Secularization,religious plurality and position: Local inter-religious cooperation in contemporary Sweden

Abstract

Swedish society is characterized by secularization, and at the same time, as a result of migration, the country has become more pluralistic. An important consequence of this is the increasing possibilities for cooperation between different religious communities, and a variety of inter-religious cooperation are currently taking place in Sweden. The aim of the article is to show how inter-religious cooperation arises and is maintained at a local level in Sweden today, but also to highlight what the hurdles are. The article is based on interviews with people who in different ways were involved, or had chosen not to be involved, in inter-religious cooperation at a local level in Sweden. It is also based on participation in five local inter-religious groups during 2010 and 2011. The study shows that inter-religious cooperation at local level in Sweden is largely influenced by differences in conditions between religious communities. These differences mainly derive from the positions the religious communities have in society, i.e. there is a strong power imbalance between the religious communities that is clearly reflected in the inter-religious cooperation.

Introduction

Swedish society, like many Western societies, is characterized by secularization. Religion has an inconspicuous place in society and many people do not uphold any religious affiliation, religious practice or religious belief (Bromander, 2013; Lövheim and Bromander, 2012). Religion is also treated in the country with suspicion and perceived as something belonging to the past, or as it is sometimes suggested, not perceived at all (Burén, 2015; Flodell, 2006; Willander, 2014: 189–191; Zuckerman, 2008: 148–150). Secularization in Sweden is an ongoing process, however, because there is still religion in the society, albeit small in scale and importance. The country has also, for a long time, been religiously homogeneous as the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Sweden has had a completely dominant position and until 2000 was a state church. However, as a result of migration and globalization, we see processes of post-secularity in society, and the former religious homogeneity has become more pluralistic. An important consequence of the latter is the increasing possibilities for cooperation between different religious communities, and a variety of inter-religious cooperation is currently taking place in Sweden, both at a local and national level. The conditions for this cooperation, though, are highly influenced by the secularization in society and by a distinct variety of inequalities between religious communities.

Inter-religious cooperation can be seen as the consequence of a pluralistic society, but can also be argued to be a deliberate strategy of the religious communities as a reaction to ongoing secularization. In other words, by forming inter-religious cooperation, religion, as a phenomenon, i.e. not the religions per se, can be reintroduced into society. The cooperation between different religious communities may be experienced as positive by the society and therefore seen as less threatening than the upholding of one religion’s specific uniqueness.

How the inter-religious cooperation arises and is maintained, though, is highly influenced by the context in which it is found; a context which in Sweden is characterized by secularization, as well as by a variety of imbalances between the religious communities involved. The aim of this article is to show how inter-religious cooperation arises and how cooperation is maintained at a local level in Sweden today, and also to highlight what the hurdles are. The questions to be answered are the following: What circumstances and conditions influence local inter-religious cooperation at the local level in contemporary Sweden, and in what way do they influence the inter-religious cooperation?

In this article inter-religious cooperation is referred to as an organized cooperation between different religious individuals or religious organizations whose primary and manifest purpose is the interaction and mutual cooperation between persons or organizations with different religious affiliations. The concept is not in widespread use; typically, the term ‘religious dialogue’ is used (Ahlstrand, 2005: 8), but since this mainly emphasizes inner work in the groups and theological issues, it differs from what is in focus for this study. Inter-religious cooperation may have, and often has, other aims and objectives than the cooperation itself. People with various religious affiliations meet to achieve something beyond the meeting itself, which in some cases can be beneficial for just those who are involved in the cooperation, but in other cases it is intended to be beneficial for the society at large. The focus of this study is not on the inter-religious cooperation within the religious communities, but on how inter-religious cooperation relates to the surrounding society. This perspective on inter-religious cooperation has previously been studied to a limited extent, both in Sweden and internationally, but a need for further research has been stressed (Ahlstrand, 2002: 50; Borell and Gerdner, 2013; Council of Europe, 2007; Griera, 2012; Westerlund, 2002).

The study I will refer to in this article is based on interviews with people who in different ways were involved, or had chosen not to be involved, in inter-religious cooperation at a local level in Sweden. It is also based on participation in local inter-religious groups’ meetings. For the study, interviews were conducted with 26 people in 18 interview sessions, and in addition, observations were made at 30 meetings in five local inter-religious groups during 2010 and 2011. The four cities where these groups and interviewees were situated are Swedish medium-sized cities with at least 70,000 inhabitants and with some religious plurality. The inter-religious cooperation was studied from a local perspective in order to get a close and clear link between the surrounding context and the inter-religious cooperation.

