The Real Reason Why Scandinavians Are So Happy

May 13, 2021 By Gene Veith

For the fourth year in a row, Finland is ranked as the happiest country in the world. So why do Finns and other Scandinavians rate so happy when they are also notoriously gloomy?

According to the World Happiness Report, an ambitious yearly study, in the plague year of 2020, here are the world’s 20 happiest countries:

Finland
Iceland
Denmark
Switzerland
Netherlands

Sweden

Germany

Norway

New Zealand

Austria

Israel

Australia

Ireland

United States

Canada

Czech Republic

Belgium

United Kingdom

Taiwan

France

The list is interesting for lots of reasons. (Such as why is Israel happier than the United States, despite having to live with the constant threat of terrorism, rocket attacks, and the opprobrium of much of the world?)

But the biggest puzzle is why five of the top eight spots are occupied by Scandinavian countries? That violates all stereotypes. What about the “melancholy Dane”? What about all of those jokes about the morose Norwegians of Minnesota? As for Finland, I heard a joke about its famously introverted and reserved people and COVID, something about their reaction to the two-meter social distancing rule. After COVID goes away, the Finns will be glad they won’t have to stand so close.

A Finnish immigrant to the United States, Jukka Savolainen–who says that he moved to America in part because he likes to see people smile–has written an article that explains it all entitled The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness.

Nobody is more skeptical than the Finns about the notion that we are the world’s happiest people. To be fair, this is hardly the only global ranking we’ve topped recently. We are totally fine with our reputation of having the best educational system (not true), lowest levels of corruption (probably), most sustainable economy (meh), and so forth. But happiest country? Give us a break.

He quotes approvingly a visitor’s description of Helsinki’s glum pedestrians: “This is not a state of national mourning in Finland, these are Finns in their natural state; brooding and private; grimly in touch with no one but themselves; the shyest people on earth. Depressed and proud of it.”

So why do they rank as the happiest people in the world? Savolainen points out that the research behind the World Happiness Report asks respondents to rate their lives on a scale of one to ten, with ten representing “the best possible life for you,” and one representing the worst. That is to say, the scale measures what people think is possible for themselves. The Scandinavian countries are indeed prosperous and safe, with a welfare state that takes care of them. But the key, says Savolainen, is their low expectations. They don’t expect much, so they are highly satisfied, and, thus, very “happy.”

Savolainen makes this observation, which makes this all of interest to this blog: “Consistent with their Lutheran heritage, the Nordic countries are united in their embrace of curbed aspirations for the best possible life.”

So Lutheranism is what makes Scandinavians both gloomy and satisfied? I wonder about that. True, Lutherans know themselves to be sinners. They will be skeptical about any kind of earthly utopia. They reject any “theology of glory” in favor of the “theology of the cross.”

Then again, Lutherans believe they have been saved despite their sins by the grace of God, who justifies them freely by the sacrifice of Christ. That takes the pressure off. Lutherans also believe in vocation, that God is present and active in ordinary human work and relationships. That gives meaning to ordinary life.

Scandinavians today have a Lutheran “heritage,” but the Lutheran faith has faded considerably, with some notable exceptions. Perhaps what remains is Lutheranism without faith, the devastations of the Law without the joy of the Gospel, the depressing parts with only a dim–but real–memory of the happy parts. (But read this about confessional, evangelical Lutheranism in Finland.)

And yet, there may be wisdom even in this secular version of Lutheranism. Another word for satisfaction even in the face of low expectations is contentment. The Word of God–another Lutheran emphasis–has much to say about this:

I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. (Philippians 4:11-12)

Godliness with contentment is great gain,for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. (1 Timothy 6:6-8)

The Scandinavians have food and clothing and much more. Why shouldn’t they be content?

We Americans, by contrast, tend to want more than we have and be ambitious for ever-greater success, only to be miserable when we do not attain it. We are restless, changeable, and dissatisfied. Though we are still optimistic that a better life is just ahead. This aspect of our national character is part of our strength and dynamism. But it is also why we come in on the World Happiness Report at #14.

Photo: Hamlet [the Melancholy Dane] by Nawe97, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. With the following caption: Sam Gregory, left, will portray the Ghost of John Barrymore and Alex Esola will portray Andy in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s I Hate Hamlet play this summer at the University of Colorado Boulder. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado) .

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Research Shows Benefits of a Classical Christian Education

November 12, 2020 By Gene Veith

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There is now research that demonstrates the superiority of Classical Christian Education by almost every standard–academically, socially, spiritually, psychologically–to the alternatives.

