Phil Zuckerman spent a year at the Danish University of Aarhus a couple of years ago. Denmark is a small country of about 5,5 mill people. This makes it possible for us all to be more or less connected to each other either through, family, friends or work. The joke is that whenever you travel by train from one end of the country to the other the person in front of you will end up being a relative.
If you then base your research primarily upon interviews with collegues or friends of collegues at the department of religious science at the aforementioned university, what you get is an intimate snap-shot of a small select group of people heavily enmeshed in each others local culture. Neither is it very complicated for a Danish researcher, who works in this field, to identify the said informants through the description presented in the book. This was easily done by some of us at a meeting in Copenhagen when the book was published.
One of the characteristics of the three religious science departments in Denmark are, that that they are heavily biased towards flagrant atheism. This is in general a public laughing matter amongst other Danish intellectuals due to the crudeness it projects in its heavily biased research projects. Not only could we thus identify the informants, we could also very poignantly identify the biased character of the socalled research undertaken by zuckerman.
To readers who were duped by zuckerman's book it might accordingly be of interest to know, that Denmark is in no way a society without God. 82% of the Danish population are members of the Danish national Church and have a fond relationship with their local church. It is true that the church is considered a different entity and plays a different role in the local community than what is common in US. It plays a somewhat different role in the society than the common American congregation. This has to do with the fact that the churches are not so much old institutions than old buildings framing the idea of Danishness - Danes don't talk about God directly; they talk about their family, their history, their traditions. The preferred location chosen for this "conversation" is however their local church, which means that people do not seek the church sunday mornings to celebrate God; but they take part in year-long and life-long celebarations whenever there is a special occasion in the life of our families or communities. Does this mean that "God is absent"? Not at all: it just means that we encounter God under other circumstances than the traditional American way on sunday mornings. We encounter God instead at family occasions on an average of 4 to 5 times a year. Yes, our "God" does not "live" in an American temple or church.It does not mean, however, that "God" in general is absent from the livess of Danes. It just means that the American God is absent..
It might be important to know that most academic reviews in the National papers in Denmark noted that Zuckermans book represented a classical example of an anthropologist or sociologist falling short, while being duped by the natives.
Karen Schousboe
MA, Anthropologist, www.kirkenikobenhavn.dk