2. Religion and inter-religious cooperation in Sweden

As stated, Sweden has for a long time been religiously homogeneous. From the eleventh century, Christianity has been predominant in Sweden and it is only during the last fifty years that we find a greater number of people in Sweden who have another religious affiliation, or who are Christians, belonging to the Catholic Church or the Orthodox and Eastern churches. We must be aware, though, that the religious minorities we find in Sweden today are very small in comparison to the number of people who are members of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Sweden. If we set the number of members of the Church of Sweden in relation to the non-Christian religions estimated to have the highest number of affiliated, namely Islam, the ratio is 6.2 million to 400,000, i.e. 62% of Sweden’s population belongs to the Church of Sweden and about 4% are estimated to belong to Islam ¹ . With regards to other religious communities in the country, the numbers are even less; approximately 150,000 belong to the Orthodox and Eastern churches, approximately 110,000 to the Catholic Church, the free church denominations have in total approximately 300,000 members, and it is estimated that there are approximately 25,000 Buddhists, 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 10,000 Hindus, 8,000 Jews, and about 8,000 Mormons. Sikhs are expected to number around 3,000, Bahia has approximately 1,000 adherents and Scientology has approximately 500 active members. Although these groups are small, they have been growing fast recently; in the early 1970s there were, for example, about 50,000 Catholics in Sweden and in the 1930s approximately 500 people belonged to the Orthodox and Oriental churches and only about eight citizens were Muslims (Stoor, 2002: 37–44). It is also worth mentioning that the state authority Swedish Commission for Government Support to Faith Communities (SST) gives grants to religious organizations in the country ² .

Organized inter-religious cooperation is a relatively late phenomenon in Sweden ³ . One of the first books about cross-religious gatherings in the country, Christianity’s encounter with the religions by Carl Gustav Diehl, was not written until 1961 and came as a response to the author’s experience that one could also meet ‘foreign’ religions in Sweden. More established inter-religious work, however, did not start in Sweden until the 1970s, primarily involving dialogue between Christians and Jews, and in 1979 the organization Cooperation Council for Jews and Christians was formed. During the 1980s the cooperation between Christians and Jews expanded and came to include Muslims as well (Ahlstrand 2008: 65; Aneer 1999: 257–260). The Church of Sweden is the community that has been most active in terms of the more organized inter-religious cooperation in Sweden (Alwall, 1999: 17; Roald, 2002: 85). Since the 1990s the Church of Sweden has initiated a number of projects that mainly caters to Muslims living in Sweden. A survey conducted in the mid–1990s, within the parishes of the Church of Sweden, showed that in the parishes which had more than 5,000 inhabitants, about a third engaged in some form of religious dialogue with Muslims (Alwall, 1999: 16–17). It is not possible to get an exact account of how many inter-religious projects have been implemented by the Church of Sweden, or by other religious communities since the 1990s, because they have not been recorded or compiled. One can, however, assume they have not declined because it has been emphasized that during the 2000s there has been an increased interest and a growing concern for inter-religious cooperation (Nyhetsbrev Centrum för religionsdialog i Stockholms stift, 2010; Hägglund, 2010) ⁴ .

Inter-religious cooperation in Sweden mostly takes place at a local level, but there are also some national initiatives. Among these we can find ecumenical partnerships, such as the Christian Council of Sweden, which was established in 1992 as a development of the Swedish Ecumenical Council founded in 1932. There is also a Muslim cooperation council, the Swedish Muslim Council, and an inter-religious one, Sweden Interfaith Council. The Sweden Interfaith Council was formed in 2010 on the initiative of the Church of Sweden and consists of 15 people; five Christian representatives, three Muslim, two Jewish, two Buddhist and one each from Bahai, Sikh and Hindu organizations. The goal of the Sweden Interfaith Council is to ‘promote and create conditions for inter-religious cooperation in Sweden, highlighting the role of religion to create goodwill and peace in the world and be a voice against religious hostility’ (Faith-based organizations in Sweden, 2013). In addition, several religious communities in Sweden also belong to international inter-religious organizations, such as the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Regarding local inter-religious cooperation in Sweden there are some important aspects to be taken into consideration in order to fully understand the conditions for inter-religious cooperation. One of these is that the collaboration is something that often takes place outside the organized work of the religious communities ⁵ . These, often temporary, projects are also to a high degree dependent on personal initiatives from dedicated individuals and financed by external sources.