The University of Notre Dame sociology department was commissioned by the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) to do research on their effectiveness. Notre Dame researchers, incorporating data from the larger Cardus Educational Survey, studied thousands of alumni aged 24-42.

They had been educated in six categories of schools: public, secular private, Catholic, evangelical Christian, religious homeschool, and ACCS (classical Christian).

The study then compared the graduates in terms of their life-choices, preparation, attitudes, values, opinions, and practices. The research concentrated on how well these adults were prepared for college and a career; their outlook on life; their Christian practices; their Christian life; their conservatism; their ability to think independently; and their engagement with the larger society.

The findings were stunning. Those educated with a classical Christian education outperformed their peers in virtually every category, often by an order of magnitude. See the results at this website. Read the entire study, entitled Good Soil: A Comparative Study of ACCS Alumni Life Outcomes.

Just to give you a few examples, when it comes to academics, classically educated students had the highest test scores; nearly 90% felt well-prepared for college; and 55% earned mostly A’s in college. Among public school graduates, about 50% felt well-prepared and 35% made A’s. The homeschooled students came in second to the ACCS students in earning A’s, with 45%, and yet only 60% felt well-prepared, suggesting that they lacked confidence. Evangelical schools trailed even the public schools in A’s, with just over 30%.

This study will also be instructive for homeschoolers and evangelical schools. All of the Christian alternatives did well when it comes to transmitting the faith, though the classical approach was most effective (90% of ACCS grads go to church at least three times a month; about 70% of the homeschooled and evangelical grads do). Catholic schools tracked pretty closely with public schools, except they were more effective in most measures.

The classically-educated showed strong results in holding to orthodox Christian theology and moral convictions. They also score the highest in being willing to take action when they see injustice.

What struck me most, though, is the data for “outlook on life”; that is, for their general happiness and mental health. The classically-educated adults scored significantly higher than everyone else in measures of gratitude, hopefulness, sense that life is under control, and ability to handle suffering. They also had more friends, with nearly 90% saying they had more than three close friends, far outstripping the private secular prep schools, with came in second at 50%.

Why would classical education help with that sort of thing? My former student Andrew Kern, with whom I wrote Classical Education [paid link] was the one who told me about this study in a Zoom discussion we were having with some people in Finland who were wanting to start a classical school. He said that classical learning teaches “rightly ordered thinking,” so that there is a connection with the “rightly ordered mind” that is essential to mental health.

Here is Andrew’s “elevator speech” explaining what this approach entails: “Christian classical education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts so that the student, in Christ, is better able to know, glorify, and enjoy God.”

Here is the ACCS description of what they do: “Classical Christian education (CCE) is a time-tested educational system which establishes a biblical worldview (called Paideia), incorporates methods based on natural phases of student development, cultivates the 7 Christian Virtues, trains student reasoning through the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric), and interacts with the historical Great Books.” (The 7 Christian Virtues refers to the “natural virtues” of the ancient world–justice, self-control, courage, and wisdom–plus the “spiritual virtues” of Christianity: faith, hope, and love.)

The Association of Classical Christian Schools, the first to bring back classical education in the 1990’s, has been around long enough to have educated some 50,000 students in over 300 schools, giving them a big sample of adult alumni to study. But there are other networks of classical schools as well, such as the Society for Classical Learning. Andrew Kern operates the Circe Institute, which offers resources, teacher training, and other help for schools that want to go classical.

I also want to emphasize the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education, an association of Lutheran parochial schools and homeschoolers that follow this approach.

I wish the ACCS study could have spun out the category of classical Christian homeschoolers, of which there are many, with a great deal of curriculum and online programs, including the Lutheran Wittenberg Academy.

I don’t know to what extent the ACCS data carries over to these other classical education ventures. The ACCS has been doing this a long time, while many of the others are newer. Not all students have had the benefit of the entire K-12 program.

But still, these findings are significant. Those who want to fix the manifest problems with education in this country–including experts who say “follow the science” and educators who demand “research based programs”–would do well to consider classical education.

Image by Наталия Когут from Pixabay

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Reversing Religious Decline

May 8, 2020 By Gene Veith

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Religion waxes and wanes in a culture and throughout history. It can fade away, but it can also suddenly come back again.

That is one of the takeaways from the American Enterprise study by Lyman Stone that we’ve been discussing this week: Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.

In addition to giving us something of a three-dimensional profile of the extent of religion in the United States and Western Europe, the study gives data about why religions decline but also what brings religions back.

