I started by claiming that Luther’s Small Catechism has a unique position in Norwegian book history. Even the Bible cannot compete with it. For 460 years, some fifteen generations, the authorities relied upon it in matters of education. Little by little, popular literacy and print culture were established thanks to this little book. In telling its story, this remarkable constancy, la longue durée, should not be eclipsed by our preoccupation with the historical shifts of catechetical dogmatics. Questions of dogma have certainly been of great interest and concern to theologians, but rarely of much importance to ordinary lay people. To believe first of all means to belong. Norwegians achieved this belonging in part by learning the catechism by rote. Thus, in a secular perspective the social function of the Lutheran Kinderlehre has been no less important than the spiritual one.
Catechism even survived the abolition of theocracy. The constitution of 1814 stated that all authority exercised by the state no longer rested in God (and His substitute, the king) but in the people themselves, implementing the Rousseauan principle of popular sovereignty. However, for as long as the monarchy remained exclusively ‘Evangelical-Lutheran’, fully-fledged democracy was put on hold, the clergy continuing their work as if nothing had happened.
1 The Constitution of 1814, Section 49 (the principle of popular sovereignty) and Section 2 (‘Evangelical-Lutheran state religion’): <www.stortinget.no/no/Stortinget-og-demokratiet/Lover-og-instrukser/Grunnloven-fra-1814/>.In the end, this persevering little book had to yield to secularisation. Luther got what he feared the most: ‘the world’ and the devil. Today (2020) 70 per cent of the Norwegian population still belong to the Evangelical-Lutheran church which, since 2017, is no longer a state church. Only a small minority claim to be true believers: 11 per cent, irrespective of religion (2008),
2 L. Taule, ‘Norge – et sekulært samfunn’, Samfunnsspeilet, 1 (2014) (Statistics Norway) <www.ssb.no/kultur-og-fritid/artikler-og-publikasjoner/norge-et-sekulaert-samfunn>. and only 50 per cent of the new-born are initiated into the church by the sacrament of baptism (2019).
3 Statistics Norway (SSB), table 12025. Five hundred years after the Reformation the Norwegian or rather the Scandinavian version of Protestantism seems to be developing into some kind of ‘cultural religion’. People hold on to the old rituals and traditions but refrain from mentioning God. What matters is the coming together of families and communities, the sense of belonging. Cultural religion, according to the American sociologist Phil Zuckerman, is ‘the phenomenon of people identifying with historically religious traditions, and engaging in ostensibly religious practices, without truly believing in the supernatural content thereof’.
4 P. Zuckerman, Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York, 2008), p. 155.After five centuries we know the outcome: Luther’s grand scheme ultimately failed. His catechism did not bring about the spiritual change it was supposed to. Instead, unintendedly, it taught Norwegian children how to read. Contrary to what is often taken for granted, popular literacy was not an objective of Luther’s. The reformer actually grew increasingly doubtful of the people’s ability to understand his main tenets. Therefore, according to Gerald Strauss, he concentrated on ‘works of popular indoctrination’, the catechism, considering learning by rote a guarantee against any fanciful interpretations or outright misunderstandings of the Scripture.
5 G. Strauss, ‘Lutheranism and Literacy: A Reassessment’, p. 113. Nevertheless, in due course the catechism became instrumental in teaching the Lutheran North its ABC. An exceptionally high literacy rate and a particularly vigorous print culture gave the Scandinavian countries a head start into the modern world.
In his acclaimed study of how ‘the religious revolution’ of the early sixteenth century went wrong (The Unintended Reformation, 2012), Brad S. Gregory fails to comment on ‘good consequences’ like literacy, print culture and the use of vernacular languages, exploring only the ‘bad consequences’ (secularised morality, privatisation of religion, relativity of doctrine, capitalism and other ‘deplorable’ developments). However ‘unintended’, literacy and print culture have proved to be a blessing to democracy and freedom, if not to Christianity as such. Thus, the case of the Norwegian catechism is an instructive historical example of how an unintended development turned out for the best after all, catechism boosting literacy as well as the new technology of printing in the Lutheran North.