3. Secularization and religious plurality: position and context

3.1 Secularization, religious plurality and inter-religious cooperation

The point of departure in this article is that inter-religious cooperation in Sweden takes place in a secularized society, i.e. the cooperation is carried out in a context where religion has little and, to some extent, even a contested influence or is completely forgotten (Bromander, 2013; Burén, 2015; Flodell, 2006; Lövheim and Bromander, 2012; Willander, 2014: 189–191; Zuckerman, 2008: 148–149). This, however is not the whole truth because religion and people with religious affiliations still exist in Sweden and, as a result of international migration and ongoing globalization, religion is continuously brought up and discussed in the public sphere (Lindberg, 2015; Axner, 2013; Cato, 2012). This new attention to religion, however, applies mostly to religious expressions that are considered a digression from what previously existed (and to some extent still exists). In other words, the most prominent are the non-Christian religious expressions, and mainly the Muslim ones (Lindberg, 2015; Niemelä and Christensen, 2013; Samuelsson, 2001).

One has therefore to be aware that the return of religion in Sweden’s public sphere does not include every religion. The processes that have taken place are, to some degree, in alignment with those that José Casanova highlighted in Public religions in the modern world (1994) in regard to the return of religions and also to those of Jürgen Habermas (2006) in regard to post-secular societies. In the Swedish case, though, it is not so much about a return of religion but rather about an entrance of other religions. However, these religions are inevitably related to the religion that was there before and it is in this important intersection that the local inter-religious cooperation in Sweden takes place.

So, how does this situation effect inter-religious cooperation in Sweden? The historian of religion, Mattias Gardell, puts forward the thesis that inter-religious cooperation in modern societies could, in itself, be a catalyst for the disappearance of religions; this is due to the fact that the prerequisites for collaborating in inter-religious cooperation are the similarities between the religions, which leads to the repeal of religious differences (Gardell, 1996). That this necessarily means that religion, as a phenomenon, will disappear from society is not entirely obvious because it could instead lead to the opposite – that is, religion re-entering into society through this dissolving of differences between religions. If we follow Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that late modern individuals do not have the need to live their lives after clearly divided categories and unique truth claims (Bauman, 1998), then it can be argued that when inter-religious cooperation downplays the particular religion’s claim of uniqueness, it could form a religious platform that suits them well, and the skepticism towards religion in Sweden could be alleviated.

Within religious dialogue studies it has been claimed that the dialogue content has shifted from ‘inter-religious issues’ to ‘inter-faith issues’ – a shift of focus from the collective (religious) to the individual (faith) aspects of religion (Palmblad, 2005). The dissolving of differences between religions has also been seen in religious dialogue based on syncretism, which is a dialogue emphasizing the ongoing changing aspects of religious traditions. This effort to downplay the idea that religions are fixed and unchangeable is made because the idea is perceived as obstructive to religious dialogue (Egnell, 1999; Chung, 1990). In addition, the studies show that people who are actively working with inter-religious cooperation have a propensity to develop a mixed (hybridized) religious identity (Williams, 2008; Williams and Ruparell, 2014).

It remains to be seen whether, in accordance with Gardell’s thesis, this inter-religious cooperation leads to the disappearance of religions, but in any case it will most likely lead to a loosening of religious peculiarities, which means inter-religious cooperation could be a forum for religion that would well suit late modern individuals, but also potentially become a form of religion that neutralizes the differences between religions in contemporary Sweden. This would lead to increased possibilities for all religions, both previously located here and more newly established, to re-enter into a secularized country like Sweden that has renounced religion, but the inequalities between religious communities in Sweden may deter this.

3.2 Religious plurality and position

The starting point for the emergence of inter-religious cooperation is religious plurality. In Sweden, as in many other countries, there is, however, a large imbalance in this plurality and one of the reasons is the relation between the new religions and the established ones. In addition, the religious communities differ from each other in several areas; such as where in the country the religious communities are represented, the available human and financial resources, the access to premises for meetings, and how the religious communities are organized on both a local and national level. These differences in conditions, between the religious communities, become particularly evident in, and also effect the potential for, inter-religious cooperation; and this could therefore hinder processes of re-introduction of religion in the Swedish society.

