Sanja Nilsson: “Performing Perfectly: Presentations of Childhood in Knutby Filadelfia Before and After the Dissolution of the Congregation.”

The village of Knutby, a few miles to the north west of Uppsala, hit the headlines not only in Sweden but also in the popular media throughout the Western world when, in January 2004, it emerged that the pastor, Helge Fossmo, of the Knutby Filadelphia congregation had persuaded his former mistress, Sarah Svensson, that God had sent email messages instructing her to kill both Fossmo’s current wife, Alexandra, and his current mistress’s husband, Daniel Linde. Svensson did what she believed was God’s wish and shot both the targeted victims. Alexandra died, but Linde, although seriously wounded, survived the attack. Svensson confessed and was sentenced to institutional psychiatric care; Fossmo was sentenced to life imprisonment for instigated murder and an instigated murder attempt. This gruesome story provides a backdrop to Dr Sanja Nilsson’s research, but her focus is on the situation as it subsequently developed – according to the children’s “performances” at different stages. Knutby Filadelphia had enjoyed relatively unremarkable beginnings. Founded in 1921 as a Pentecostal congregation with about 15 members, it had become an Autonomous Swedish Pentecostal Congregation, with charismatic leanings, when a young woman, Åsa Waldau, joined the congregation in 1992. Five years later, Helge Fossmo and his first wife, Helen (who was to die in suspicious circumstances), came to Knutby, and within two years Fossmo was the congregation’s pastor, with Waldau playing an important role in guiding the spiritual and secular life of the congregation, and considered by the inner core to be the Bride of Christ. Following the events of 2004, Knutby Filadelphia was excluded from the Pentecostal Alliance of Independent Churches and became increasingly stigmatised and isolated in the face of intense media interest, for whom a bad story is a good story– particularly one that combines sex, murder and religion. Towards the end of 2008, Åsa Waldau ‘withdrew’ from interactions with all but a chosen few, but continued to wield considerable power over the lives of the congregation. Then, in 2016, to the shock of the congregation, Waldau divorced her