A policy brief written by Amaranta Thompson (2026) on the article Sámi Resurgence through Heritage Work. Exploring Sámi Cosmology in Negotiation with Lutheran Christianity by Mia Liinason (2025) published in Religion & Gender. You can download the policy brief here and read the article itself here.
Sámi knowledge systems are essential for cultural justice, indigenous rights, and climate resilience in the rapidly changing Arctic. Despite centuries of suppression by state institutions and Lutheran Christianity, Sámi knowledges persist through adaptive negotiation with dominant cultural norms. Recent research highlights a resurgence of these traditions, underscoring the urgent need for policies that protect, revitalise, and integrate Sámi epistemologies into environmental and cultural governance.
An estimated 80 000 – 100 000 Sámi lives across the Sápmi territories of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. These communities have historically faced systematic efforts to erase their languages, cosmologies, and land-based practices. Such suppression has produced long-term cultural and ecological consequences, particularly as the Artic now experiences climate change more intensely than any other region.
Understanding and supporting Sámi knowledge systems is therefore crucial for both Indigenous justice and sustainable Artic policy.
As Denmark-Norway, Sweden and Finland consolidated into nation-states, they pursued a model of citizenship grounded in linguistic uniformity, Christian morality, and sedentary land use. Sámi societies, nomadic, multilingual, spiritually diverse and organised around different relationships to land, were treated as obstacles to this vision of modernity.
State authorities and the Lutheran church worked hand-in hand to reshape understanding of the world. This included missionary campaigns aimed at eradicating Sámi spiritual traditions the destruction of sacred objects such as drums used by spiritual healers and schooling systems that were designed to replace Sámi languages and knowledge systems with Scandinavian ones. These were not isolated policies but part of a coordinated effort to redefine what counted as legitimate knowledge.
Assimilation policies focused on the pillars of cultural continuity. Boarding schools and language bans disrupted intergenerational transmission as children were integrated into Nordic culture. Land practices such as reindeer hearding were restricted by the appropriation of lands by settler communities. Religious moral values and practices suppressed Sámi cosmologies and justified by framing them as superstitious or paganism. These interventions chipped away at the foundation of Sámi self-determination and has led to a historical trauma expressed through Sámi descendants.
Therefore, there has been a long history of epistemic marginalisation. What ties these policies together is not only cultural suppression but epistemic control, the attempt to delegitimise Sámi ways of knowing by treating Sámi knowledge as inferior or ‘primitive’. Sámi populations were also excluded from spheres of knowledge such as governmental or scientific institutions and excluded from Nordic state narratives. These were forms of epistemic colonisation that excluded Sámi knowledges from shaping national narratives.
Mia Liinason’s research (“Sámi Resurgence through Heritage Work: Exploring Sámi Cosmology in Negotiation with Lutheran Chistianity”) demonstrates that Sámi knowledges have survived within a “third space”, an in-between zone where Indigenous and Euro-Western systems interact. Despite violent efforts of erasure Sámi knowledges have not simply survived but have resisted suppression by adapting to hegemonic structures that seek to eliminate them. Rather than framing Sámi knowledge as either erased or preserved in isolation, Liinason demonstrates that it has survived through negotiation, translation and selective adaptation. Even under violent assimilationist pressures, Sámi communities engaged in what she terms as heritage work: intentional practices that sustain, reinterpret and revitalise cultural identity. This heritage does more than safeguard fragments of tradition, it enables Sámi epistemologies to maintain internal coherence while operating within hegemonic structures that sought to eliminate them. The result is a form of epistemic resilience that highlights the continuity, adaptability and creative agency of Sámi knowledge systems.
