to the question posed above requires broadening the per-spective both in time and space.

During the last decade a virtual inversion of the traditional image of Den-mark as an overly tolerant and humane and liberal society has taken place. Globalization, increased migration, and enhanced mobility within Europe have contributed to diminishing the congruence between Blut (blood) und Boden (soil), to use a renowned and infamous German phrase, on the European continent. This in turn has had repercussions in a wave of “new xenophobia,” a xenophobia, paradoxical as it may sound, in the name of tolerance, and populist politics in several European countries. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 accentuated these trends and caused latent anti-Muslim sentiments to be voiced openly in public debate.

Two tendencies that have become manifest in the aftermath are, on the one side, a strengthened emphasis on national unity and national culture, such as Christianity and secularism, and on the other side, increased militancy of those groups that feel targeted by this new xenophobia.

The way immigration from non-European and mainly Muslim countries into Europe has been handled over the last two decades has contributed to this. In the wake of the failure—or perhaps, rather, unwillingness—to let these immi-grants become integrated into their host countries a strengthened tendency towards a “new nationalism” in several European states has emerged. Populist political parties such as Front National in France, Jürg Haider’s nationalist Freiheitspartei in Austria, Lega Nord in Italy, Vlamske Front , now Vlamske Belang , in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn’s Party in The Netherlands, and Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) in Denmark have more or less successfully exploited this.

With some variations between the countries, the policy these parties have launched could be described as a kind of “diet version” of Blut und Boden. The tendencies these parties express have not been confined only to these and similar outspoken populist parties and movements; well-established and “decent”


democratic political parties and groupings in some of the countries mentioned have jumped onto the hyper-nationalist band-wagon.

Denmark, one of Europe’s most advanced liberal welfare states and most enlightened countries, is a case in point. Denmark is not just a small, ethnically homogeneous, and seemingly peaceful country on the Nordic edge of the European continent. Denmark is also the European country that today has been judged by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) as having the most xenophobic public debate and government policies.18

One significant reason for this is the influence of the populist Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti ). This political party, whose leading spokesmen on these matters are two priests in the Folkekirken,19 combines a strongly Islamophobic, anti-immigration, and anti-asylum-seeker position with political protection of central aspects of the social welfare state system, granting the Danes such goods as free medical care, relatively generous allowances in case of unemployment, sickness, retirement, etc. The political platform of the party may be described as ”welfare state chauvinism.”

In the last elections the party gained approximately the same following as many right-wing populist parties in other European countries, about one eighth of the vote. But in contrast to what has happened in many other countries, the populists in Denmark have gained a dominant influence both on the public debate and on government policies as far as immigrants, asylum seekers, and foreigners are concerned. Contributing to this has been the strategy chosen by the two major established political parties in Denmark, the Social Democrats and the Liberal Party (Venstre, headed by the present prime minister), in combating the challenge posed by the up-and-coming Danish People’s Party. In what, at best, could be understood as an attempt to pre-empt the challenge, they co-opted the anti-immigrant and anti-multiculturalist arguments put forward by the Danish People’s Party—thereby in effect legitimising the very discourse launched by the populist agitators.

This discourse has now become very influential in Danish politics and many of the measures taken by the government in these matters. The underlying, but also publicly expressed idea is that the coherence (sammenhængskraften ) of Danish society is threatened by the very presence of these “strangers” (fremmede ) in Denmark. Islam, and by the same token, Muslims, are pictured not only as basically incompatible with both Danishness and democracy, but also as posing a threat both to the Christian and the secular culture.

This development was greatly helped by a populist tabloid press and by a certain brand of Danish publicists and intellectuals, many of whom were previously active on the extreme left, and were influenced by the ideas of the


popular 19th century Danish Christian priest, writer, and philosopher Frederik Severin Grundtvig.

A celebrated notion in his philosophy is the notion of “the people” (folket ). In his understanding “the people” is synonymous with “the Danes”—entrusted with a particular folkesjæl (soul or spirit of the Danish people) and constituting a certain folkestam (the tribe of Danes)—that by implication is Christian but at the same time also secular.

The political exploitation of such ideas apparently has deep cultural reso-nance among the Danish population. When referring to the celebrated notion folket , what is denoted is the Danish ethnos, rather than a demos corresponding to the “the inhabitants of Denmark.” As a consequence, much of the political discourse in Denmark today centers around blatantly ethnocentric and outspokenly anti-multiculturalist propositions.

A corresponding tendency towards neo-nationalism now penetrates also into the sentiments of some of the other “indigenous” European populations. There are similar tendencies towards developing an ethnically and/or religiously defined social identity among some of the newly arrived groups on the European scene.

Taken one by one, each of these tendencies is potentially xenophobic and at times also manifests itself in xenophobic attitudes and actions.20 Paradoxically enough then, considering the ongoing European integration within the eco-nomic and political spheres, in its shadow a kind of neotribalism within the social and cultural spheres seems to be emerging.