Peter Beyer pinpoints how ecumenical cooperation is to be seen as part of globalization; a process which, he argues, is powered by Western hegemony (Beyer, 1990; Beyer, 1998). This is understood as a continuing colonial perception of cultural and religious hierarchies, where, for example, Islam is considered incompatible with modernity and Western societies (Martikainen, 2013: 86–89; Farrar et al., 2012; Keaton, 2006). The underlying prerequisite for inter-religious cooperation would therefore be the values of the Western societies (Olsson, 2002), which is most likely also the case within the local Swedish context. Other reasons for these hierarchies between religions are the above mentioned differences between the religious communities in Sweden, as well as the differences in perception people have about religions; for example, 44% of Swedes have a positive view of Christianity, but only 11% have a positive view of Islam (Weibull, 2012; see also Gardell, 2010; Otterbeck and Bevelander, 2006).

The significant differences between the religious communities in Sweden give them what I have chosen to call different positions within Swedish society. This refers not only to the factual differences, but also to the existing imbalance of power between them; a power imbalance that may be crucial for how and if inter-religious cooperation arises and how the cooperation is maintained. This is particularly due to the fact that inter-religious cooperation is community work done in conjunction with external religious organizations, i.e. outside the regulated work in the community and therefore without specified motives or occupational roles allocated for doing this work.

4. Conditions influencing inter-religious cooperation

The interviews and observations, which were conducted for this study, disclosed several conditions that influence local inter-religious cooperation. These different conditions are closely related to the position religious communities have in Swedish society. I have chosen to divide the conditions into, firstly, more factual conditions, such as demographic differences, differences in human and financial resources, access to premises for meetings and how the religious communities are organized on a local and national level, and, secondly, more normative conditions, such as how the various religious communities are established in society, the religious communities majority and minority positions, their religious credibility, post-colonialism, gender norms, and conflicts in other countries.

4.1 Factual conditions

One of the factual differences in opportunities for local inter-religious cooperation between religious communities is the demographic situation, that is, the way in which religious communities are represented in Sweden. The Church of Sweden is represented throughout the country with approximately 1,300 communities ⁶ and will therefore always be in a position to partake in inter-religious cooperation at a local level. For other religious communities the situation is very varied – they will certainly always be located within one of the Church of Sweden’s areas but will not always be in close proximity to other religious communities. A consequence of this is that the Church of Sweden can always be included in the inter-religious cooperation at a local level, which also was the case in all the groups included in this study. For the other religious communities, though, this basic condition of being established in all areas was lacking and this did, to a high degree, influence their ability to partake in inter-religious cooperation.

Another factual condition affecting the possibility for religious communities to be part of and have influence in inter-religious cooperation relates to the question of personnel. Some religious communities such as the Church of Sweden have many employees while the human resources in other religious communities in Sweden are scarce. This results in some religious communities including the inter-religious cooperation as part of the community employment, whereas other religious communities have to rely on community members being willing to work with inter-religious cooperation on a voluntary basis, and there are yet other religious communities without the human resources for this kind of work. One interviewee from the Muslim community raised the following aspect in regards to their cooperation with the Church of Sweden:

I have been there many times and they had eight, ten employees there. I was actually a little jealous. They have educated people. They have great buildings that get building conservation grants from the Swedish people. The Church of Sweden is very rich … And they help us when we have problems with the economy.

This also has implications for how much time the various religious communities can dedicate to local inter-religious cooperation. In the groups I studied a representative from the Church of Sweden was always included and this participation was also always part of the community employment. The other religious communities were represented in various degrees and the local inter-religious cooperation, and to a greater extent the participation, was not included in their employment. If participation was included in their employment, however, there was often little time allocated to partake in this work. This had the consequence that some religious communities, even if they wanted to or were asked to partake, could not and therefore were not represented in the local inter-religious cooperation, or could only participate sporadically.

As the quote above expressed, the religious communities also had very different economic resources. Many of them just barely managed to conduct their own internal religious community work and did therefore not participate in local inter-religious cooperation, even if they agreed this work was important. A person from the Church of Sweden expressed this lack of inter-religious cooperation in the following way:

We have the financial resources, but there is no counterpart [that has that]. But maybe we could invite and sponsor someone…

The lack of premises in some religious communities and the access to premises in others also resulted in a power imbalance in regards to local inter-religious cooperation. A consequence of this inequality of access to premises was that some religious communities could always be in charge of holding the meetings in their premises, while others could never do so, which, in turn, gave the religious communities with access to premises a better position in the inter-religious cooperation. An example is that representatives from some religious communities did not want to participate in meetings held in premises of the Scientology community and yet others were not even allowed to do so by their organization on a national level. In some interviews, the lack of premises was clearly a reason for why the community had chosen to totally reject inter-religious cooperation.

