Feeling at Home: Embracing Both Church and Mosque

Parisa Liljestrand is not naive.

When she was three years old, her family fled Iran, where the mullahs had taken power. Twenty years later, she traveled to South America to study the Pentecostal revival. There she saw how pastors lived luxurious lives at the expense of poor parishioners.

She has more reasons than most to distance herself, both from God and organized religion – but she doesn’t. On the contrary, she has a constant conversation with God and likes to seek out holy rooms.

– I feel just as at home in a church as in a mosque, synagogue or Buddhist temple. The conversation with God becomes obvious in those rooms.

We’ll get back to the mosque thing. But we start where we are: In Vallentuna church. It is Liljestrand that chose the place for our meeting.

– I went here a lot with my mother, we have enjoyed these benches since I was little.

You can tell when she steps in: She habitually takes out her phone to leave a collection gift and lights a candle before we start.

Faith was part of the family’s everyday life when she was growing up, and it was further nourished when she accompanied a friend to the Pentecostal church in Vallentuna. In addition, she went to the Church of Sweden – but when she wanted to be confirmed, her mother told her to stop.

– She had a built-in barrier against organized religion, because she had fought to take us away from it. So I didn’t get to confirm myself.

How did it feel?

– It was a sadness. I had found a community in the church, and so I wasn’t going to be part of this. It was really tough.

The mother’s skepticism is not surprising. In the authority report “Post Muslims”, written by the religious scholars David Thurfjell and Erika Willanderimmigrant Iranians rank highest of all when it comes to affirming a secular identity – even higher than native Swedes.

In the Swedish public, several people with this background have come forward as critics of religion. For people who Hanif Bali and Dilsa Demirbag-Sten has the experience of religious oppression in the Middle East led to a critique of all religion.

We are extremely materially rich, but existentially we are quite starved

It is easy to understand. It is actually more difficult to understand why Liljestrand does not arrive at the same conclusion. The question I carry with me to our conversation: How is it that she, whose family fled religious oppression, so eagerly sought out the local churches when she came to this secularized country?

But she questions the premise of my question.

– We usually say that Sweden is secularised, but I don’t believe that. We have just replaced the religion with something else. Against culture, politics or a football team. And we still believe that things are sacred: Individual freedom, the climate issue and human dignity.

So you mean that there is not that big a difference between religious and secular?

– Exactly. We make the barriers bigger than they need to be.

For Liljestrand, man is a religious being – a “homo religiosus”, like the old bishop Martin Lonnebo used to say. The only question is where we go with our longing. She has noticed that more and more people, not least young people, are applying to the church. Why is that so?

– We are extremely materially rich in this country, but existentially we are quite starved, she begins.

When you interview politicians, you are always prepared for them to turn on the politician voice: Dutiful commitment and a flood of big but empty words.

Within us we carry something greater: A purpose, a higher meaning

Liljestrand has such a voice: “Bombastic and populist platitudes”, sighed GP’s Johan Hilton in a column last winter (25/1). Every now and then it comes up in our conversation, when she avoids a question or needs time to think.

But she also has another voice, which comes out when she talks about faith: the preacher’s voice. There is no mistaking the commitment.

– You can live on material wealth for a while. (Pause, then whispering) But it will be quite poor! Within us we carry something greater: A purpose, a higher meaning! It comes and knocks on in the end. We can try to explain existence with material things, but ultimately we need something more.

But again: You who have so many reasons to be cynical, how can you feel at home both with Pentecostal friends and in mosques?

– For me, faith comes from within me and flows out. It sits in the heart and flows out through me. Religion, on the other hand, comes from outside and wants to enter me.

Inside, I sigh silently. I am prepared for a reasoning that I have heard from countless Swedish cultured people: Personal spirituality: beautiful – organized religion: ugly.

But Liljestrand takes a different route:

– I have a very strong faith in people – I think that most people want well. Therefore, I believe that what is formed out there and seeks to move in towards me, also wants me. Most of the time, anyway. It means having a positive basic attitude towards religion.

We can’t bear to paint the world in more shades right now

How do you think about all the darkness that exists in religion?