Liinason’s paper foregrounds the contemporary resurgence of Sámi cultural practices, showing that revitalisation is not simply a return to the past but an active, future-oriented process. She emphasises the crucial role Sámi women play in sustaining and transmitting indigenous knowledge, often acting as cultural mediators who navifate the intersections of Sámi cosmology, Christian traditions and modern political structures. Their work demonstrates how knowledge is not only preserved but continually re-created through everyday practices, community leadership and intergenerational teaching. Across Sápmi, a wide range of heritage initiatives are contributing to this resurgence, including hymn-singing in Sámi languages which blends Christian liturgical forms with indigenous linguistic and musical traditions. These initiatives illustrate how Sámi communities mobilise heritage work as a strategy of cultural continuity. Rather than being passive recipients of policy or victims of historical suppression, Sámi people demonstrate a strong capacity for self-directs cultural renewal, especially when supported by policy framworks that recognise indigenous rights, language revitalisation and community autonomy. This underscores Liinason’s broader arguments: Sámi epistemologies endure not by resisting change, but by adapting creatively within, and sometimes again, the structures that sought to erase them. These developments show strong community capacity for cultural renewal when supported by appropriate policy frameworks.
1. Strengthen Sámi-led Knowledge Revitalisation
· Fund community-driven heritage projects, language revitalisation, and cultural education.
· Ensure Sámi organisations lead the design and implementation of initiatives.
2. Integrate Sámi Knowledge into Climate and Land-Use policy
· Recognise Sámi ecological knowledge as essential for Artic climate adaptation
· Include Sámi experts in environmental decision-making bodies and climate research
3. Enhance Legal Protections for Sámi cultural rights
· Expand protections for cultural expression, land access, and traditional practices.
· Align national policies with international Indigenous rights frameworks
4. Promote Ethical, Collaborative Research
· Encourage partnerships between Sámi communities and academic institutions
· Adopt research standards that respect Sámi intellectual sovereignty and data governance
Sámi knowledge systems are vital for cultural continuity, ecological understanding, and climate resilience in the Artic. Their survival and resurgence demonstrate both the strength of Sámi communities and the need for supportive policy environments. Effective policy must prioritise Sámi leadership, protect cultural rights, and integrate indigenous expertise into Artic governance.
A policy brief written by Onur Kilic (2025) on the article "Problematizing the secular/religion divide: Religion as the Other in contemporary discourses on LGBTQIA+ rights in Sweden" by Mia Liinason & Elin Lundell (2025) published in Journal of Gender Studies. You can download the policy brief here and read the article itself here.
In Sweden, a growing divide between secularism and religion is reflected in state policies and media debates. This development introduces complexities into discourse on LGBTQIA+ rights as well as the lived experiences of queer religious communities in Sweden. Recent debates surrounding state-commissioned investigations (SOU:er) on so-called “conversion attempts” and state funding of religious organisations serve as a case in point, illustrating how religion is portrayed as “the Other”. Religion is positioned as inherently oppressive toward queer lives, in contrast to secular modernity, which is equated with progressive values that embrace queerness. From this vantage point, Mia Liinason and Elin Lundell, in their recent article in the Journal of Gender Studies, titled “Problematizing the secular/religion divide: Religion as the other in contemporary discourses on LGBTQIA+ rights in Sweden”, examine how the secular/religious divide marginalises queer religious communities. They argue that this binary oversimplifies complex lived experiences and obscures the inherent restrictive role of cis-heteronormativity in disciplining queer bodies across both secular and religious spheres. The recent state policies tend to problematise the role of religions that are positioned as external to secularism (shaped by Lutheranism) in relation to LGBTQIA+ rights, pressuring religious communities to align with “Swedish democratic values”. This creates a rigid view in which secularism is seen as the safeguard of LGBTQIA+ rights and democracy, while religious communities are cast as its opposite. However, the relationship between religious communities and conversion attempts remains complex and unclear. Critical approaches to the secular/religious divide can help create religious spaces that welcome queer people and queer spaces that embrace religiosity based on a dialogue between state actors, religious communities, and LGBTQIA+ organisations.