As we reported from that study, the lowest level of church membership and church attendance in the history of the United States was in the 1780s, when only a third of Americans belonged to any church body and only a fifth of the population was in church on any given Sunday. That’s far worse than today’s supposedly “declining” numbers, of 62% membership and 35% attending.

But after that religious low point at the very outset of our nation came the Second Great Awakening, which began in the 1790s and soon made our forebears the strong Christians we have always assumed them to be.

What changed? Researchers have cited sociological factors. For example, as we blogged about, the American Enterprise study says that the heavy-handed, politically powerful colonial churches created a backlash against faith, whereas their disestablishment and America’s new religious liberties created a climate for faith to flourish again.

But ultimately, bringing back Christianity from times of church decline requires a spiritual “awakening”–or revival, or renewal, or reformation–that has to be seen as the work of the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, such movements often begin outside of the institutional church as such–from the Reformation in the universities to the revivals on the American frontier–before having their effect in the churches.

The Holy Spirit’s work, of course, includes bringing Christians into the task. So it’s legitimate to think, plan, organize, and take actions towards another spiritual awakening. But, as we saw yesterday, gimmicks and simplistic solutions are unlikely to go very far.

One task, of course, is to pray: Christians I met in the Inner Mission organizations of Denmark and Finland told me that they had been praying for revival for years. Now it is happening, they said, not as they expected or as they had been working for, but as Muslim immigrants are coming to Christ.

“We did nothing to make this happen!” they told me. But now their Bible Studies, their classes, and other ministries are full of people coming to them and asking to hear about Jesus. These mission societies, themselves the fruit of an earlier Christian awakening in Scandinavia, are now sending hosts of eager new converts to conservative pastors for baptism and church membership.

Illustration: A Haugean meeting [see Hans Nielsen Hauge, credited with reviving the Christian faith in 19th century Norway] by Adolph Tidemand / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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A Defense of Capitalism

March 9, 2020 By Gene Veith

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Americans are flirting with socialism. A major presidential contender, Bernie Sanders, is an avowed socialist. A majority of young adults think socialism is morally superior to capitalism. Even many conservatives are drawing back from capitalism, putting forward “hyphenated capitalism,” such as Marco Rubio’s “common good-capitalism.” Even many businesses are retreating from capitalism, demanding the government protect them from the free market.

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, has launched a forceful defense of capitalism. In a speech to the conservative think tank the Hudson Institute, she takes on not only the overt socialism of Bernie Sanders and the quasi-socialism of the other Democrats, but also the “socialism lite” that she sees in her fellow Republicans.

You should read her entire speech. I’ll let George Will summarize it:

Speaking in a manner bracingly unusual in this city, Haley minced no words: “The American system is capitalism.” Although “the Founders never used the word, they gave us capitalism in all but the name,” because capitalism is “another word for freedom. And it springs from America’s most cherished ideals.” The Founders understood something the Supreme Court has forgotten for eight decades: Economic freedom is, like freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, a fundamental right. Capitalism has “lifted up more people, unlocked more progress, and unleashed more prosperity” than any other system, yet “many people avoid saying that word, including some conservatives and business leaders.”

Haley said the Business Roundtable, which represents major corporations, wants companies to “focus not on business, but on some vague notion of helping ‘stakeholders,’” meaning customers, employees and communities. “This,” Haley said astringently, “is puzzling.” Companies that do not serve their customers, reward their workers and serve their communities will fail — unless abusive or incompetent companies are saved by misguided government policies. Such business-government entanglement breeds cronyism, self-dealing and bailouts from taxpayers.

“Some conservatives,” Haley said, “have turned against the market system. They tell us America needs a … different kind of capitalism. A hyphenated capitalism. Yet while these critics keep the word capitalism, they lose its meaning. They want to give government more power to make more decisions for businesses and workers. They differ from the socialists only in degree.”

[Keep reading. . .]

Other highlights from the speech:

–She deals with the “myths” about capitalism. E.g, “It is a myth that capitalism is just for the wealthy or big corporations.” And that capitalism creates sweat-shop conditions for workers.

–She cites capitalism’s beneficial impact on the world. “Two hundred years ago, 94% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, it’s 10%.”

–She cites capitalism’s beneficial impact on the environment. “You wouldn’t know it from listening to the gloom and doom of the left, but the facts are clear. The world is getting cleaner, healthier, and wealthier.”

–She agrees that there is still much pain and suffering in the world, but she argues that the biggest cause of human suffering is socialism.”