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– Yes, but there is everything in society! If we were to let politics be defined by its dark spots, democracy would feel quite weak. If you stare blindly at the darkness of religions, then you don’t see the light that is actually there.

Why do you think so many people think about the dark the most?

– We would like to have black and white explanations. We want to be able to point out what is bad and what is good. And so we want to live on in our delusion, that we are super-individualists living in the world’s most secular country. Maybe it’s also the case that we can’t bear to paint the world in more shades right now?

– But look out at the world out there (raises his arm, points to the sunshine out there) and you will see the world in color. I don’t know why we are so obsessed with painting in just black or white. But the fact that more people still turn to religion is perhaps a sign that this black and white world is no longer enough.

Sometimes it can be difficult to have the strength to go inside yourself

I wonder if it also has to do with proximity. Today, the media is many Swedes’ only contact with religion – especially with Islam. But the religion that ends up on the leaflets is not the one that is lived in everyday life. To know that, however, you have to look it up.

When you entered the church, you knew exactly what to do – what do you do when you enter a mosque?

– I take off my shoes and wash myself, if I get the chance. Shows reverence for the place. That doesn’t mean I buy the whole concept, but it’s a place where the noise is shut out. Sometimes it can be difficult to have the strength to go inside yourself. It gets easier when the distractions are shut out.

For many Swedish Muslims, it is probably unusual to hear a minister talking about his own experiences of a mosque as a spiritual place?

– Yes, maybe. But isn’t it because we rarely talk about faith? We talk quite a lot about religion, but then we do it based on the dark spots.

Liljestrand and I were both born in the early 1980s, which means that we grew up in a kind of second reformation. During a few years when Sweden’s religious landscape changed drastically. The experts’ forecasts were that the churches would disappear, but they lived on, grew in their places and were revitalized by the migration. The Swedish secular image began to crack.

Some have treated this new world much like the main character in John Bunyan’s classic “The Christian’s Journey” from 1678: One has gone through the world taking care not to be contaminated by all the ideas that surround one. This fearful Puritanism comes in both religious and secular varieties.

But Parisa Liljestrand’s journey is different from Kristen’s. It is difficult to find any corner of the Swedish religious landscape that she has not passed through and been impressed by. In her story there are pentecostal friends, mosques, Swedish church youth groups and theology studies when she studied to become a religious teacher. Twice she mentions Zoroastrians, she gets teary-eyed when she thinks about the song “You know you’re valuable” and says that she “experimented” a bit in her teens – with religion, that is – I regret that I forget to ask more about it.

On the bracelet sits a cross, a Star of David and a moon

She is, it strikes me, Sweden’s first post-secular minister. Her older, ecclesiastical government colleagues – Elisabeth Svantesson, Jakob Forssmed – grew up in the Swedish secular project. Ebba Busch is younger, but comes from a Life’s word that drew energy from the difference and the fight against “the secular Sosse-Sweden”.

But Liljestrand came here in the late 1980s, was brought up with an obvious belief in God, and then continued the search himself. In post-secular Sweden, atheism is no longer the norm, but no religion has a monopoly on interpretation either. Here is a teeming spiritual landscape, where the curious can find their own way.

Where has it led her?

You were not allowed to be confirmed, but now you have baptized your children in the Church of Sweden. So you give them not just your general belief in God, but a home in an institutional religion. Does it worry you in any way?

– No, not at all. I will not mince words, but for me my faith is not general, but it is very particular. After all, I have decided what is included in my story about the faith. I do not deny any religion, but I do not resort to one either.

– I have a bracelet that I bought many years ago. It’s a simple white bracelet, and on it sits a cross, a Star of David and a moon. They sit side by side, attached to the same bracelet.

– Faith for me is, well, how to explain it… It’s a companion who is there, but who is sometimes gone, and then I just feel: Where did it go? Why did it happen like this? But then it pops up again! Although my faith is constantly challenged, I can never give it up. I can’t seem to get out of my heart and go to work. Faith always shapes who I am, even if I don’t always know how.

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Joel Halldorf is a professor of church history and employee on Expressen’s culture page.