REYKJAVIK (ICELAND)
Reykhjavik Grapevine
Nov. 8, 2019
By Sam O’Donnell
The number of Icelanders who trust the National Church has decreased by half since the turn of the century. Only one third of the nation now trusts the Church, according to a Gallup poll published on October 28. In a nation without a separation of Church and State, it’s hard to read those numbers as anything but a crisis for the National Church.
There are many reasons for the decline in trust in the institution. The simplest is that immigrants to Iceland are largely from countries with strong Catholic beliefs. People born in Iceland are registered with the church automatically, so long as their parents are also in the church. However, immigrants have to go through the process of registering themselves if they want to join the National Church. Since the largest percentage of immigrants to Iceland are Polish, the majority of them choose to register instead with with the Catholic Church. The Icelandic National Church is Lutheran.
Additionally, Icelanders are leaving the National Church in droves because of the church’s notoriously tone-deaf method of handling social issues. For example, in 2006, Guðrún Ögmundsdóttir submitted a bill to Parliament on various legal benefits for homosexuals, which, among other things, allowed them to get married and adopt children. Former Bishop Karl Sigurbjörnsson of the National Church objected strongly to the proposal.
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