Strong organizational structures in the religious communities, with established duties for those who work in them, also influence inter-religious cooperation. For the Church of Sweden, in one case, this meant they first had to re-interpret the aims of the community work and then re-organize the work to include local inter-religious cooperation, and once this was determined it created a stability and continuity of inter-religious cooperation. A consequence of this strong organizational structure, however, is that such religious communities have a greater ability to control and influence the inter-religious cooperation in comparison to other religious communities where the work is done on a more temporary basis and dependent on the commitment of a few individuals. In another Church of Sweden community, though, there were never any decisions taken on how to relate to inter-religious cooperation and the community was thus totally excluded from inter-religious cooperation.

Weak organizational structures also influence participation in local inter-religious cooperation. In one case it was an individual’s personal conviction of the importance of inter-religious cooperation that resulted in the participation of their religious community. Since the religious community had a weak organizational structure, there was no need for an official approval from the religious community to be part of inter-religious cooperation, so this person could quickly become a part of an inter-religious group and directly influence what happened in it (see also Illman, 2006: 30). Weak organizational structures, on the other hand, were also used as a factor for not being involved in inter-religious cooperation, as expressed by those interviewed about why they had chosen not to participate. In another case, having a weak organizational structure had resulted in a religious community being ignored by other religious communities and therefore not having the possibility to participate in local inter-religious cooperation, which they experienced as regrettable.

The religious communities’ different national organizational structures also, to a high degree, influenced the local inter-religious cooperation. One reason for this was that in some cases the organization on national level had directives on how the religious communities should relate to local inter-religious cooperation; some religious communities had no such national directives at all and yet others had a weak national organization that did not influence the local inter-religious cooperation. These national level regulations or lack of regulations thus formed different conditions for religious cooperation on a local level. In one of the studied inter-religious groups this had led to the exclusion of one representative from one religious community because he was not allowed by his national organization to participate in the local inter-religious cooperation. In other cases with religious communities with weak national organizations, or no such organization, it had led to a greater freedom to choose how to participate, or not, in local inter-religious cooperation. This latter situation, however, often resulted in participation not being part of the religious communities’ official duty and therefore had to be done on a voluntarily basis.

The global context also came to influence the local inter-religious cooperation in various ways. In these cases it had to do with the religious relations in other countries, which in turn influenced the community relations locally in Sweden. I will come back to this issue in the coming section.

In this part it is clearly seen how conditions such as demographic differences, differences in human and financial resources, access to premises for meetings and how the religious communities are organized on a local and national level influences local inter-religious cooperation at the local level in contemporary Sweden, both in how they arise and how they are upheld.

4.2 Normative imbalances

Other differences in conditions that influence inter-religious cooperation are less factual and more related to normative aspects. One of these is how established the religious communities are perceived to be in society. My interpretation of the various circumstances in the studied inter-religious groups, and by what emerged in the interviews, was that the length of time the community had been established in the country strengthened its ability to be involved in cooperation. One reason for this may be that it is assumed that these religious communities better understand and accept the surrounding Swedish society and are therefore able to establish a relationship with that society, which is often perceived as an important objective for the involvement of local inter-religious cooperation. Even if religious communities were among the larger ones in the local setting and had been there for a long time, religious communities with an unclear establishment in society, and with the aforementioned weak organizational structures, risked intentionally, but also unintentionally, being excluded from cooperation. A representative from a Muslim congregation with many members, as well as their own premises and employed leaders, felt they were not included in the inter-religious cooperation because they had not been clearly organized for a sufficient period of time so as to be considered an established community. The representative also said there was another Muslim community that had a mosque and had established close links with the surrounding society in the same local setting, which was involved in the inter-religious cooperation. This, he argued, resulted in only some interpretations of Islam being included and far from all Muslims being represented in the cooperation. He then added, with resignation: ‘I get the feeling that we are not equal with them. They are entitled to everything. No one contacts us’.

