The Sacred and the Secular: Confirmation in Norway

Confirmation in Norway has held a variety of meanings since the introduction of Christianity to the country by Olav Tryggvason. From a point of formalized entry into the spiritual world, it has diverged to take on multiple forms for the Norwegian populace. An initiation into the world of adulthood, a point of resistance against an oppressive religious order, and an area of status negotiation, ritual confirmation has broadened its borders and surpassed even, in true Weberian form, the constraints of organized religion to become a civic, rather than religious, activity.

In 1736, the state Church of Norway required that youth be taught and examined in the ways of the church before taking their first communion. Confirmation in the church was mandatory for Norwegian citizens up until 1912, and fairly standard thereafter. Couples were not permitted to marry in the eyes of the church or even work without proof of confirmation, generally done between the ages of 14 to 20 years old.

In practice, confirmation was a time that marked a child's material emergence into adulthood. Young boys switched from knickers to long slacks, often acquiring their first suit specifically for the confirmation ceremony. Young girls, too, received new dresses - a white gown for the ceremony itself, and also a new dress for the subsequent celebration. Money was a common gift from relatives during post-confirmation feasting.

In the early to mid nineteen hundreds, confirmation was a time of differentiation. Religious instruction in the church (in addition to that taught in school from the second grade on) lasted all year and the ceremony itself coincided in the spring with graduation from the seventh class. This marked the point of differing paths for most students - some left school to enter professions, while others went on to trade/professional schools, or realskole and the gymnas. Appropriate in the context of the individual's "rebirth" into adulthood, confirmation is sometimes referred to as "vårens vakreste eventyr" (the Spring's most beautiful story).

Though about 75% of Norwegian youth participate in confirmation, for some the ceremony itself has lost many of it's religious connotations. The decision to participate has become for some more a matter of "habit - what everyone does." The ceremony became more and more secularized as a transcript of proper credentials, something "on your records, kind of, that you've been baptized such and such a place, and confirmed such and such a place."

While an increasing number of youth chose not to participate in confirmation after it was no longer compulsory, many simply went through the motions for fear that failure to do so would reflect badly on the family, that others would say, "what's the matter with her family, why didn't she get confirmed?" or that the family was "not Christian, but heathenish."

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