The State Church and Free Speech Controversies

The Church of Denmark remains constitutionally established, funded partly through a church tax paid by its registered members and governed formally by the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, an arrangement that gives the state, through parliament, ultimate authority over church legislation even though members elect local parish councils and the church retains considerable internal autonomy in practice; roughly one in five Danes has formally opted out of membership in recent decades, reducing the once near-universal registration.

Denmark became a global flashpoint for religious controversy in 2005 when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a deliberate test of self-censorship around Islam that triggered violent protests across the Muslim world, attacks on Danish diplomatic missions and lasting security threats against the cartoonists and editors involved, an episode Danish authorities and much of the public came to defend as a matter of free expression even as it strained diplomatic relations with several Muslim-majority states for years afterward. Denmark has since debated and in 2017 passed a law banning full-face veils in public, part of a wider European pattern of legislation targeting Islamic dress.