Although known as a Lutheran country, Greenland is seeing a growing Pentecostal movement, and even a new Bahá’í presence, writes Julia Duin in Religion Unplugged (May 19). Greenland has captured the geopolitical imagination of the Western world, particularly Americans, but less is known about the emerging pluralism and growing Pentecostalism of the island nation. Lutheranism first came to Greenland back in the 1700s through Danish colonialism, but in visiting the country today Duin finds its influence to be in a weakened state, with Greenlanders showing a nominal attachment to the church. She notes that her observations conflict with a 2019 World Council of Churches report, which found the denomination’s churches to be full, but with a shortage of clergy and trained musicians. However, according to British religious historian Rebecca Jane Morgan, it is INO, a Pentecostal denomination with 14 outreaches around Greenland, that represents the “the single most successful new religious phenomenon” in the country.
In an essay in the online magazine Medium (January 19), Morgan writes that the movement’s fresh ways of worship and evangelism have propelled its growth and geographic spread across the ice-capped nation. Outstripping such groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventism, she argues that Pentecostalism’s similarities to the country’s shamanism (now largely extinct) may be another contributing factor to its growth. And the longtime Pentecostal partnership with abstinence organizations could be another boost in a nation suffering serious alcoholism and a related high suicide rate. Turning to the Bahá’ís, their growth in Greenland draws on spiritual rather than geopolitical sources for its mission. Should the island convert to that faith, Bahá’í leader Abdu’l-Bahá prophesied: “All the ices of that continent will be melted, and its frigid climate will be changed into a temperate climate…that country and continent will become a divine garden and a lordly orchard.”
(Religion Unplugged, https://religionunplugged.com/news/trumps-greenland-obsession-overlooks-a-spiritual-iceberg-inside-the-religious-revival-in-the-arctic; Medium, https://rebeccajanemorgan.medium.com/how-the-pentecostal-movement-changed-greenland-8ea360103012)
