Educational Biblical Nationalism and the Project of the Modern Secular State

Abstract

Biblical Criticism, the historical study of Biblical texts, spread across the Europeanuniversities during the late 19th century, the same period when the European statesmodernized, and identifying state and nation became a political project. The newscientific view on the Bible became in this political reform context a topic of publicdebate: Should the national education systems under construction implementthe modern scientific understanding of the Bible, should school keep teaching theCatechism, or should religious instruction be separated from the school of the nationin order to become a ‘school for all’?Whereas the academic hotbeds of Biblical Criticism were not least the Germanspeakinguniversities and academic institutions in France, the popularization ofBiblical Criticism through education proved more successful in the Nordic states thanin e.g. Prussia and France. The article explores the gradual success of Biblical Criticismeducation reform efforts in the case of Denmark from the late 19th to mid-20th centuryin relation to the development of the state from an absolutist kingdom to a nationstate with constitutional monarchy and parliamentarism, and discusses on this basisthe relation between religion, secularization and educational nation-state crafting.Keywords: Biblical Criticism; Christian modernism; education reform; meso-levelactors; nation-state crafting.