Cultural Radicalism versus Christian Conservatism: Political Controversies in Literary Nation Building in Norway, 1863-1938

Contemporary cultural policy programmes in Western Europe and in the Nordic countries have their direct origin in the welfare state after World War II, and in some countries they can be traced back to the 1930s. However, also in the Nordic countries, the states supported heritage, cultural institutions and even single artists long before the concept of “cultural policy” was coined. From the mid-19th century the state in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway engaged in supporting heritage and the arts. Nation building was a strong driving force in the states’ intervention in culture, and artists were supposed to be bearers of national characters. But in liberal states of the 19th century, with individual democratic rights, and among them was the freedom of expression, artists were no longer loyal to state power and religious dogmas. On the contrary, many became critics and rebels who made themselves spokesmen for radical ideas beyond bourgeois establishment and the Christian belief. Artists’ and intellectuals’ attack on traditional values and institutions was later called “cultural radicalism”. Often cultural radicalism was associated with left wing liberal ideas in art worlds and academic circles. And one of the cultural and political issues of the time was the conflict between cultural radicalism and Christian conservatism. This article, which rests on a historical study of state support for literature in Norway 1863–1938, demonstrates that conflict. My study has a specific focus on an arrangement of state grants to writers of fiction called “writer’s salary”, which meant that the Norwegian parliament (Stortinget) assigned lifelong salaries to selected and “distinguished” writers who were expected to contribute to cultural nation building. In the period 1863–1938 there was a lot of political controversy in the parliament about writers who were typically critical to the Christian faith, to the Lutheran State High Church and the clergy, and even to the Low Church laymen movement. They criticized the bourgeois family and marriage as institutions, and were politically and culturally radical in attitudes and values. The structure of the policy model for state support to literary fiction made political confrontations inevitable since the parliament made its decisions mainly on political and moral grounds, not on aesthetic ones. There was no “arm’s length body” of literature experts between the writers who applied for state support and the politicians of the government and the parliament. Single decisions followed ordinary political procedures, so even in cases where the parliament rejected a controversial writer’s application for economic support, it was formally not a political censoring. State support for cultural purposes, like any other purpose, was practiced according to general political procedures