Ah, those blessed Scandinavians. Reputedly cool, calm, collected, rather good race drivers and, it would seem, not really that concerned about gods one way or the other. During my time observing and participating in discussions about religion and its public role over the last few years, Scandinavia has often been held up as a bastion of faithless virtue, a shining beacon of godless goodness, a prime example of what can be accomplished on a transnational scale without referring to scripture but merely concentrating on what works for the populace.

Atheist/secularist/humanist commentators often to point to Scandinavian social successes (for example low unemployment, high standards of living, functioning democracies, effective public health care & education) as evidence against the claims of many religious people that if we in the West abandoned our “Judeo-Christian” values or kept our church & state separate, our nations would all fall, unrestricted by fears of celestial surveillance, into a grimy, black crevass of murder, pillage and hedonism (one could argue that the US in the last eight years has fallen into an economic & diplomatic hole of a similar depth, led by a very religious man who was happy to pander to very religious people for his entire reign, but that’s a whole other article).

According to a recent New York Times article by Peter Steinfel on a study by Californian sociologist Phil Zuckerman (here), it seems that far from there being only two sides to the god coin, the Scandinavians, almost characteristically, have ended up on a third side. And here it is:

They don’t care.

Zuckerman, after 14 months of talking to Danes & Swedes about religion, discovered that far from being a nation of atheists in the Dawkins/Hitchens mould of actively promoting freethinking and condemning inappropriate religious behaviour, Scandinavians seem to be completely unconcerned by religion. He was perplexed, as I’m sure a lot of people would be. I think this quote sums up his experience:

The many nonbelievers [Zuckerman] interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label “atheist.” An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church.

Though they denied most of the traditional teachings of Christianity, they called themselves Christians, and most were content to remain in the Danish National Church or the Church of Sweden, the traditional national branches of Lutheranism.

At the same time, they were “often disinclined or hesitant to talk with me about religion,” Mr. Zuckerman reported, “and even once they agreed to do so, they usually had very little to say on the matter.”

Zuckerman asked himself:

Were they reticent because they considered religion, as Scandinavians generally do, a private, personal matter? Is there, perhaps, as one Lutheran bishop in Denmark has argued, a deep religiosity to be discovered if only one scratches this taciturn surface?

“I spent a year scratching,” Mr. Zuckerman writes. “I scratched and I scratched and I scratched.”

And he concluded that “religion wasn’t really so much a private, personal issue, but rather, a nonissue.” His interviewees just didn’t care about it.

Not even a private, personal issue, as I’m sure many of my US friends – religious and otherwise – would prefer it; an actual non-issue. Doesn’t come up in conversation, public policy, education. It’s something not even worth considering. Something so unimportant it barely even gets discussed. Something so insignificant in day-to-day life that you don’t get Swedish evangelists trying to sneak Genesis into biology classes; multimillionaire Danish preachers with their own TV stations & Lear jets blaming natural disasters on godlessness and depravity (then being caught with their hands in the till or down someone’s pants); Viking priests demanding to have their mythology written into national constitutions or religious monarchs sowing murder and disease with misguided rhetoric (no hyperlinks necessary, this religious madness is unfortunately so commonplace I’m sure every reader could go and google up a dozen individual stories on each topic). And certainly no Ragnarokians going around telling everyone to repent because the Fenris wolf is off his leash so they’d all better bloody well repent!

However, it seems many Scandinavians are happy to identify as Christians despite their obvious non-religiousness.

At one point, [Zuckerman] queries Jens, a 68-year-old nonbeliever, about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture. Jens replies: “We are Lutherans in our souls — I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah. It’s an old, good, moral thought.”

Naturally I’d take issue with any assertion that kindness & charity are uniquely Lutheran traits but I admire the general attitude described in this article. “God or not – meh, I don’t worry about that. I get on with my life and try to be good.” It’s an attitude I’ve held for a long time – until somehow, a few years ago, I got interested in spirituality & the reasons behind it and eventually got myself drawn into religious discussions online, chiefly with Americans, first through Off-Topic sections at a few gaming forums I visited, then in comment threads at blogs like this one. As I got drawn into rant after rant and argument after argument with strong religious types, I think I completely lost sight of where I actually stood on the issue of gods and was just having fun swinging my sword around.

Here it is: I don’t believe, but I really don’t think about it that much. The claims of religious people don’t stand up to scrutiny, but it doesn’t bother me (that is, until I read something about some fundie getting too big for his sandals). The problems caused by religious people in Australia simply aren’t of the magnitude that reasonable people face in the US. We don’t have Phelpses or Robertsons publicly condemning gays to hell or dentists inserting creationism into biology textbooks or anti-gay pastors being caught with their pants down & noses full of meth. Most religious people in Australia do indeed keep it private (I still don’t really know what my parents think on the subject – because it doesn’t come up) and people who overstep the un-drawn line of decency are ridiculed as bible-thumpers or simple pains-in-the-arse. Hell, our most successful creationist, the inimitably thick-as-shit Ken Ham, had to move to Kentucky to build his “Fred Flintstone & The Vegan Dinosaurs” Creation Museum. I can’t imagine the ridicule he would’ve copped had he tried to build it here (maybe he could though, which is maybe why he left – plus I’m sure he would’ve known there’d be no cash in it for him down here. Maybe he’s not as thick as he seems – maybe he just knows there’s a particular kind of person born every minute).

To close, I have decided Scandinavians (and myself, for that matter) should be called “Apatheists” – they don’t believe and furthermore don’t even care if there’s a god. The universe functions as it does with or without one. They get on with their lives, try to be ethical and don’t even think about whether they’re on Pan-Dimensional Big Brother. There’s an elegant simplicity in that attitude – a refreshing shift of focus onto things that are important, like here, now, you, me and everybody.