This has been one of the most covered happening in Finland for the past week and the effect is... well, interesting.
Last tuesday there was a show on tv, a discussion about homosexuality, mostly because the equal marriage rights and church-weddings have been on the table recently. Currently in Finland gay couples can't adopt unless one of them is a biological parent, and they can't get the same surname. And the evangelical lutheran church, which in -09 consisted of over 79% of finnish people, doesn't allow a gay wedding. At least yet.
This show was about 2 hours of discussion between representatives from both sides of the issue with watchers being able to send in questions and then getting a response from whoever wanted to comment on the issue. The church side had some of the most biggotted people I've seen and in general there wasn't anyone who could've presented the gay-positive movement in the church properly(because there is, the bishops are currently divided, around 4 of 9 are for gay wedding and equal rights in the view of church). The show has been claimed to have been a set up for the church, and I do agree that they propably did find the most obnoxious homophobes on the anti-gay side and not a good spokesperson for the more rational majority.
But here is where it gets interesting. When the show was on and ever since then, there has been a massive separation from the church. And I do mean on a massive scale.
The freethinkers in finland have a site that makes it easy to resign from your chosen church. They do all the paper-work for you and raise awareness that you shouldn't belong to a church if you don't even believe in the stuff and such. They keep the statistics of who resigns by their site, so these statistics are propably not even the whole figure, some might have gone and resigned via the more "official" way(that is really not much harder, the online forms take just more time to find). But here it is:
This image has represent a median of how many people leave the church per week. The different colors represent different years and so on. So the other years have around 250-300 resignations per week, and the last week spikes to a tenfold leave. That seven day median is likely to rise, as this next graph shows.
This here is the hourly statistics of the past few days.
The light gray represent the day before yesterday, darker gray is yesterday and the red is today. People have been resigning from the church at an accelerating rate for the past week. When the show was aired, the same day we had 2500 resignations. The next day it was already over 3000 and then it got news coverage as a "massive resignation boom" and it completely took off. As you can see they are predicting over 6000 resignations today.
For me it's fun to crunch some numbers into this phenomena. The evangelical lutheran church get 974 000 000 euros in taxes every year, 300 per every working adult. There are 323 independent congregations in Finland. So taking the average, every congregation has a budget of 3 million. That's 10 000 tax payers. So assuming the resignees are two thirds tax-payers(mother,father and a kid for example): For every 15 000 who resign, they lose so much money they don't have the resources to uphold one congregation. Currently this "gay night" discussion has cost the church nearly 10 million in taxes.
As if this wasn't enough, when this funny little movement had been going for a few days, an interviewer ask a priest for a comment, and he announces that this is going to hit their preschooling and family services first. The church preschooling is quite popular for being farely cheap and available everywhere, so this enraged the parents, even more so when it's still in fresh memory how a vicar bough a million euro home just a month ago(somehow this was newsworthy too in the tabloids). So they are unwilling to cut their payrolls that are higher than most engineers but they are cutting the social services the church provides.
I'm interested to see how long this will last, but I doubt it will last long enough to cripple the church for good.
Last tuesday there was a show on tv, a discussion about homosexuality, mostly because the equal marriage rights and church-weddings have been on the table recently. Currently in Finland gay couples can't adopt unless one of them is a biological parent, and they can't get the same surname. And the evangelical lutheran church, which in -09 consisted of over 79% of finnish people, doesn't allow a gay wedding. At least yet.
This show was about 2 hours of discussion between representatives from both sides of the issue with watchers being able to send in questions and then getting a response from whoever wanted to comment on the issue. The church side had some of the most biggotted people I've seen and in general there wasn't anyone who could've presented the gay-positive movement in the church properly(because there is, the bishops are currently divided, around 4 of 9 are for gay wedding and equal rights in the view of church). The show has been claimed to have been a set up for the church, and I do agree that they propably did find the most obnoxious homophobes on the anti-gay side and not a good spokesperson for the more rational majority.
But here is where it gets interesting. When the show was on and ever since then, there has been a massive separation from the church. And I do mean on a massive scale.
The freethinkers in finland have a site that makes it easy to resign from your chosen church. They do all the paper-work for you and raise awareness that you shouldn't belong to a church if you don't even believe in the stuff and such. They keep the statistics of who resigns by their site, so these statistics are propably not even the whole figure, some might have gone and resigned via the more "official" way(that is really not much harder, the online forms take just more time to find). But here it is:
This image has represent a median of how many people leave the church per week. The different colors represent different years and so on. So the other years have around 250-300 resignations per week, and the last week spikes to a tenfold leave. That seven day median is likely to rise, as this next graph shows.
This here is the hourly statistics of the past few days.
The light gray represent the day before yesterday, darker gray is yesterday and the red is today. People have been resigning from the church at an accelerating rate for the past week. When the show was aired, the same day we had 2500 resignations. The next day it was already over 3000 and then it got news coverage as a "massive resignation boom" and it completely took off. As you can see they are predicting over 6000 resignations today.
For me it's fun to crunch some numbers into this phenomena. The evangelical lutheran church get 974 000 000 euros in taxes every year, 300 per every working adult. There are 323 independent congregations in Finland. So taking the average, every congregation has a budget of 3 million. That's 10 000 tax payers. So assuming the resignees are two thirds tax-payers(mother,father and a kid for example): For every 15 000 who resign, they lose so much money they don't have the resources to uphold one congregation. Currently this "gay night" discussion has cost the church nearly 10 million in taxes.
As if this wasn't enough, when this funny little movement had been going for a few days, an interviewer ask a priest for a comment, and he announces that this is going to hit their preschooling and family services first. The church preschooling is quite popular for being farely cheap and available everywhere, so this enraged the parents, even more so when it's still in fresh memory how a vicar bough a million euro home just a month ago(somehow this was newsworthy too in the tabloids). So they are unwilling to cut their payrolls that are higher than most engineers but they are cutting the social services the church provides.
I'm interested to see how long this will last, but I doubt it will last long enough to cripple the church for good.