“Ethno-Christianity” and “Militant Secularism”

On one hand one can notice a tendency towards a strengthened Christianity-colored neo-nationalism celebrating secular values within some of the established European nation states. On the other hand, an equally strong tendency exists towards increased ”Muslim militancy” within the very same European societies. These tendencies are not unrelated; on the contrary, they reinforce each other.

A political spiral is set in motion: neo-nationalistic tendencies encourage increased marginalisation of the growing numbers of immigrants (regarded as “strangers”) in European countries, which then engenders increased ethnic radicalism, (Muslim militancy) among them, which in turn breeds even more xenophobic sentiments in several indigenous European populations. Intriguing-ly enough, this kind of “new” xenophobia argues its case in the name of tolerance by focussing on the murderous intolerance of its target group. Thus cases like the following serve to underpin this standpoint:


Denmark: 9 found guilty in ‘Honor killing’. A jury in Copenhagen convicted nine people, all family members and friends, of murder or accessory to murder in the killing of a 19-year-old woman. The woman was gunned down by her older brother last September, two days after her wedding, because her Pakistani family disapproved of her choice of husband.... Besides her brother, the defendants included her father, three uncles, an aunt and two family friends.” 21

As has become the case in Denmark, but also in other European countries, events like this feed a kind of “ethnoChristianity” amalgamated with a militantly secular neo-tribalism. Even if Muslims and other religiously and culturally “deviant” groups are not all fundamentalists of the kind illustrated by this case, the fact that such things actually take place fosters not only hostile attitudes towards these groups in general, but also a sense of self-sufficiency among those who feel they embody the “righteous” secular values of tolerance. In Denmark this, by extension, now manifests itself in hostile attitudes to immigration from Muslim countries and “strangers” in general, against giving asylum seekers refuge, and against—in actual practice—granting equal human rights for all, regardless of origin, religion and ethnicity.

Thus, the paradox occurs whereby the hegemony of a secularized Luth-eranism combined with the valorization of contemporary secular values (at least in ethno-Christian Denmark) can serve in effect not only as a vehicle for individual emancipation, but also, as an effective instrument for a militant ethnocentrism.

EndnotEs

1. Esping Andersen, Gosta. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

2. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Life Index. 2005. The Economist. April 1, 2007. http://www. economist.com/media/PDF/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf.

3. Global Youth. 2007. Kairos Future. April 1, 2007. http://www.kairosfuture.com/en/international/projects/globalyouth or http://www.kairosfuture.com/en/node/1012

4. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).

5. Ibid.

6. Dencik, Lars. “INTO THE ERA OF SHIFTS—How everything gets designed in an increasingly non-designed world” Ed. Lars Dencik. SHIFT: Design as Usual or a New Rising, (Stockholm: Arvinius, 2005), pp. 6-29.

7. cf. Dencik, Lars. “Transformations of Identities in Rapidly Changing Societies” Eds.


Mikael Carleheden and Michael Hviid Jacobsen The Transformation of Modernity. Aspects of the Past, Present and Future of an Era, (London: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 183-221.

8. Dencik, Lars. “ ‘Homo zappiens’—A European-Jewish way of Life in the Era of Globalisation,” Eds. Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson. Turning the Kaleidoscope— Perspectives on European Jewry, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) pp. 79-105.

9. “Keep religion indoors.” Politiken 19 May 2006.

10. His name is Christian Mejdahl.

11. Jyllandsposten, 7 June 2006

12. Vice Prime Minister Bendt Bendtsen in Jyllandsposten 7th of June 2006

13. Gundelach, Peter. Danskernes værdier, (København: Hans Reitzel, 2002).

14. Weber, M. (2004) Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Max Weber Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I, Tübingen (1934), pp. 1-206.

15. Arvidsson, Håken, Lennart Berntson, and Lars Dencik. Modernisering och Välfärd. Om individ, stat och civilt samhälle i Sverige. (Stockholm: City University Press, 1994); Dencik, Lars and Per Schultz Jørgensen. Børn og Familie i det postmoderne samfund, (København: Hans Reitzel, 1999).

16. Politiken 1 March, 2007.

17. This section is in parts based on a corresponding section in my article “‘Homo zap-piens’—A European-Jewish way of Life in the Era of Globalisation,” Eds. Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson Turning the Kaleidoscope—Perspectives on European Jewry, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 79-105.

18. In a poll published 5. June, 2003 by Jyllandsposten, the largest morning daily in Denmark, more than 80% of the Danes admit that in Denmark “racism” now pre-vails against those that have arrived in the country as refugees and immigrants.

19. Søren Krarup and Jesper Langballe, who also happen to be cousins.

20. Thus, e.g. the radical Muslim group HizbutTahrir is active in Denmark where they, among other things, have set up a web-site and distributed pamphlets referring to the Jews proposing: “And kill them wherever you find them, and expel them from wherever they expelled you.”

21. “World Briefing: Europe: Denmark: 9 found guilty in ‘Honor killing’.” New York Times 28 June 2006.

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The Paradox of Secularism in Denmark: From Emancipation to Ethnocentrism?