En modern tro? : En fallstudie om allmänhetens religiositet under efterkrigstidens Sverige

Several theories have been used to capture the trend of a general decline in religiosity in Western Europe. The main assumption in most of these theories is that religiosity amongst the public has shifted towards a more private and individual form of belief that refrains from the traditional church-based belief. Contemporary Sweden is often singled out as a country where the secularization process has gone particularly far. The earliest results indicating a decline in church-oriented religiosity in Sweden goes back to 1955. The aim of this study is to investigate the Swedish public's religiosity and attitude towards the Church of Sweden's attempts at religious profiling in the early post-war period. The empirical data consists of a public opinion poll concerning the state-church and Christianity that was carried out in 1948. The result of the study indicates that only a minority of the Swedish public at the time subscribed to a church-based religiosity. Religion was increasingly seen as a private matter, a trend that becomes even clearer if one considers how the Swedes who participated in the opinion poll related to the Church of Sweden’s attempts to clarify its core beliefs.