Taken altogether, this resulted in an imbalance in the composition of the local inter-religious cooperation, which in itself, within the groups need not be problematic, but may become so when interacting with the surrounding society. An example of this is when the municipality wanted to get in contact with Muslim communities, they often contacted the Church of Sweden and not the Muslim communities directly. That the differences in opinion about religions in Sweden (a Western hegemony) also influences the inter-religious cooperation is not possible to verify in this study, but it is clear that how established in the community, religious communities are perceived to be, does influence the possibility of being part of inter-religious cooperation.

Closely related to the above-mentioned imbalances concerning the degree of a religious community’s establishment, are the majority and minority positions they hold in society. Even though Sweden today is characterized by increasing religious plurality, which is foundational for inter-religious cooperation, this plurality is unbalanced, since the Church of Sweden, has a much larger majority position, which entails a high amount of membership, employees, access to premises and, I argue, a perceived strong establishment in the society. All the other religious communities are in minority positions, but these minority positions differ due to a variety of factors. The Islamologist Anne-Sofie Roald showed, in a study of an inter-religious group in Sweden, that some participants in the group felt they were controlled by the Church of Sweden because of its majority position (Roald, 2002). This was never expressed in this study, but several times the issue of the Church of Sweden’s dominance was raised, and it was implied that this influenced the cooperation, but no one said this influence was negative.

Another normative factor, which created different conditions for inter-religious cooperation, deals with what I have chosen to call religious credibility. The following decisions were taken in one of the studied groups when two more religious communities applied for inclusion:

Concerning the issue of the election of Scientology and shamanism into the Working Group: the Working Group decided that they would only include the established world religions, thus not these two groups. (Internal Protocol)

In this case, the religious communities perceived as ‘good’ were those seen to participate in co-operation only for the purpose of inter-religious cooperation itself. Talk or behavior in the groups perceived as missionary was clearly not accepted within the groups and some strong criticisms against partaking religious communities using the group to spread information about their own community, through the group’s information channels, were raised (a sort of missionary work), and if people talked too much about their own community during the meetings it was silenced in different ways. In some groups this was an explicit policy and in others it was more implicit and regulated through various forms of more or less hidden social sanctions. This could be done by, for example, discontinuing and transferring the conversation in a different direction, or by not coming to meetings that took place on the premises of these religious communities.

Previous studies on Islam’s position in Europe state that, as a result of former colonial power relations, the religion has a lower position in relation to other religions in Europe, and is perceived to be incompatible with modern society (Martikainen, 2013: 86–89; Farrar et al., 2012; Keaton, 2006). Some studies on Islam’s position in Sweden also indicated this (Gardell, 2010; Otterbeck and Bevelander, 2006; Weibull, 2012), and in some of the interviews in this study it also emerged that this subaltern position does indeed influence the inter-religious cooperation. One interviewee from a Muslim community expressed this in the following terms:

We have invited [others], but none have come. There is always someone with fears, prejudices against Muslims – one is afraid. They are scared. They do not dare. And we are probably also afraid, perhaps, that we should not be treated in a good way…

In this case, the experience of being excluded from society led to their not daring to contact the Church of Sweden in the area. In another case, the experienced subordinated position, however, was a starting point for initiating inter-religious cooperation:

In our city, but also in Sweden in general, it has for a long time been tensions between ethnic groups. Voices argue that religious groups, particularly Muslims ones, are a danger to the Swedish welfare state; a danger which stems from differences regarding religion, thoughts and culture. This fear, we wanted to fight through together demonstrating the opposite. […] This was the aim of our project; to show that differences between people unite – not disintegrate. (From the group’s internal evaluation)

A couple of studies on religious dialogue in Sweden have highlighted how women and men, to different extents, are represented in cooperation groups and the studies have also shown that men usually represent the religious communities (Ahlstrand, 2002: 58–61; Gunner, 2002: 80). This tendency could also be seen in this study. A consequence of this gender imbalance is that women’s experiences and opinions tend to be ignored in local inter-religious cooperation; gender differences within the religions were almost totally ignored in all the studied groups and the topic was seldom brought up in interviews. This may then result in patriarchal structures within religious communities being left unaddressed when inter-religious cooperation groups interact with the surrounding society. Another reason for the lack of dealing with or even discovering gender issues is that inter-religious cooperation does not focus on the traditional content of a religion per se, but is rather more of an abstract religious phenomenon that focuses on the cooperation between the religious groups as a whole.

