Religion, media, and democracy in the Nordic countries: A scoping review of empirical research 2011–2024

The presence, visibility, or mediatisation of religion in the public media spheres of the Nordic countries is a highly complex and heterogeneous area of scholarly inquiry. From a historical perspective, the Nordic countries are often considered similar in terms of our welfare societies, media ecologies, and, with specific pertinence to this review, in connection with Evangelical Lutheran state church traditions as well as with more recent trajectories concerning secularisation of postmodern societies, where the Nordic countries are often considered as being highly secular compared with the rest of Europe and the world. Muslims are a growing minority, with a strong presence in contemporary media debates on religious diversity in the Nordic countries (Furseth, 2015, 2017a; Taira, 2019b; Zuckerman, 2008).

Due to these developments, the status of and perspectives about religion are rapidly evolving. The relative decline of majority Evangelical Lutheran churches relates to immigration as well as to disaffiliation and the growing number of people who choose to remain outside any faith community (Furseth et al., 2017). Adding in developments regarding the political mobilisation of civilisationist (Brubaker, 2017) religious identities, perspectives on multiculturalism, and the role of women or values related to the family in societies make evaluating the position that religion has in the Nordic democracies and media environments a multifaceted endeavour where the results are not often in a form that would allow a straightforward provision of an overview.

A few research projects and publications in recent years have taken up this challenge, and outcomes include comprehensive contributions that delve into questions and data relating to religion in the Nordic public spheres (the NOREL study, Furseth, 2017b), media dynamics and conflicts around religion in Scandinavia (Lundby, 2019), and religion in Nordic newspapers (TEMENOS special issue, Taira, 2019a), to name a few. In addition to these encompassing publications, the subfield of research on religion and media is active within the context of the Nordic countries, sustaining lively scholarly theorisation and discussion thereof with regard to, for example, positions on the mediatisation of religion (e.g., Hjarvard, 2008; Hjarvard & Lövheim, 2012; Lövheim & Lynch, 2011).

Despite the growing interest in the intersections of religion, media, and democracy in the Nordic countries, there is currently no consolidated mapping of this interdisciplinary field. As these themes gain relevance in public discourse and policymaking, an overview of the empirical research is essential for identifying knowledge gaps, bringing together diverse findings and insights, and setting an agenda for future research. As such, this scoping review endeavours to bring together individual empirical research relating to religion and the media in the Nordic countries, to map the state of this subfield, and to identify areas where further research could be especially warranted. Additionally, and as per the question at the centre of this special issue, research focusing on the mediated realities in terms of religion and democracy in the Nordic countries have not been previously systematically examined.

We operationalised the research aim – to map and to review research that explores the intersection between religion, democracy, media, and the Nordics – into the exploratory research question that allows us to effectively scope and map the empirical literature:

What scientific understanding can we gather from publications between 2011 and 2024 about the intersection of religion and democratic society in the context of Nordic media sphere?

Before engaging with the data collection to produce a corpus for answering this question, we first defined the initial key concepts that served as the basis for pinning down the keywords to be used in search queries.

The findings presented in this article are based on a scoping review of the existing literature conducted in 2024, with 20 June 2024 as the cut-off point for collecting recently published research. According to Raitskaya and Tikhonova (2019), scoping reviews have substantial unrealised potential in social sciences. A scoping review is a tool for determining the scope or coverage of a body of literature on a given topic, giving indication of the volume of literature available as well as an overview of its focus. Where systematic reviews endeavour to answer specific research questions through systematic evaluations of existing knowledge, scoping reviews are particularly useful for examining emerging research topics and for conducting an overview of a topic that is diffusely distributed among fields that might not systematically communicate with each other.

The purpose of a scoping review is to map the available research on a given theme and offer insight into how (e.g., specific academic discipline as well as data, methodology, topics, or concepts, depending on the chosen perspective) this research has been conducted (Munn et al., 2018; Raitskaya & Tikhonova, 2019; Severin-Nielsen, 2023). In this scoping review, we also seek to extract some of the main findings in the research covered, contributing to an understanding of what the current state-of-the-art research suggests about how media, religion, and democracy are intertwined, and what specific insights are made available to form the foundation for further analysis.

