The World’s Happiest Countries Are (Culturally) Lutheran?

1. Finland  (for the 9th year in a row)
2. Iceland
3. Denmark
4. Costa Rica
5. Sweden
6. Norway

By way of comparison, the United States came in at #23.  Of course, we have to take these kinds of ratings with a grain of salt.  According to the linked article, “researchers look at six factors including GDP per capita, life expectancy, generosity and perceptions of freedom and corruption.”  The stories in the media concentrate on these country’s health care systems and generous social programs.

But I couldn’t help but wonder, does the Lutheran influence on their culture have anything to do with these high levels of “happiness”?  This article actually focuses on how these countries have a strong sense of community, trust in their government, a spirit of cooperation, and general kindness.

For example, Finland was rated highest as the best place to lose your wallet.  This is because Finns will pretty much always return your wallet to you, cash intact.  Nordic folk trust each other to do the right thing, and they generally do.

I suspect that the attitude towards work–the sense among both employers and employees that they are serving their neighbors–is part of this “happiness.”

Now one could say that this is just cultural.  Yes, indeed, since these have become highly secularized countries.  But, I ask, how did the culture get that way?  The Vikings were not exactly kind hearted.  They never gave the gold back to the monasteries they pillaged.  They didn’t adopt Christianity until around 1000 A.D.–a thousand years after the rest of Europe–and it was still taking hold when the Lutheran Reformation was embraced in the 1520’s, while Luther was still alive, the first entire nations to do so.

I would argue that Luther’s neighbor-centered ethics, as opposed to the Catholic emphasis on acquiring merit and the Reformed emphasis on individual performance, can be seen in the Scandinavian mindset.  The habit of thinking about what you are doing for your neighbor contributes to a sense of community and social solidarity.  The doctrine of the Estates emphasizes the value of family and government.  The doctrine of vocation not only gives purpose to work, but also instills the responsibility of those in authority to care for the neighbors they are exercising that authority over, which may be why Scandinavians have good things to say about how they are treated by their bosses and their governments.

But here is the paradox:  Scandinavians also have a reputation for introspection and melancholy!  These are the lands of Nordic noir in literature, Ingmar Bergman films, and Hamlet the “melancholy Dane”!  And Scandinavians admit to this tendency.  They also speak of the so-called Law of Jante, a code of extreme humility.

This too is commonly ascribed to the Lutheran heritage.  Lutherans are justified by their personal faith, requiring inner scrutiny.  And they must always confess their sins. They know that human sinfulness makes us all equal before God, ruling out pride and social hierarchies, and making us pessimistic about the world.

But, apparently, this Lutheran melancholy contributes to happiness!  If you expect difficulties, you won’t be thrown off when you encounter them! Being skeptical about yourself and the state of the world is evidently a key to well-being!

Lutheranism embraces the world as God’s kingdom even in its secularity and directs us outward to our neighbor, while also embracing the inner life and acknowledging our limits.  That is a formula for happiness.

Why don’t we Americans do this?  We don’t have the culture for it.  We want to assert ourselves.  We want to change the world, in one direction or another.  This too reflects our religious heritage of crusading Puritans and triumphalist evangelicals.  This is why we are never satisfied.  This is why we are #23 on the happiness scale.

And, of course, there is the leavening legacy of the Gospel, which gives assurance, comfort, and joy.  In my unscientific impression (based mainly on reading Nordic crime novels), that while there are lots and lots of unbelievers in the Nordic lands today, they tend to be not so bitterly hostile to Christianity as they tend to be in other formerly-Christian countries. Their cultural memory of Christianity is of a benign religion.  They think that it is too good to be true, not that it was so oppressive that it somehow damaged them and the world in general, as Christianity is often thought of in other countries, as seen in the New Atheists.   Without faith in Christ, though, a law-less, confused view of the Gospel can lead to complacency and antinomianism, which also, I suspect, contributes to secularist Scandinavians’ “happiness.”

I would caution our Scandinavian friends that while their culture can draw on their religious capital for awhile, even after that religion fades, in time that capital will all be spent.  In their secularism, they will eventually find themselves unable to resist the pull of self-centered materialism, over-optimistic progressivism, and technological solipsism.  And their melancholy will drive them to despair. They will need to recover their Lutheran Christianity if they want to keep their happiness ratings.

Photo:  Frank Barrie as Hamlet [the Melancholy Dane] (1974) by Bosmeor – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118215765

[I wanted to use this one, but licensing fees prevented that.]