–She cites evidence that “Socialism has failed everywhere it’s ever been tried.”

–She shoots down Bernie Sander’s claim that he is simply advocating the socialism of Scandinavia:

The same Scandinavia where Sweden tried socialism, saw it fail, and went so far in the other direction that it now has one of the freest economies in Europe.The same Scandinavia where Denmark cut its business tax rate by more than half. The Danish Prime Minister criticized Bernie Sanders and said his country is a “market economy.” And get this. Finland’s president was recently asked if his country was socialist. His response: “No, God bless.”

Other democracies have tried socialism. Israel, India, and the United Kingdom went through periods of socialism, only to abandon it. Their people are markedly better off as a result.

–She acknowledges the criticisms of capitalism, but says that the critics are really pointing to deviations from capitalism, not its essence:

They’re right when they say too many businesses engage in corrupt self-dealing. We saw it in the housing crisis of the last recession. We see it today with some anti-market monopolistic behavior. But that’s not capitalism. It’s corruption. It’s often illegal, and it’s always immoral. Corruption has no place in a free market. Everyone deserves an equal shot.

They’re right that too many special interests get special treatment. But that’s not capitalism either. That’s cronyism and corporate welfare. It destroys a level playing field and rigs the economy in favor of the well-connected. We should expose it and root it out. And no company should ever get a taxpayer bailout.

They’re also right that some communities in the American heartland have suffered ill effects from globalist economics. But globalism and capitalism are not even close to synonymous. Take it from me, at the United Nations, I had a front row seat to witness the values of the multilateral bureaucrats. I assure you capitalism was not among them.

Finally, critics of capitalism are right that income levels are unequal in America. Income inequality will always exist in a free economy. That is not capitalism’s proudest feature, but it’s infinitely better than the alternative. Under socialism, everyone is equal. But they are equal in their poverty and misery.

She says much more.

What do you think of her analysis?

If leftists, liberals, conservatives, and businesses are clamoring for some kind of socialism, if only “socialism lite,” does that mean America is going socialist? Does capitalism need some protections to address those “deviations” that are giving it a bad name? Isn’t that what the “hyphenated capitalism” is aiming at?

Image: Official Photo of Nikki Haley, United States Department of State / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Criminalizing Christian Teachings about Sex

February 11, 2020 By Gene Veith

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Police in Finland are investigating the leader of an entire denomination for publishing a booklet that disapproves of homosexuality. The author of that booklet,which sets forth the Biblical teachings about sexuality, is also under investigation for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic group,” a statute which added “sexual orientation” to the list of protected classes. The maximum punishment is two years in prison.

I have blogged about Christianity in Scandinavia and Finland in particular, based on what I learned during my speaking engagements in those regions. See my posts on the subject, for example, Confessional Lutheranism in Finland, Scandinavia’s Two Tracks of Christianity, and Challenges for Conservative Churches in Scandinavia.

The police came for the Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, Dean of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland. This is a church body that broke away from the established state church. It was started by members of independent mission organizations, which have become the home of evangelical, conservative Christianity in the nordic countries. The Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese is committed to confessional Lutheranism and is a member, along with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, of the International Lutheran Council.

The church published a 24-page booklet entitled in English Male and Female Created He Them. (The link will take you to the English translation.) There is nothing hateful in the booklet. It simply lays out what the Bible says about sexuality, including the teaching that homosexuality is against God’s design.

Also being prosecuted is the author of that booklet, Dr. Päivi Räsänen. She is a member of the Finnish parliament and a former Minister of the Interior, no less! She is also under criminal investigation for a tweet she wrote last year in which she asked leaders of the state church what their doctrinal basis was for supporting a gay pride parade.

The booklet was written back in 2004, long before Finland legalized same-sex marriage in 2017. An earlier investigation of the book concluded that no crime had been committed, but the Prosecutor General has re-opened the case, saying there is reason to believe that it “incites hatred.”

You have got to read Rod Dreher’s interview with Dr. Räsänen, who is very impressive in her integrity–she might have avoided prosecution for her tweet by taking it down, but she refused to do so–and in the way she speaks up for Christian truth in the public square. (For example, she points out that the Finnish state church is obligated, by law, to base its teachings on the “Holy Scriptures,” and asks, how could it then be illegal to teach what the Holy Scriptures say?) Here is a sample of what Dr. Räsänen, a medical doctor, has to say:

I believe that ultimately the purpose of these attacks is to eliminate the Word of God and discard the Law of God. It is very problematic that expressing Christian beliefs is often seen as insulting in the West. For example, marriage between a man and a woman has become a concept that is understood as restrictive, even threatening. Concepts such as man and woman, father and mother, are dearly loved concepts, and as old as the history of humanity. The attempt to break down the gender system based on two different genders hurts especially children. It is unfortunate how uncritically the ideology of sexual diversity and LGBT activism has been supported and endorsed even by churches.