Of the 46 empirical studies included in this review, approximately two thirds have been published in scholarly journals located at the nexus of media studies, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, politics, and conflict studies. The rest have been published in international, edited book volumes focusing on similar disciplines and topics. The time span of publishing extends over the 14-year period, with a larger density of publications (n = 30) clustering around the second half of the time period (2018–2024). This appears to reflect the societal phenomena just before and during the time period, particularly related to an upsurge in immigration to Nordic countries and political responses that followed the European “refugee crisis” of 2015. In what follows, we go through some general attributes of the study corpus, depicting the recurring themes and topics per our coding of the review material.

In terms of geographical distribution, studies focusing on Norwegians or the Norwegian society were most prevalent (n = 21), with a Swedish focus being second most common (n = 16), Danish the third (n = 14), and Finnish as the least frequent (n = 3). No studies centring on Iceland were present in the final corpus. As five articles analyse two or more countries, the combined country code frequency (n = 54) is greater than the corpus size (n = 46). Regarding the distribution of religious emphasis on the studied empirical analyses – which religions were at the centre of analysis in each study – significant variation was lacking, as the majority of the studies focused on themes relating to Islam (n = 36), or to a lesser extent, Evangelical Lutheran Christianity (n = 14). Finally, Judaism (n = 4), Revivalist Christianity (n = 2), Orthodox Christianity (n = 1), and religiosity (non-denominational) (n = 4) were examined in a total of 11 studies.

The sources of empirical data in the corpus are in line with the distinct mediatisation of phenomena involving religion and democracy as researched in the Nordic context, with the data commonly sourced from print journalism (n = 24), social media (n = 13), or television and radio (n = 9). Micro-level interactions were also frequently examined with interviews and ethnographic data (n = 12). Less prevalent sources of data analysed in the corpus include religious publications (n = 5), other online sources (such as countermedia, blogs, and fast messaging apps) (n = 5), and surveys (n = 3). These findings are presented in Table 1, which provides an overview of the corpus composition.

Media interest was notated along the lines of the specific media data studied in most cases; for example, press-derived data (journalistic material from mainstream media sources) was coded as traditional media, and studies utilising social media or other Internet data were coded as referring to digital media. In individual studies’ datasets that were not gathered primarily from media sources (interviews, ethnographic data, and surveys), we assigned media codes in order to accurately map the various media perspectives in our corpus.

Media perspectives regarding interview, survey, or ethnographic data centred on traditional media (n = 6), digital media (n = 5), the public sphere (n = 5), and television (n = 2). Two additional, more specific media codes were utilised (in terms of both analyses relying on media data and interview, survey, or ethnography data) to specify media-related viewpoints further: political communication (media appearances, social media use of politicians and so on; n = 6) and public service media (discussion on the content or role of public broadcasting in Nordic countries; n = 5).

Finally, given the focus of this special issue, particular attention was given to the themes and subthemes related to democracy in the corpus. To accurately depict the studies gathered here, we inductively and iteratively generated eight codes for marking key elements of democracy relevance, which were assigned to publications in the corpus based on the thematic subject matter present in research questions and conclusions. These codes were distributed as follows: minority relations (n = 35), nationalism (n = 21), security and threat (n = 18), democratic ideals (n = 13), conflict case (n = 11), extremist mobilisation and terrorism (n = 9), populism (n = 7), citizenship (n = 5), and government officials (n = 5).

In what follows, we take an in-depth look at four thematic clusters that formed around the most prominent democracy codes: minority relations, nationalism, security and threat, and democratic ideals. We have chosen this manner of presentation to showcase the most recurring dimensions relating to empirical analyses on media, religion, and democracy in the Nordic countries. Through examining these publications, we endeavour to identify potential research gaps regarding contemporary Nordic democratic societies and religious dimensions, undercurrents, and conflicts thereof.

