From Lutheran Dominance to Diversity

Abstract

This article examines religion in Finnish newspapers, arguing that religion-related discourses have changed from one of Lutheran dominance to one of diversity. The main data consists of a longitudinal sample of the most popular Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, and especially of its editorials and readers' letters. Additional data covers a wider variety of newspapers from the 1990s to 2018. The data is analysed using quantitative content analysis and a discursive approach. It will be suggested that it is possible to discuss diversity both as an emergent discourse and a theme in the Finnish media since the mid-1990s, thereby overcoming earlier frameworks that took Lutheranism for granted or gave it a special role in the private sphere. The analysis shows that these shifts do not provide clear support for the idea that newspapers and journalism are anti-religious; rather, it suggests that they may be understood as having a 'liberalizing' effect, especially when religious values are not seen as compatible with those of journalists and newspapers.

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“…Even if the dominance of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) is diminishing in Finland, it is still a relatively strong cultural model (over 68 percent of the population still belong to ELCF in 2020), and the public presence of new spiritualities and neopagan forms of religion is more moderate than in Estonia. However, religious diversity and privatisation of religion is a steadily growing trend which is also reflected in mainstream Finnish media (Taira 2019). We hypothesised that the level of representation of various forms of and approaches to alternative medicine (debates and boundary-work about the truth, depiction of miracle healers) is visible in the media and there are some repeated common models.…”

“…Although media studies have applied three categories -positive, negative, neutral -to describe the tonality of their sample articles (Taira 2014(Taira , 2019, it became clear on the basis of the Estonian material that articles about CAM with completely neutral tonality are rare -either outright opinions or more implicit connotations contained in the text make them belong either under positive or negative tonality. Depending on the position on the positive-negative axis, sub-tonalities like 'ironic-ridiculing', 'danger-and fear-mongering', and 'heroic-praising' were observable, especially in the Estonian material.…”