Embodying God: ritual, value, and secular‐sacred entanglements in Norwegian folk high school education

Abstract

This paper explores the role of Lutheran ritual in value formations in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools, subsidized by the state, offer gap year programs that are meant to instil values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Christian folk high school in south‐eastern Norway, I assess how the school's Lutheran masses were designed to develop values relating to community, experience, and equality by inviting all students and staff, irrespective of their personal relationships with the Christian faith, to participate. I argue that despite prevailing stereotypes of Norway being predominantly secular, the ‘hidden sacrality’ of Norwegian political and social life was made visible through these masses at the state‐sponsored Christian folk high school. I take the body as an analytic, arguing that the school's rituals, designed to encourage students to ‘embody God’, were situated in students’ bodies in such a way that sameness and difference, secularity and sacrality, and faith and doubt could co‐exist.