Religion and History in Sweden

Sweden is among the most religiously unaffiliated countries in the world by practice, though a large majority remain formally registered members of the Church of Sweden, Lutheran in doctrine, which disestablished as the official state church only in 2000 after nearly five centuries as such; Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 and other surveys consistently find only a small minority of Swedes reporting regular religious attendance or strong personal belief despite this high nominal registration.

Sweden adopted Lutheranism during the sixteenth-century Reformation under King Gustav Vasa, who broke with Rome partly for the same mix of theological and fiscal motives seen elsewhere in Reformation Europe, seizing Catholic Church lands to fund the new Swedish state. Sweden's Sami indigenous minority in the north practiced a distinct shamanic religion centered on noaidi ritual specialists and reindeer-herding cosmology before centuries of forced Christianization and, more recently, state assimilation policy suppressed much of this tradition, an experience Sami communities and scholars have compared to indigenous religious suppression elsewhere. Sweden's Muslim population, grown substantially through refugee resettlement particularly from the Middle East since the 1990s and 2015 European refugee crisis, is now one of the largest in Scandinavia relative to population.