Empirical research focusing on the intersection of democracy, religion, and the media environment in the Nordic countries prioritises topics relating to Islam, often focusing on high-profile controversies or mediatised conflicts. This scholarship commonly addresses how Islam interfaces with several facets of the autochthonous culture in the Nordic countries – with a particular focus on how these mediatised social and political encounters reinforce tensions, conflicts, and negative stereotypes. This reflects both the priorities of public debate and the logics of media coverage. A focus on Islam dominates the analyses reviewed, with 78 per cent of publications (n = 36) including Islam among key research questions, conclusions, or data collection rationales. Several of the remaining publications (n = 10) do include some references to Islam or Muslims as well, although not on the level of main research aims. It thus appears that conversations in Nordic media or in studies examining that media often have Islam in mind when religion (and specifically, the intersection between societal perspectives and religion) is brought into focus. Future research would benefit from an added focus on the integrative roles of religion in democratic life, such as civic participation or ethical deliberation, and could be facilitated by linking democratic theory to empirical data when identifying and examining the “problem-space” of democracy, especially where related to religion and media.

The meta-analysis of our corpus indicates that the civic or popular responses to Muslim immigration – particularly the question of whether “Islam is a threat to our native cultures” – is an increasingly complex and contested debate in the public sphere (see, e.g., Hjarvard & Rosenfeldt, 2018). Considering, as Hjarvard and Rosenfeldt pointed out, that the boundaries between religion and culture are often indeterminate, their conflation in the empirical material analysed may be carried on into the analysis in the studies reviewed, unless the conflation itself is taken as an object for critical inquiry. In our corpus, Døving (2016) focused on representations and experiences of Jews, who are, on the one hand, protected as a minority group in Norway, but on the other, whose customs (such as kosher rules and circumcision) are still commonly branded as harking back to ancient, barbaric times, similarly to practices such as halal, hijab, and arranged marriage. The mediatisation of religious practice, including intergroup comparisons, emerges as an area with considerable potential for further research.

Several articles in the corpus elucidate how a range of Nordic media environments – particularly mainstream print journalism, other news content, and content disseminated by public service media – rarely differentiate Islam as a range of (assumed) religious vocation or practice from Islam as a marker of migrant background or culture. In the empirical material analysed, “Islam” and “Muslims” thus function mainly as categorisations that are utilised to simplify the heterogeneous field of actors and citizens in Nordic societies. Many articles underline that, particularly in public debate, the range of affiliations to Islam and their cultural functions are often overshadowed by its role as a marker of migrant culture perceived as the Other. Thus, oftentimes a Muslim identity attributed to either specific or ambiguous groups of people becomes, in effect, a shorthand identifier for a community with immigrant background.

This conflation points to two types of lacunae in the scholarship addressing religion, media, and the democratic society in the Nordic countries. The first one calls for a systematic assessment of the extent to which societal tensions linked to behaviour, custom, or practices of community organisation may originate in religious belief or practice – as opposed to being brought about by immigrant background. Secondly, the existing scholarship invites further critical and conceptual engagement with what may be achieved or lost by linking those phenomena to religion that may not be stemming from religious practice per se – especially in cases where religiously framed identities largely operate on the level of civilisationist belonging (Brubaker, 2017), driving populist or even Christianist (Ryan, 2021) mobilisation.

We identified the hybrid mediation of religious (or “religion-like”) belief and practice as a research area warranting further investigation, especially where the pertinent claims and narratives directly engage with or reinterpret democratic values and ideals. Lundström (2023) has analysed political thought in Swedish revivalist newspapers and introduced the concept of evangelical supremacy that underlines the tie-ins between Christian revivalist and the political ideology of radical nationalism. As populist rhetoric, disinformation and extremist or “alt” actors often stem from Christian ideations – whether revivalist, Lutheran, non-denominational, or “civilisational” (Brubaker, 2017; see also Valaskivi, Sumiala et al., 2023) – the emergence of new forms of allegiances between revivalist Christianity, populism, and radical right point to an interesting, topical, and understudied area of inquiry that merits further study. Considering the relative dominance of qualitative case studies in the corpus, particularly discourse and content analyses, such future research would benefit from integrating longitudinal, comparative, and mixed-methods approaches that remain comparatively rare in the corpus.

