Last night in Örebro: Joel Halldorf on power, the sacred and the church's role in democracy

At Immanuelskyrkan here in Örebro, where Johan Arenius , pastor and senior minister, interviewed Joel Halldorf about his latest book.

Halldorf is a professor of church history at Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm and one of Sweden’s sharpest voices at the intersection of faith, culture and society. His new book “Makten och det heliga” — Power and the Sacred — was the evening’s point of departure.

This text was originally written in Swedish and translated into English by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

Notre Dame, 1793

He began in Notre Dame on 10 November 1793.

The revolutionaries had transformed the cathedral into a temple of Reason. White-clad dancers, busts of philosophers, a flame lit in honour of human reason. The point was as simple as it was sweeping:

The Enlightenment did not abolish religion. It created new religions. Reason, nation, class, science — these became not merely tools but narratives of salvation.

The great political movements of the twentieth century drew their energy from precisely that structure. Hymns, holy days, martyrs, a vision of the promised land. It gave them enormous power to tear down the old and build something new. But it also contained the explosive force that cost millions of lives.

The vacuum

And then we stopped believing.

The fall of the Berlin Wall. The ironic nineties. The triumph of market liberalism and politicians who proudly declared they were not ideological. Party membership in Sweden fell from 15 per cent of the population in 1985 to under 2 per cent today.

A secularisation took place. Not of religion. But of politics.

Halldorf calls it a vacuum. And into a vacuum something always flows.

What we see now, in Washington, Moscow, Budapest and increasingly in Sweden, is political forces actively borrowing the language, symbols and narrative of Christianity. Not because they are believers in the traditional sense. But because they understand that religion provides the energy and sense of the sacred that rational administrative politics can never mobilise.

The democratic legacy of the Baptists

I have a particular relationship with Halldorf as an academic. In 2021 I took his university course “The Free Churches and the Democratic Breakthrough” at Enskilda Högskolan Stockholm . It gave me a historical framework into which the evening’s conversation landed perfectly.

For the role of the Baptist movement in Sweden’s democratisation is a story that deserves to be told.

On 21 September 1848, five people were baptised in the sea at Vallersvik in Halland. After the ceremony the group walked to Borekullastugan, a cottage a short distance inland, where they founded Sweden’s first Baptist congregation. F.O. Nilsson, who had led the process, was later sentenced to exile. Other early Baptists received prison sentences. But the movement grew regardless.

The struggle the Baptists waged for religious freedom contributed directly to the abolition of the Conventicle Act in 1858 and the passage of the Dissenter Act in 1860. These were not merely religious victories. They were democratic ones.

The Baptists carried a theological conviction that had political consequences: a free church in a free state. The right to obey God rather than the state. The right to choose for oneself. These ideas had already shaped the English and American Baptists’ struggle for religious and civil liberty in the seventeenth century, and they exerted direct influence on the American constitution. In Sweden they became a lever against a society of deference unaccustomed to ordinary people organising themselves and taking collective decisions.

The free churches, and the Baptists in particular, were not merely part of the democratisation. They were its model. The associational form with minutes, accounts and democratic decisions. The meeting culture in which everyone had a voice. The study circle as practice in argument and listening. This then spilled over into the temperance movement and the labour movement.

The democratic ecosystem was thus built in large part by people who gathered around a Bible in a Baptist congregation in the nineteenth century.

The personal

This is where it becomes personal for me.

I am a Baptist, or perhaps more precisely: someone who carries the broad spectrum of the free church tradition in his background. I am today a member of Equmeniakyrkan Betel Örebro , which has the Baptist tradition as one of its foundations.

But my upbringing was within the Örebro Mission, where my father Flore was a pastor and children’s meeting leader, known well beyond his home congregation. With “Flores hörna” — Flore’s Corner — he toured the whole of Scandinavia, reaching children at a time when the free church children’s ministry was a popular movement in its own right.

That is a tradition I carry with pride.

Not least because the Swedish Baptists had equal voting rights for women within their congregations long before Sweden achieved that in wider society. A consequence of the theology itself: if all are equal before God, all have an equal right to speak.

That has shaped how I understand both faith and society.

The church’s double responsibility

Halldorf’s message last night is that the church now has a double responsibility.

The first is to speak out clearly when Christianity is used as a political weapon. Only believers themselves can make that distinction with credibility. A journalist can note that something is political. But only the church can say: this is not Christianity as we recognise it.

The second is that the church can help restore democracy from below. Not by capturing institutions or clustering around politicians who promise to stand up for Christians. But by being the place where people are trained in listening, in receiving rather than taking, in gratitude rather than demands.

The Eucharist as practice in open hands. Prayer as practice in inner listening.

That sounds abstract. But it is fundamentally radical at a time when public discourse is dominated by the loud cry and the swift condemnation.

It is, as it happens, exactly the same role the free churches played during the democratic breakthrough a hundred years ago. The circle conversation, the meeting culture, the art of listening and letting everyone speak. That was not merely spiritual practice. It was democratic training.

Halldorf is not calling for something new. He is calling for historical memory.

The religion he recognises from Sweden smells of freshly baked saffron buns and is about helping your neighbour and welcoming the refugee.

Bishop Mikael Mogren put it well. The lived, enduring, serving religion. Far from those who use the name of Christianity as the language of power.

That is a distinction we need to keep alive.

The evening at Immanuelskyrkan reminded me why it matters.

I am also a politician, a liberal in Örebro, and liberalism is currently in a time of strong headwinds. Populism and polarisation crowd out the conversation that is democracy’s core. It is easy to lose your footing. But evenings like this one remind me of why I chose the ideology I chose in the first place. Liberalism is ultimately about the same thing Halldorf speaks of: every person’s inviolable worth and right to shape their own life. That is worth remaining faithful to, even in adversity.

Have you read “Makten och det heliga” ? What do you think about the relationship between religion and politics in our time?