“Haugianere” (The Haugeans) by Adolph Tidemand, 1852
This iconic painting shows a religious gathering of Haugians — followers of the lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge. His Pietist revival movement emphasized personal faith, Bible reading, and moral living, often in opposition to the official state church. Hauge was imprisoned for years, and his followers faced persecution. The work is housed in the National Museum in Oslo.

and let it, like the garden, bloom.
Let your peace shine from mountain to shore
and winter flee before the spring sun.
Let the people dwell together as brothers,
as Christians may fittingly do.

Our homeland long lay in darkness,
and ignorance hid the light.
But, God, you looked upon us in mercy,
Your love did not forget us;
You sent your word to Norway’s mountains,
And light streamed over the land.

And Norway lies far to the north,
And winter lasts long;
But the light and life in your word
No one can block.
Though the mountain is high and the valley narrow,
Your word still has its passage.

Thus our land bloomed in light and peace,
It grew so green on the hillsides,
But again night sank upon the land
With bondage and heavy times.
And the people sighed for light,
And you lit it up at last.

And morning dawned, and the darkness vanished,
Which long had shadowed our happiness.
You gave us again our inheritance of freedom
And secured it for us in hardship.
You protected our people and gave us peace
And with law we built the land.

If God will not be the builder,
We build the house in vain.
If God will not defend city and land,
No watchman can make us safe.
So guard us, God, that we may dwell
In the home with peace and comfort.

Now it is again day in Norway
with spring sun and song in the forest.
Though the seed still grows in varied ways,
it sprouts behind the plough.
So may God bless the good seed
until the growth one day is ripe.

Happy Constitution Day!

More than 200 years ago, the majority of the constituent assembly at Eidsvoll dared to proclaim that Norway should be an independent state. The Napoleonic Wars and the Treaty of Kiel had motivated them to act. They did not want a union with Sweden. Motivated by John Locke and his idea of popular sovereignty, they drafted a constitution that revolutionised our way of thinking about politics.

It was about this country, Norway, being ours, our home, an inheritance from our forefathers and home to a people called Norwegians. But perhaps equally important: John Locke gave them an ideological right to cast off leaders who violated the rights of the people.

But it began in the years before 1814. In 1772, students in Copenhagen founded Norske selskab. It was a milieu in which they began to cultivate the distinctively Norwegian that they saw in our nature, history, Norwegian language and popular life. The idea of the Norwegian people was founded.

When Denmark in January 1814 was forced to give Norway to Sweden, the Norwegian people already had an idea of a different future. We did not want to become part of Sweden, and we wanted to get rid of absolutism. We made this clear to Christian Frederik early in 1814. The dictatorship under absolutism is often neglected in Norwegian history teaching, but the Constitution we received on 17 May 1814 was a liberating revolt both against absolutism and a desire for independence, that is, a revolution on a par with other and more famous revolutions. Remember that in 1814 Hans Nielsen Hauge was imprisoned under terrible conditions as a political prisoner.

It is interesting that we managed to retain freedom, even though we entered into union with Sweden. We retained the Constitution and the rights it gave us. But the Constitution also gave us an identity. We were a Christian people with democratic rights and with a country that belonged to us. That was not far-right or conservative, and it is not far-right today either.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, nation-building began as a common project. The patriotic hymns of the nineteenth century are filled with gratitude, both to God, who gave us the country, and to those who fought for this right to become a reality. More and more pastors became active in Venstre, and thereby also in the struggle for the dissolution of the union. Norway’s inhabitants were understood as a people with their own God-given history and task.

The pastor Elias Blix (1836–1902) would have risked being labelled a Christian nationalist today, but his patriotic hymns such as “Fagert er landet” and “Gud signe vårt dyre fedreland” bind language, faith and nation together in a way hardly anyone dares to do nowadays. I have yet to hear anyone problematise what the concept of fatherland actually entails.

It is not a conservative and racist nationalism we celebrate, quite the contrary. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910), author of “Ja, vi elsker”, and Elias Blix did not believe that we were better than other peoples; it was about equality of worth in difference. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson became internationally known for his struggle on behalf of Europe’s oppressed minorities. He saw the value of a state built on the nation, where no one was oppressed because of their nationality. These were radical ideas that ultimately changed Europe’s borders for all time.

It is this radical nationalism that can protect us from cultural ruin. It is our responsibility and our duty to administer the inheritance our nation-builders left behind in a way that ensures that our heirs, too, have a home on the day they take over.