American Bible-Thumper Travels To Scandinavia, Freaks Out After Discovering How Secular They Are

[TomVilmer]

61. Denmark still has a State Church - but it has little power

The State Church has been named the People's Church since the first Danish constitution in 1849, where the King lost a lot of his power. Before that our kings had been head of church and state for two hundred years, and the most autocratic monarchs in Europe. Now the membership is no longer mandatory, but since most babies still are being forced to enlist by their parents, the church do has kind of support from around 80 percent in the country.

The special church tax is paid together with the other taxes, but more and more people leaves the church and stops paying. The christian priests are educated at normal universities, the salary of bishops are paid by the state, and the church is also paid to do civil registration of births and deaths. Our national state radio transmits sermons, but most people only visits the church for the big ceremonies - baptism, weddings and deaths.

After 1.000 years we all are so called cultural Christians. Everybody lives in this bubble, and it is baked into all of laws and philosophy. We now got a minority of Muslims, and for some Christians these foreigners provides a nice battle ground. But only one smallish but quite dominant political party waves a Bible in the parliament, where religious quotes are not considered good arguments. Officially church and state are very separated, but still all laws starts with a note about our monarch having her power from God!

Next month there will be a week long political event for all, a summer camp for political stuff, where all of government attends from the prime minister and down - yeah, very small country. But the Anti Muslim Crowd has invited the Dutch clown Geert Wilders to explain why all Qurans should be burned. And they do this to support freedom of expression - we do have some religious nuts around...