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Sweden

Also Known As Swedish
Europe

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Sweden's state Lutheran church was formally disestablished only in 2000, and the country today has one of the highest rates of religious non-affiliation and lowest rates of active worship attendance in Europe by most surveys, even as most Swedes remain nominally registered members of the former state church. Pre-Christian Norse religious practice, centered on deities including Odin, Thor and Freyja, persisted in Sweden later than in much of Scandinavia, with the temple at Old Uppsala remaining a significant pre-Christian cult site into the eleventh century. Immigration in recent decades has built substantial Muslim and other minority religious communities within a broader secular culture. The atlas holds Sweden chiefly for this Norse heritage and its distinctively secular modern religious landscape.

Facts
Law and State
Establishment Status
Disestablished 3
The Church of Sweden was disestablished as official state church in 2000.
State Funding Mechanism
The Church of Sweden ceased to be the state church on 1 January 2000, but the Swedish Tax Agency, Skatteverket, still collects its member fee alongside ordinary income tax on the church's behalf, averaging about one percent of taxable income and funding roughly eighty percent of parish activity across 2,200 parishes; a member stops owing it only by formally withdrawing in writing before 1 November of the relevant year, after which Skatteverket is notified and the deduction ends. 4
State Funding Mechanism
The state provides funding support to multiple recognized faith communities including Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox Christian and Buddhist organizations. 3
Registration or Recognition Regime
The Church of Sweden ceased to be a state church on 1 January 2000, losing its seats in parliament and its role in state civil registries while keeping cultural functions such as funerals, and the same reform opened registration as a religious community, through the government agency Kammarkollegiet, to the Church of Sweden and to any other faith on equal terms; registration protects a community's name in law and lets the state collect membership fees from its members' income tax on the community's behalf. Nearly every active religious community in the country has registered. 5
Concordat Basis
Sweden has no concordat; the Church of Sweden was its state church until formal disestablishment. The Church Ordinance that took effect 1 January 2000 ended the Church's constitutional status, closing clerical representation in the Riksdag and the Church's role in state civil registries, though the state still collects the Church's membership fee through the tax system. 6
Geography
Latitude
60.1 degrees north 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Longitude
18.6 degrees east 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Status
Legal Status
The Church of Sweden was disestablished as official state church in 2000; the state provides funding support to multiple recognized faith communities including Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox Christian and Buddhist organizations. 3
Demographics
Religious Composition
Large formal registration in the Church of Sweden (Lutheran), though regular attendance and belief are low by most surveys; growing Muslim population, notably through refugee resettlement since the 1990s and 2015 (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). 1
Government
Capital
Stockholm 2
Government Type
parliamentary constitutional monarchy 2
Sovereignty Status
Sovereign UN member state 2
Established Year
1523 2
6 June 1523 (Gustav VASA elected king of Sweden, marking the abolishment of the Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden)
Location
Location of Sweden Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Federated States of Micronesia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Guam Guatemala Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Laos Latvia Lebanon Libya Lithuania Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Mali Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
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Religion and History in Sweden

Sweden is among the most religiously unaffiliated countries in the world by practice, though a large majority remain formally registered members of the Church of Sweden, Lutheran in doctrine, which disestablished as the official state church only in 2000 after nearly five centuries as such; Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 and other surveys consistently find only a small minority of Swedes reporting regular religious attendance or strong personal belief despite this high nominal registration.

Sweden adopted Lutheranism during the sixteenth-century Reformation under King Gustav Vasa, who broke with Rome partly for the same mix of theological and fiscal motives seen elsewhere in Reformation Europe, seizing Catholic Church lands to fund the new Swedish state. Sweden's Sami indigenous minority in the north practiced a distinct shamanic religion centered on noaidi ritual specialists and reindeer-herding cosmology before centuries of forced Christianization and, more recently, state assimilation policy suppressed much of this tradition, an experience Sami communities and scholars have compared to indigenous religious suppression elsewhere. Sweden's Muslim population, grown substantially through refugee resettlement particularly from the Middle East since the 1990s and 2015 European refugee crisis, is now one of the largest in Scandinavia relative to population.

