Becoming what you are: faith and freedom in a Danish Lutheran movement

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in the Danish protestant movement Tidehverv, this article explores what it means to try to live one's life according to a neo‐orthodox Lutheran and explicitly Kierkegaard‐inspired theology, whose overarching existential, social and political ideal is always to be true to oneself. Departing from the seemingly paradoxical notion that the essence of living a genuinely Christian life is ‘to become what you are’, as a Tidehverv priest put it, I seek to pin down the distinct concept of character, and wider concepts of personhood and temporality, upon which this ‘fundamentalist existentialist’ theology and ethics rest. This will involve discussing in some detail a number of core Kierkegaardian concepts such as ‘the moment’ (øjeblikket), the ‘decision’ (afgørelsen) and ‘the leap’ (springet), and making a preliminary attempt to contextualise Tidehverv's existentialist project within the wider political, religious and cultural history of the modern Danish nation state. In doing so, the article offers an exploration of the relationships between Lutheran concepts of character and political expression, and between the concept of Christian individual character and Danish national character.

Retaining character: heritage conservation and the logic of continuity

“…Inspired by recent anthropological work (see particularly Faubion ; Keane ; Reed and Bialecki ; Strathern ), this paper seeks to understand how character is implicated in the adjudications and assessments that heritage professionals make, in their efforts to value and protect the historic environment. Drawing on ethnographic research with conservation professionals working for Historic Scotland, the national heritage agency, I highlight how the concept is central to the deceptively simple work of maintaining continuity (compare Pedersen ).…”

Reconfiguring Hell

“…While the literature that falls under the rubric of conversion, as I mentioned, oft en focuses on the conversion of societies and cultures rather than individuals, a slight readjustment in our reading of this literature points us towards the second part of this body of work, what I categorise here as the literature on salvation. While the literature surveyed in the previous section can be read along such axes as continuity-versus-discontinuity and modernity-versus-tradition, the work focusing on salvation oft en leaves room for conceptualising how individuals, or groups of individuals, continually work on themselves or with each other in the sanctifi cation, confi rmation and self-improvement that is entailed in living life as Christian subjects (Pedersen 2018;Robbins 2004). Th is literature, oft en drawing a parallel with what is usually coined the 'anthropology of ethics' (Laidlaw 2014;Pedersen 2018: 2), usually focuses on what Michel Foucault (1984) coined 'technologies of the self ', those ethical practices that individuals perform in an attempt to make themselves into virtuous subjects within a given social and cultural context.…”

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…By far the most extensive engagement with the anthropology of ethics in 2018 was Reed and Bialecki's two‐part special issue in this journal on character, which seeks to take the concept of character beyond its often deeply individualistic Christian undertones to understand how the concept could be made more flexible so as to inhere in all manner of collectivities. Contributors are concerned to account for how Christians – especially modern, protestant Christians – have historically conceived of character within the context of its conceptualisation of individual moral culpability (Bialecki ; Pedersen ). Yet contributors also seek to both catalogue the shortcomings of such conceptualisations (Faubion ; Strathern ) as well as to document how the notion of character in Western society overflows these boundaries in a myriad of ways.…”