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Religion can often be a political tool, and politics can often be a religious tool. Awareness about this fact has been one of the driving motivations for separation of church and state in the West. In Sweden, one of the most secular countries in the world, the traditional Lutheran Church was only formally disestablished as the state’s own church in 2000, although a century and a half of other acts of secularisation of course preceded that development.
While the Church of Sweden is officially separated from the state, that has unfortunately not liberated it from political influence. On the contrary, the political edge of the clergy and of the Church’s platform seems to have accelerated since the separation. Today the Church organises an assembly of politically elected representatives, and in September of 2025 it is time for election, where the Church’s more than five million members are eligible to vote. The roster of participating parties, or formally “nomination groups”, more or less mirrors the political party landscape in the country, although perhaps with slightly more variation.
The actual influence that this political assembly has on the Church’s activities and religious outlook is limited. But it manifests the inconspicuous politicisation that religious life has undergone in Sweden as of the last half century, which is perhaps shared by most Protestant cultures – most mainline national, or formerly national, churches have a deeply left-wing bias in their theology and in their application of their faith to everyday life.
How did Christianity become so left-wing?
The modernisation movement in the Western world has put demands on religious organisations to adopt more secular values, and to democratise themselves. Just like modern worldly governance, churches must too respect the equality of all citizens, and make no moral distinction between those of “good faith” and those of “bad faith”, unlike what the Church’s historical role always has been. Any vestiges of gatekeeping that has in the past been central to the Church’s role in society has been declared obsolete for the modern world.
There is likely a truth to the belief that pre-modern expectations of the Church are unappealing to the wider public today. In order to not lose their relevance and fade into obscurity, churches, including the Catholic Church, must adapt to the progressive zeitgeist and embrace the same values that are espoused by more dominant institutions, such as schools, media, and the government. This has also occurred in the Catholic Church to a large extent, and is a natural consequence of the power shift between these institutions. When less people adhere to traditional Christianity, the churches must adapt to stay competitive in relation to other civil organisations.
This is of course forever fluctuating, and different churches have adapted to modernity in different ways. One common trend right now is that Christians, especially Catholics, are increasingly instilling more conservatism in their religious life. More and more people are questioning churches’ open advocacy for migration, non-traditional family values, and seemingly unconditional communion with Islam.
Political infiltration…?
The left-wing bias in many Protestant churches prevails, however. The ecclesiastical leftist turn is difficult to explain, and a plurality of causes may be at play to explain how Christianity went from being a bastion of conservatism against progressivism, to embodying progressive values as if it was its sole cause.
In the first half of the 20th century, when the battle of ideas between traditional society and progressive modernism was being fought in the public, the Church was typically lumped into the conservative establishment, along with the landowners, the bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy. Marxist socialists painted out the Church, whether it was the Catholic one, or their respective national Protestant church, as one of their antagonists.
Thus, when the left’s “long march through the institutions” began as social democracy and liberalism won the battle of ideas, the ecclesiastical realm became a reasonable target for progressive nudging. Universities produced increasingly left-leaning academics of theology who could man the left’s new Church from the top, while secular democratic politics on grassroots level nudged the Church to the left from the bottom.
This cannot be the ultimate explanation for the transformation of the Church, but it coincides well with the institutional transformations that were seen around the same time. Of course, one cannot assume every clergyman of the new generation to be a committed left-wing activist who only entered the Church for political reasons. Modern culture has put left-wing ideas at the forefront of every facet of public life, and the churches of Western Christianity are but one of the many institutions that have been dramatically changed by this. But perhaps the Christian realm is more susceptible to the progressive narrative than many other institutions, due to its moral values?
… Or logical biblical conclusions?
The Christian teachings about tolerance, “turning the other cheek”, and acceptance of victimhood is useful for left-wing purposes. Using various progressive interpretations of the message of Jesus Christ, many ideologues have largely managed to convince Westerners that the true nature of Christianity is about accommodating various types of minorities in society, including sexual ones, as well as generosity to migrants – and especially to make no distinction between Christian and non-Christian migrants. That one may find circumstantial support for these sentiments in the Bible has no doubt contributed to the swift conquest of the churches by the political left, from its conservative custodians.
By some sociological accounts, progressive left-wing ideology may in and of itself be an extrapolation of Christian tenets. Perhaps leftism is what happens when, with the help of Enlightenment rationality, certain biblical teachings are decontextualised, secularised and applied in a utilitarian sense. Deeper biblical readings about the promotion of family values and the security of national communities are disregarded.
Christian missions that were once emanating from the West have been replaced by ideological campaigns to promote not faith in Christ as the saviour, but in global justice for the “oppressed” against the “oppressor”. The monastic orders of old have been replaced by NGOs and other international lobby organisations.
In this view, the confluence of radical left-wing ideas and organised Christianity may fit like hand in glove. But it also implies that the nature of the churches may actually not have changed at all. They still have a higher purpose that requires some sort of sacrifice from its adherents, just like they did historically. It’s just that in the 21st century that sacrifice is not austerity, intellectual submission, and conformity, it is the comfort of their own lives; the cross that Christians in the West must bear is seeing their own traditional society come to an end, and their nations change into something unrecognisable at the hands of the non-Christian foreigner, who must be viewed as an equal.
Should the Church then open its doors to politicians?
From the view of a traditional Christian, the Church of Sweden is definitely compromised. Most church-going nationalists and conservatives would agree that the institution has been manipulated by the Social Democrats, and other left-wing organisations with which the church frequently expresses sympathy or cooperates.
But there is a discussion on the right about whether it is right or wrong to confront these errors politically – or whether the Church is best saved in the long term by keeping politics out of it. The argument is to not make the politicisation worse than it already is.
That requires a significant degree of discipline that is rare in highly polarised times such as these. Should the right sit idly by as the left maintains its ideological and institutional (the Social Democrats is by far the largest party in the Church’s representational assembly) hold on the national church? The left-wing resistance inside the Church might only harden in the face of an expressly conservative offensive, some argue, and thus it would be counterproductive to attempt to conquer the Church through electoral politics.
What gives credence to this approach is that the Church, like most of society, is subject to cultural fluctuations that transcend politics. It is these natural cultural changes that shape politics in the first place, rather than the other way around. When the current generation of clergy spawned from 1960s counter culture is gone, a new counter culture clergy will take its place. And it is likely that it will be conservative, since that is where the general societal development is heading. Until then, conservative Christians in the Church of Sweden, and perhaps in progressive-turned Protestant churches everywhere, could do well to bide their time – to turn the other cheek, if you will.