Religion
Although only one fifth of Swedes in one investigation chose to describe themselves as believing in a god, the majority (78%) of the population belongs to the Church of Sweden, the Lutheran church that was disestablished in 2000. This is because until 1996, those who had family members in the church automatically became members at birth. Other Christian denominations in Sweden include the Roman Catholic Church (see Catholic Church of Sweden), several Orthodox churches in diaspora, Baptist, Pentecostal, Neo-pietistic (nyevangeliska) and other evangelical Christian churches (frikyrkor = "free churches"). Shamanism persisted among the Sami people up until the 18th century, but no longer exists in its traditional form as most Sami today belong to the Lutheran church.
Jews were permitted to practice their religion in five Swedish cities in 1782, and enjoy full rights as citizens since 1870. The new Freedom of Religion Bill was passed in 1951, and former obstacles against Non-Lutherans working in schools and hospitals were removed. Further, that bill made it legal to leave any religious denomination, without entering another. There are also a number of Muslims, Buddhists, and Bahá'í in Sweden, mainly from immigration.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Sweden
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else’s morality.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”
—Richard Chase (b. 1914)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)