Going to Heaven?

Over ninety-seven percent of Finns, and slightly higher than that in the Oulu region, are buried by the Lutheran Church. Even in relatively secular countries such as Denmark, the overwhelming majority are buried by the national church. It's a kind of default religion for the dead. But unlike in Denmark, over eighty percent of Finns are paid-up members of the Lutheran Church and are confirmed into and married into it. You might expect that the same eighty percent believe in the church's teaching on the afterlife - that Christians go to Heaven and Non-Christians go to Hell. But it doesn't work like that at all.

For a start, some Lutheran priests do not see the after-life in this way at all - but they have to be careful about what they say because, in theory, they should accept certain doctrines without question. Accordingly, the more liberal priests would only be interviewed if their names weren't printed.

'I don't believe in Hell,' explained one anonymous Oulu pastor. 'No, God would never said anybody to Hell. My God is nothing like that.' When asked what she meant by 'God' she thought for a moment and replied. 'Well . . . God is love. God is the same as love.'

And Heaven? 'It's not like a place on the clouds or something. It's . . . welll . . . it's being with God. It's very difficult to explain but it's having God's love forever.' God and 'love', for the priest, are exactly the same thing. However, this particular cleric absolutely insists that she 'believes in God and believes in Heaven.'

Despite Finland's extremely high (though slowly declining) church membership, the priest's belief in 'God' is shared by only forty-one percent of Finns, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll on religion. The same percentage of Finns believe that there is 'a God or some kind of life force.'

Eighteen percent of Finns assert that 'there is definitely no God or life force'. This puts the percentage of Finns that believe in God significantly below the European average of sixty-two percent. But they are just below average in terms of believe in God or a spirit force and exactly average in terms of people not believing in God at all.

'Belief doesn't really have that much to do with being a member of the church in Finland,' another priest told me. 'It's a cultural thing, deep in our history. Being Finnish means being Lutheran. It's one of the ways that we marked ourselves as different when we were under the Russian rule. They were Orthodox and we were Lutheran.'

And the priest wasn't at all surprised by how few Finns believed in God or an afterlife. 'I'm not surprised. As I say, the church is a cultural thing for most Finns. It's somebody to do rituals for them. They don't really believe it . . . though it's interesting that people start to believe a bit more when they're ill or somebody close to them dies. Then they might pray even if they say they don't believe.'

Heikki Orsila, who helps run the website 'Leave the Church,' (www.eroakirkosta.fi) agrees with the priest on many points, especially on why people who are not particularly religious are still church members.

'Finnish society has been a very conservative and a very closed society,' he explained. 'There was a very strong sense of community and to be part of that community meant you had to be part of the church. There was a lot of peer pressure involved. And especially after World War II, Finland felt under threat from the Communists who threated religion which in Finland was the Lutheran Church.'

According to Orsila, this has started to change since the 1980s. Finland is gradually becoming less religious, less oriented around the church. 'The average Finnish person goes to church only once a year,' he complains. 'But the church has this special legal status. We want to change that. And the way to change is to get to a point where only half of people are church members. And so this why we set up the site. It makes it easier for people to divorce the church.'

Twenty percent of Finns are not members of the church. But this doesn't stop them wondering if there's maybe a meaning to life, maybe a God, maybe something more. Finns are actually slightly above the European average in terms of how much they 'think about the meaning of life.' Thirty-nine percent of Finns 'often' think about the meaning of life. EU-wide only thirty-five percent think about what it's all about on a frequent basis.

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