The mainstream media’s portrayals of migrants and Islam often reflect a double-standard dynamic that juxtaposes inclusivity and equality with freedom of speech – a tension we illustrated in the section on democratic ideals. The invocation of such ideals across a range of media spaces frequently rests on a foundational categorisation of Islam as a “non-native religion” to Nordic societies. By contrast, if conservative Christian faith were similarly scrutinised through the lens of democratic ideals, the narrative would likely shift from grappling with xenophobia to confronting different kinds of perceived threats to ostensibly secular Nordic cultural norms and ways of life. Considering the rise of right-wing populism over the past decade – and its notable appropriation of religious symbols and sentiments – mainstream media’s ambivalent, favourable, or critical portrayals of what might be called “civilisational Christianity” constitute a pressing and timely object for media analyses. Moreover, in light of recent experiences with terrorism and the Israel–Palestine conflict, and their translocal repercussions in the Nordic media sphere, investigation into the impact of conflictual and assuaging value-talk in the representations of migrant religiosity (Ezzati, 2021) presents a promising avenue for future research.

Some publications further address the intersection of religion, media, and democratic society in a manner that points to research areas that remain underexplored and merit closer attention. For instance, Valaskivi, Jääskeläinen, Huhtamäki, and Sumiala (2023) investigated conspiratorial content circulating online by delving into “conspiratorial populist imagination” amidst loosely structured online communities made of Christian revivalist groups as well as non-denominational actors of the conspiratorial “cultic milieu” (Campbell, 2002) or believers in a good–evil duality at work in society.

At first glance, social media is at least somewhat represented in our study corpus, as 13 of the 46 articles use material gathered from social media as (at least as a part of) the utilised datasets. However, the investigation of democratic themes regarding media platforms that have rapidly taken over a large part of the cultural and political space (TikTok, Instagram, X, and instant messaging applications such as Signal and Telegram) in Nordic societies are largely absent in our corpus. Only four articles (Sumiala & Harju, 2019; Kühle & Langholm Larsen, 2021; Lövheim & Jensdotter, 2023; Valaskivi, Jääskeläinen et al., 2023) venture further than Facebook in looking at how issues relating to religion and democracy manifest in these emerging yet highly popular and relevant digital platforms. There appears to be an urgent need for gathering data on, for example, how younger generations interact with societal questions pertaining to religious and political matters, as many young users cannot arguably be located discussing these matters on Facebook or in the comments sections of online newspapers. This way, studying religion, media, and democracy in the Nordic countries might take a well-justified step away from institutionalised broadcasters of information (television and the press, which seem to be most enthusiastically researched here) towards a more fast-paced public arena where public opinion is less diluted by journalistic practices. Such questions related to the perceived volatility of contemporary democratic systems could incentivise an even more politics-centred approach into looking at how religious issues are discussed and perhaps contested in our societies.

Meanwhile, despite lacking data from these new social media platforms, many of the studies investigate emergent, and hence complex and ambiguous, societal developments as they are forming. This commonly results in more exploratory analyses where specific new findings (“What do we know about X?”) may be difficult to pinpoint. This calls for future research that builds on these exploratory approaches by operationalising more focused sets of research questions for the analysis of larger empirical datasets, perhaps even some Big Data approaches, which are absent in this corpus. As the public roles of religion and the legitimacy of democratic institutions are being renegotiated around the globe – including across the Nordic countries – building on existing research through more systematic and comparative approaches offers valuable potential for deepening our understanding of these dynamics.

Taken together, what do we know about religion, media, and democracy in the Nordic countries based on this scoping review? First, the body of Nordic scholarship addressing each of these three encompassing thematic areas tends to focus on Islam and Muslim minorities, often articulating how media output contributes to public controversies, securitisation, or cultural tension. Second, mainstream media – especially legacy journalism – plays a key role in framing religious actors and discourses yet rarely captures their own agency or internal diversity in depth. Third, democratic ideals such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech are often placed in tension with each other, particularly in the media-driven public debate. Finally, while emerging digital platforms and non-institutional religious actors are beginning to receive scholarly attention, systematic research into how these spaces mediate religious expression and democratic engagement remains limited.