Disestablishment and the Church of Sweden's Changed Role

The Church of Sweden's formal disestablishment in 2000 ended its status as the country's official state religion, a change negotiated over decades and finalized through legislation separating the church's governance and finances from direct state control, though the church retains a special legal status distinct from other religious communities, including automatic registration of children born to member parents until a 1996 reform ended that practice. Sweden's broader approach to religious pluralism includes state funding support distributed to recognized faith communities, including Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox Christian and Buddhist organizations, through a government agency historically tied to the church but expanded to serve Sweden's more religiously diverse population.

Sami religious and cultural revival has grown since the late twentieth century, supported partly by the establishment of the Sami Parliament of Sweden in 1993, though Sami communities continue to seek fuller legal recognition of land and resource rights tied to traditional reindeer herding, which carries deep religious as well as economic significance in Sami cosmology. Sweden's asylum and integration debates since the 2015 refugee crisis have increasingly touched on religious accommodation questions, including halal and kosher slaughter restrictions and mosque construction disputes in several municipalities.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Sweden directly: "led at the Lutheran Cathedral of Lund, Sweden, on 31 October 2016, opening the joint Catholic-Lutheran commemoration of the Reformation's five hundredth anniversary, including Francis's own words on..."

This source names Sweden directly: "in Hagebyhoga parish, Ostergotland, Sweden, and held by the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm under accession number SHM 16429."

This source names Sweden directly: "Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger in Sweden and Martin Heinrich Klaproth in Germany identified it independently in 1803."

Large formal registration in the state Lutheran Church of Sweden, though regular attendance and belief are low by most surveys.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Sweden directly: "On Sweden, it records that since the 2000 disestablishment of the Church of Sweden, the Swedish Tax Agency collects a voluntary church fee for the Church of Sweden and, since a later government..."

Source Church Tax (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "Psalmboken, adopted by the Church of Sweden's General Synod on August 29, 1986, is the fourth official hymnal in the church's history, following predecessors approved in 1695, 1819 and 1937."

Source Den Svenska Psalmboken 1986 (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "Its limit is that a claim about how individual Church of Sweden parishes actually balance the book's traditional and modern hymns in practice, as opposed to its authorized contents, needs a source..."

Source Den Svenska Psalmboken 1986 (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "Vadstena municipality, Ostergotland, Sweden," giving the Swedish caption "vikingatida silverhange forestallande den nordiska gudinnan Freja" and cataloguing the object as SHM 16429 in the Swedish..."

This source names Sweden directly: "found at Hagebyhoga in Ostergotland, Sweden, representing a standing woman wearing a broad necklace around her neck, dated to around 1000 CE and held by the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities in..."

This source names Sweden directly: "reference account of the Church of Sweden stating that the separation of church and state took effect on 1 January 2000, after which the Church could register as a faith community and have its dues..."

This source names Sweden directly: "recording its First Assembly in Lund, Sweden, from 30 June to 6 July 1947, where two hundred delegates from forty seven member churches in twenty six countries reorganized the earlier Lutheran World..."

This source names Sweden directly: "read directly, reporting that Sweden accepted Kopimism as a legitimate religion on 5 January 2012 with an estimated 4,000 members, a figure the article attributes to Nilsson and Enkvist's 2016..."

Source Kopimism (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "in the mineral petalite from Uto in Sweden, and the name is from the Greek for stone, marking that it was found in rock rather than in plant ash like sodium and potassium."

This source names Sweden directly: "States the Lutheran World Federation was founded at Lund, Sweden in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War, replacing the more informal Lutheran World Convention founded in 1923, and is..."

Source Lutheran World Federation (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "The nisse, called tomte in Sweden, is a small household and farm guardian spirit of Norwegian and Danish folk tradition, imagined as an old, bearded man no taller than a child, dressed as a farmhand..."

