Educational Biblical Nationalism and the Project of the Modern Secular State

Biblical Criticism, the historical study of Biblical texts, spread across the European universities during the late 19th century, the same period when the European states modernized, and identifying state and nation became a political project. The new scientific view on the Bible became in this political reform context a topic of public debate: Should the national education systems under construction implement the modern scientific understanding of the Bible, should school keep teaching the Catechism, or should religious instruction be separated from the school of the nation in order to become a ‘school for all’?
Whereas the academic hotbeds of Biblical Criticism were not least the German-speaking universities and academic institutions in France, the popularization of Biblical Criticism through education proved more successful in the Nordic states than in e.g. Prussia and France. The article explores the gradual success of Biblical Criticism education reform efforts in the case of Denmark from the late 19th to mid-20th century in relation to the development of the state from an absolutist kingdom to a nation state with constitutional monarchy and parliamentarism, and discusses on this basis the relation between religion, secularization and educational nation-state crafting.