chapter fifteen
HAUGEANISM BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND TRADITIONALISM IN NORWAY, 1796–1845
Arne Bugge Amundsen
In most parts of Europe around , political debates were vivid regard- ing the future of the civil society. Facing the experiences of the French revolution, many liberal voices, in less revolutionary countries as well, spoke out in favour of civil rights, and freedom of speech and belief. In the twin monarchy of Denmark-Norway, liberal political experi- ments had been carried out as early as the s, which included a num- ber of years of full freedom of speech and print. Although the liberal free- dom acts were withdrawn after a few years, the situation in the two coun- tries was rather liberal in the following decades.1 Political opposition was a problem and the object of censorship. In the field of religion, on the other hand, the public sphere was open to quite a wide range of public discussions.2 This was the case, not least, because of the ongoing conflicts between liberal and conservative theologians. Even religious groups of more oppositional kinds were “tolerated”—such as the Moravians, who were granted the privilege of building their own ideal village in the Southern part of Jutland—in Christiansfeld. This privilege and the activities legalized with it obviously were in conflict with older legislation, but the public opinion and the state reason were in favour even of conservative piety with high moral standards—as long as its practitioners “kept silent,” i.e., worked in private and were not engaged in public debates.3 The real problems started when the relatively liberal legislation met with a more aggressive religious opposition, as was the case with the quickly expanding Hauge movement in the latter part of the s.
1 Henrik G. Bastiansen & Hans Fredrik Dahl, Norsk mediehistorie (Oslo, ), p. ff. 2 Arne Bugge Amundsen & Henning Laugerud, Norsk fritenkerhistorie – (Oslo, ), p. ff. 3 Ibid., pp. , . arne bugge amundsen
This article will focus on this movement and its founding father, the lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge (–).4 Hauge is a rather mythical person in the Norwegian history. Among church historians, he has been a religious hero to a degree that the political and theological radicalism of his message has been marginalized.5 Several secular historians have included Hauge in their description of modern Norwegian history, but their main emphasis has been on the religious leader as a political and social actor.6 There is, then, a need for a parallel interpretation of both the theological and political elements in the thinking of Hans Nielsen Hauge and his followers.7
HaugeandtheHaugemovement
It is hard to find a single person or movement that has been more intensely described and discussed in Norway’s modern Church history than Hans Nielsen Hauge and the Haugean movement. Hans Nielsen Hauge was a peasant’s son from Rolvsøy in Tune Parish, a district some ten Norwegian miles southeast of Oslo, the present capital of Norway.8
4 A Hauge-bibliography—meaning books and articles about Hans Nielsen Hauge— for the period – is printed in Hans Nielsen Hauge, Skrifter, H.N.H. Ording, ed., vols. (Oslo, –), : –. A list of different books and articles by and about Hauge, and including a short biography, can also be found in J.B. Halvorsen, Norsk Forfatter-Lexikon – vols. (Kristiania, –), : –. A more recent bibliography is Finn Wiig Sjursen, Den haugianske periode . Litterær produksjon av og om Hans Nielsen Hauge og haugianerne. En bibliografi (Bergen, ), with about titles. 5 Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘ “The Haugean Heritage”—A Symbol of National History’, ed., Jens Braarvig & Thomas Krogh, In Search of Symbols. An Explorative Study [Occa- sional Papers from the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Oslo ] (Oslo, ), pp. –. 6 Several contributions of this kind are presented in Svein Aage Christoffersen, ed., Hans Nielsen Hauge og det moderne Norge [KULTs skriftserie ] (Oslo, ). 7 See Arne Bugge Amundsen, ‘Books, letters and communication. The Norwegian Hauge Movement, –,’ Arne Bugge Amundsen, ed., Revival and Communica- tion. Studies in the History of Scandinavian Revivals – [Bibliotheca Historico- Ecclesiastica Lundensis ] (Lund, ), pp. –. 8 There are many more or less scholarly based biographies of Hans Nielsen Hauge. Without a doubt, the most influential in the nineteenth century was the one written by the church historian Anton Christian Bang, Hans Nielsen Hauge og hans Samtid, st ed. (Kristiania, ). The third edition of Bang’s biography appeared in , the last one as late as in . Partly based on his own collections of Haugeiana, Hallvard Gunleiksson Heggtveit presented a thorough analysis of both Hauge and his movement in his description of Norwegian church history in the nineteenth century,