Source Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf)Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf (editors)

This source names Sweden directly: "in Lunda parish, Sodermanland, Sweden, and held by the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm under accession number SHM 14232."

This source names Sweden directly: "in Lunda parish, Sodermanland, Sweden."

This source names Sweden directly: "succeeded him as pastor to the New Sweden colonists."

This source names Sweden directly: "second expedition to the colony of New Sweden aboard the Kalmar Nyckel."

This source names Sweden directly: "from soapstone quarried in Norway or Sweden and held by Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus."

This source names Sweden directly: "from soapstone quarried in Norway or Sweden."

This source names Sweden directly: "The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden 1523 to 1611, Cambridge University Press, 1968, is the standard English-language academic history of Gustav Vasa's reign and the half century that followed it."

This source names Sweden directly: "festival at the temple of Uppsala in Sweden, described by the German cleric Adam of Bremen as a nine-day rite involving offerings of nine males of every living species, including humans, hung in a..."

This source names Sweden directly: "World Federation formed in Lund, Sweden, in 1947, also already recorded here."

This source names Sweden directly: "A knight, Antonius Block, returns to plague-ravaged Sweden after ten years fighting in the Crusades and finds Death waiting for him on the shore."

Source The Seventh Seal (1957 film) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Sweden directly: "to see it, and King Charles XV of Sweden purchased it that same year, bequeathing it to the museum on his death shortly afterward."

This source names Sweden directly: "World Federation formed in Lund, Sweden in 1947, both already recorded here, American Lutheranism's three largest English and German speaking bodies set aside decades of separation."

This source names Sweden directly: "farm on the island of Gotland, Sweden, discovered in 1844."

This source names Sweden directly: "municipality, Vastergotland, Sweden, and held by the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm under accession number SHM 1164."

This source names Sweden directly: "gold bracteate from Trollhattan, Sweden, showing a person receiving a bite on the hand from a beast, a scene the article says may depict Tyr and Fenrir, comparing it to similar bracteates from..."

This source names Sweden directly: "Naglum, Trollhattan, Vastergotland, Sweden, captioned "The motive from the Tyr bracteate from Trollhattan, Vastergotland, Sweden."

This source names Sweden directly: "stones raised in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and it was written in a long branch and a short twig form with a further staveless variety."

Source RunenkundeKlaus Duwel

Contains

Uppsala, Cities
Vadstena, Cities
Source The Catholic EncyclopediaCharles George Herbermann et al. (eds.)

Namesake Of

Erbium is named for Ytterby, a village near Stockholm. The third of the four Ytterby elements, and one of the pair whose names were exchanged before the modern assignment settled.

Holmium is named for Holmia, the Latin name for Stockholm. One of several rare earths teased apart from the same Swedish ores in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Terbium is named for Ytterby, a village near Stockholm. The second of the four Ytterby elements. Terbium and erbium had their names swapped at one point in the nineteenth century, and the modern assignment is the reversed one.

Ytterbium is named for Ytterby, a village near Stockholm. The fourth of the four Ytterby elements, and the one that keeps the village name almost intact.

Yttrium is named for Ytterby, a village near Stockholm. Four elements are named for this one village: yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium, all separated from a single black mineral found in its quarry.

Originated Here

Norse, Cultures

Sweden is part of the Norse homeland, home to the pagan-era cult center at Uppsala.

Source Dictionary of Northern MythologyRudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall
Sami, Cultures

Religions Recognised Here

Kopimism, Religions

Kammarkollegiet, Sweden's Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency, formally registered the Missionary Church of Kopimism as a religious community on 5 January 2012, after two earlier applications had been rejected.

Spread Events Here

Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence AgencyView the Source
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
4. Do You Have to Pay the Church Tax? (Sweden Herald)
Sweden HeraldView the Source
5. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source
6. Church of Sweden (World Council of Churches)
World Council of Churches, World Council of ChurchesView the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
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