Increasingly racist and anti-immigrant policies
Stronger religious pluralism
Neoliberal reconfigurations
Although Sweden is frequently recognised as an LGBTQIA+ friendly society, the changing dynamics of secularism and religion complicate this image, revealing challenges at both policy level and in the everyday life of queer communities. Previous research illustrates how state actors have employed homonationalist discourses to instrumentalise their queer populations – equating queerness with Swedish secular values that are inextricably linked to racist and anti-immigrant policies. This strategy has paved the way for the culturalisation of “Other” religions, particularly Islam, which is perceived as hostile to secular queerness (Kehl 2018; Liinason 2023; Hägerbäck and Norocel 2024). Second, the debates on conversion attempts have led to the politicisation of religion, both by portraying it as a resource to gain political achievements or as a problem in need of legal control (Hjelm 2014). Third, while Swedish secularism has been heavily influenced by Lutheran Christianity and characterised by state regulation of religious activities, there has been a shift toward financially supporting a diverse range of religious organisations (Asad 2003). This shift is tied to neoliberal reconfigurations of the state’s role in Sweden over the last forty years, during which religious organisations have become part of the privatisation and deregulation process (Wejryd and Bäckström 2016; Furseth 2018).
“When the problem of conversion attempts is tackled as a problem of religion, rather than a problem of cis-heteronormativity, the divide between religion and secularism grows deeper.” (Liinason and Lundell, 2025, p. 9)
The analysis underpinning this policy brief employs a multi-scalar methodology that integrates macro-level policy and media discourse with meso-level civil society actions and micro-level accounts of everyday lived experiences of queer religious people. By examining state-commissioned investigations (SOU:er) on conversion attempts alongside the media debate on the topic, and in-depth interviews with 28 queer religious individuals from diverse religious backgrounds, the research reveals that current policies tend to equate conversion attempts with religion and isolate them from the broader context of cis-heteronormativity. While the notion of conversion attempts is used to justify stricter regulation of religious organisations, similar forms of cis-heteronormative pressure are visible in secular institutions such as schools and healthcare settings, which are not subjected to the same regulations. Moreover, the lived experiences of religious queers show that anti-religious racisms such as Islamophobia and antisemitism are prevalent both in their daily lives and in the queer spaces they participate in. These insights collectively call for an urgent need to problematise the secular/religious divide in queer politics and to create spaces that are inclusive of both queerness and religion.
Given the turbulent relationship between secularism, religion, and queerness in Sweden, this research recommends recognising the complexity of religion as lived and practiced by queer people. Rather than a reductive culturalisation and politicisation of religion as inherently opposed to presumably secular queer values, it is important to highlight the multiple scales of interaction between religion and queerness. Encouraging the establishment of queer-inclusive and religiously affirmative spaces – whether through grassroots community initiatives, alliances between religious groups and LGBTQIA+ organisations, or other forms of collaboration – can help bridge the secular/religious divide and mitigate the effects of anti-religious racism. Furthermore, policymakers could focus on the role of cis-heteronormativity as pervasive in both secular and religious contexts, rather than declaring religion to be solely responsible for such oppression. This is crucial, as such an approach has devastating implications and risks further marginalising queer religious communities while fuelling anti-religious racisms in Sweden.
Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press.
Furseth, I. (Ed.). (2018). Religious complexity in the public sphere: Comparing Nordic countries. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55678-9
Hjelm, T. (2014). Understanding the new visibility of religion: Religion as problem and utility. Journal of Religion in Europe, 7(3–4), 203–222. https://doi.org/10.1163/18748929-00703011
Hägerbäck, F., & Norocel, C. O. (2024). Migration and welfare: Differential grievabilities in the Swedish right-wing continuum. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 14(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.33134/njmr.678
Kehl, K. (2018). ‘In Sweden, girls are allowed to kiss girls, and boys are allowed to kiss boys’: Pride Järva and the inclusion of the ‘LGBT other’ in Swedish nationalist discourses. Sexualities, 21(4), 674–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717748621
Liinason, M. (2023). “The loved home” and other exclusionary care discourses. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 22(3), 1047–1067. https://doi.org/10.7202/1102112ar
Liinason, M., & Lundell, E. (2025). Problematizing the secular/religion divide: Religion as the Other in contemporary discourses on LGBTQIA+ rights in Sweden. Journal of Gender Studies, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2493262
Wejryd, A., & Bäckström, A. (2016). Sedd men osedd: Om folkkyrkans paradoxala närvaro inför 2020-talet. Verbum.