War as Pedagogy for "an Entire People": Educational Christian Modernism, the State and Nordic Exceptionalism around World War I

During the 1910s, the modernist and liberal generation of theologians across the Nordic states took what might seem ambivalent but nevertheless enthusiastic stances as regards on the one hand the question of the war and on the other hand peace efforts and promotion of international understanding. These stances were influenced by and washed back on their ideas on reforming the relation between religion and state through not least education. The educational efforts of the Nordic actors of the modernist and Liberal Theologian movement, in its Protestant version also known as Cultural Protestantism and Neo-Protestantism, as part of their efforts for making Christianity, cleansed by new scientific results, useful as culture for the new modern state under development. This emerged as involvement in concrete education reforms but also took the form of broader public enlightenment interest. The chapter will shed light on their attitudes towards both types of educational effort and how this was related to their attitudes towards what was later to be known as World War I during the war and after it ended.