I believe that every person has the right to hear the whole truth of God’s Word, both the Gospel and the Law. Only people who recognize their sins need Jesus, the propitiation for our sins. We must have the courage to speak about the dangerous effects of LGBT activism. Debatable themes such as immoral sexual relations have to do with guilt. Guilt cannot be solved by denying it, but only by confessing it and receiving mercy and the message of forgiveness in Jesus’ sacrifice. It is impossible to think that classical Christian doctrine would become illegal in the West.

I know both Juhana Pohjola and Päivi Räsänen. Dr. Pohjola took my wife and I out to a Finnish feast. I had a wonderful conversation with him, and he introduced me to other leaders of the confessional church in Finland who got together to meet me and for an informal presentation on my part.

My wife and I also had lunch with Dr. Räsänen. We talked about the political scene in Finland and about her political party, the Christian Democrats, which combines economic liberalism with social conservatism.

I didn’t get to know them well in such a short amount of time, but our acquaintance gives a special resonance as I read these stories about how their strong witness to their faith is putting them in legal jeopardy.

As it happens, Dr. Pohjola is scheduled to meet with the police on February 11, which is today. Pray for him. Also pray for Dr. Räsänen. And for the other faithful Christians in Finland. And in other parts of the world, where many are enduring much worse persecutions. And pray for Christians in the United States of America. Our Constitution guarantees our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, giving us much greater legal protections than are common even in advanced democracies such as Finland. But we sometimes find it hard to stand up for our beliefs if they are merely unpopular? How would we bear up if our beliefs were to become criminalized?

UPDATE: For an account of Dr. Pohjola’s five-hour police interrogation, go here.

Photo of Dr. Päivi Räsänen, by Soppakanuuna [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via Wikimedia Commons.

HT: Paul McCain

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My Article on Art for an Israeli Christian Journal

March 19, 2019 By Gene Veith

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Those who keep up with me on this blog know that I’ve been doing some things with Scandinavian Christians. In Finland a while back, I spoke at an apologetics conference about imagination and the arts, drawing on my recent book with Matt Ristuccia, Imagination Redeemed: Glorifying God with a Neglected Part of Your Mind.

(Also from that conference: I met and was introduced to the work of Klaus Härö, a major award-winning Finnish filmmaker, who happens to be an evangelical, Lutheran Christian. More on him later after I finish tracking down all of his movies that are available here.)

As I have blogged about, the mission societies in the Scandinavian countries–rather than the state churches–are the bastions of conservative, evangelical, Lutheran, confessional Christianity. And they continue to do the work that got them started a couple of centuries ago: sending missionaries. Having played a big role in the evangelization of Africa, as well as starting churches in the early days of the United States, the mission societies today do not draw back from some of the toughest and most dangerous challenges, such as reaching Muslims in Afghanistan.

I was approached by a missionary to Israel, Terho Kanervikkoaho, who was at the conference and who is the editor of Mishkan, a journal for Israeli Christians and Jewish Christians more generally. (See, for example, their two special issues on Luther and the Jews, here and here.) They were planning an issue focusing on the arts and invited me to contribute.

I thought that the perfect topic would be what I had already written about the calling and the gifts of Bezalel, the artist of the Tabernacle, a topic that opens up into the other teachings of the Bible about the arts. I wrote about this in my book State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe. That section, in turn, was taken from my very first book, The Gift of Art: The Place of the Arts in Scripture.

So I got permission from my publisher, Crossway, to reprint the two key chapters as a contribution to Mishkan. You can read the article here.

It was strange and oddly gratifying to work over material from my very first book–which got me started as a Christian writer–having retired and now being closer to the end of my writing career. Bezalel represents the first treatment of vocation in the Bible. At the time, I mentioned that, but little did I know that I would be studying vocation much more extensively, to the point of writing three books on the topic. I saw in this project how my writing has had a unity throughout my career from beginning to end, all tied together here in a bow.

Illustration: Bezalel and Oholiab, from the Nuremberg Bible Biblia Sacra Germanaica (15th century) [Public Domain]

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