Pentecostalism

Due to Sarah Palin’s previous links with a Pentecostal church, Pew Research has some notes about the role of pentecostals in the U.S. and their general political positions (hint: Palin appears to be a fairly typical pentecostal on social issues).

One side-note from a Scandinavian perspective could be that Sweden has a fairly strong Pentecostal tradition (not least compared with Denmark) and one of the parties in the present government, the Christian Democrats, actually have some of their base in Swedish Pentecostalism – this sets the Swedes apart from the Norwegian and Danish Christian Democratic parties which have their base in more traditional evangelical and pietist communities, but then Pentecostalism is relatively much stronger in Sweden than in Denmark and Norway (Pentecostals are still a tiny minority, though). Sarah Palin might look less odd in a Swedish than in a Danish context.

One major problem for the Swedish party has been how to deal with the abortion issue – Swedish pentecostals (as most other evangelicals) are firmly opposed to free abortion, but the party at one point decided that the anti-abortion standpoint wasn’t a vote-winner and has generally silenced candidates who raised the issue.

I also note that the entry in the Swedish Wikipedia mentions that Göran Hägglund, the present chairman of the Swedish Christian Democrats, was trained as a Pentecostal preacher. Hägglund’s own homepage makes no mention of this. Another sign of the party’s complicated relationship with its own beginnings?

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