The focus of this study was on the local context. I have shown that the local setting turned out to have close links to a national level, because the religious communities’ national organizational structures influenced the local inter-religious cooperation. The study also revealed that transnational situations influenced local inter-religious cooperation. This was most clearly seen through how conflicts, with religious undertones in other countries, affected inter-religious cooperation in some of the groups in Sweden. These conflicts had to be bridged to make the local inter-religious cooperation work, even though these conflicts were absent in Sweden. One interviewee, sad and disappointed, expressed; ‘How can I get an Iraqi imam, a Sunni imam and a Shiite imam from Iran to sit next to each other when they fight?’ A conclusion is thus that the aims of the inter-religious cooperation on a local level cannot be achieved without taking these conflicts into account; i.e. the global situation clearly influences the local measures of activity (see also Karner and Parker, 2008).

When it comes to the above-discussed more normative conditions, such as how the various religious communities are established in society, the religious communities’ majority and minority positions, their religious credibility, post-colonialism, gender norms, and conflicts in other countries, it is also clear that this influences how local inter-religious cooperation at the local level in contemporary Sweden, can arise and is upheld.

Conclusion

In contemporary Sweden we find ongoing inter-religious cooperation, at both national and local levels, which has arisen as a result of increased religious plurality. The conditions for the emergence and sustainability of the cooperation are, however, strongly influenced by the secularized context in which it occurs. This context also influences the position the religious communities have in society and in relation to each other, creating an imbalance of power between them. A religious community’s position in society creates different conditions for their participation in inter-religious cooperation. The factual conditions are: the differences in demographics, in resources of personnel, time, finances, and premises, as well as how the religious communities are organized, both on a local and national level. The normative conditions that influence local inter-religious cooperation are; how established the religious communities are perceived to be in the country, if they are in a majority or minority position, the religious credibility that they uphold, colonial power structures, gender differences and conflicts in other countries.

This study reveals that both transnational events and national structures have an impact on the local inter-religious cooperation, which somewhat contradicts the research within migration studies which stress the importance of dealing primarily with the local levels, and not the national context or global situations (Ebaugh and Saltzman Chafetz, 2002; Glick Schiller, 2009; Kühle and Lindekilde, 2010; Levitt, 2009; Qvortrup Fibiger, 2004; Robertson, 1995).

This study also shows that inter-religious cooperation on a local level in Sweden is largely influenced by differences in conditions between religious communities. These differences mainly derive from the positions the religious communities have in society, i.e. there is a power imbalance between the religious communities clearly reflected in the inter-religious cooperation. The Church of Sweden has an advantage in power in regards to several of these conditions, which puts it at risk of being perceived as holding a strong position and being the dominating community within the cooperation. Muslim communities have, on the other hand, a weaker position in the Swedish society, which means that these religious communities’ opportunity to participate and influence the inter-religious cooperation is curtailed. It is thus a valid claim that inter-religious cooperation is dominated by a western hegemony (Beyer, 1990; Beyer, 1998; Olsson, 2002), also at the local level in Sweden.

In response to Gardell’s assumption that inter-religious cooperation could be a driving force towards the disappearance of religions, I argue that this study shows that inter-religious cooperation, instead of erasing religion, has the potential of being a form of religion that suits the late modern individual since it implies a loosening of religion’s peculiarities. Previous research on religious dialogue has shown that, in some groups, there is a shift of focus from the religions particularities to an individuals’ religious beliefs and that the individuals who are engaged within these groups exhibit a mixed religious identity (Chung, 1990; Egnell, 1999; Palmblad, 2005; Williams, 2008; Williams and Ruparell, 2014). It can thus be argued that the loosening of the specific peculiarities of religions, as a result of inter-religious cooperation, can lead towards an emergence of religion as a universal and inclusive phenomenon. In a Swedish context, inter-religious cooperation could potentially lead to the previously existing religion, Christianity, as well as the religions that are newcomers, such as Islam, being reintroduced into society. In other words, through inter-religious cooperation a new form of relationship to religion can emerge that could be suitable for and therefore could be able to survive in a secularized society. What the results of this study show on inter-religious cooperation at a local level in Sweden, is that it is not the differences between the religions that is an issue, but rather the differences in context and power positions between the religious communities that clearly influence and complicate the process of inter-religious cooperation. Therefore, the re-introduction of religion in Swedish society through inter-religious cooperation is hindered.