Denmark's national church traces its establishment to 1536, when King Christian III, having won a civil war against forces loyal to the old Catholic hierarchy, decreed that Lutheran Christianity would become the kingdom's religion. Catholic bishops who resisted were imprisoned, church property was confiscated by the crown, and the German reformer Johannes Bugenhagen arrived from Wittenberg the following year to help organize the new Lutheran church's institutions. That founding act still governs the church's constitutional standing today: Section 4 of the Danish Constitution states that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is Denmark's Established Church and, as such, is supported by the state.
The church today comprises eleven dioceses, ten on the Danish mainland and one in Greenland, each headed by a bishop, and subdivided further into roughly a hundred deaneries and about 2,200 local parishes. What sets its governance apart from its Nordic Lutheran neighbors is an absence rather than an office: Denmark's church has neither an archbishop nor a central synod empowered to define doctrine or set nationwide policy on the church's behalf, a structure Sweden and Norway both moved away from once their own state churches gained independent synodical government. In Denmark that central authority instead rests with the elected Parliament and a government Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs, who administers the church's legal and financial framework while, by long convention, leaving spiritual questions to the bishops and parish clergy themselves.