Irreligion in Finland: according to Statistics Finland in 2020, 29.4% of the population in Finland were non-religious, or about 1,628,000 people. The Union of Freethinkers of Finland and other organisations have acted as interest organisations, legal protection organisations and cultural organisations for non-religious people. In a 2018 international ISSP survey, 40% of the Finnish population said they did not believe in God, 34% said they believed in God and 26% did not know. Nearly one out of every five people in the country is not a member of a religious organisation, and the number of people with no religious affiliation has doubled in two decades.
History
In Finland, the Enlightenment mainly influenced the educated classes. In the late 19th century, Darwinism came to Finland. The secularist philosophy of materialism was represented solely by Wilhelm Bolin, a friend of Ludwig Feuerbach, who worked as a librarian at the University of Helsinki, and who had a doctorate in Spinoza's philosophy. Bolin was one of the pioneers of cremation in Finland. Naturalistic evolutionary theory inspired, among others, Hjalmar Neiglick and Edvard Westermarck in Finland as early as the 1880s.
In 1887, Viktor Heikel and 50 other citizens attempted to found the Finnish Association for Religious Freedom and Tolerance (, ). The Senate sent the association's statutes to the Lutheran Church's chapter for approval, which rejected the proposal. In 1889, the newspaper , edited by Eero Erkko, published a series of articles on evolution. It led to a heated debate, involving Juhani Aho and Minna Canth, among others. The same year, Canth and A.B. Mäkelä began publication of the magazine ('Free Ideas') in Kuopio, which presented development theory. The magazine was discontinued because censors removed a number of the articles in the magazine.
At the turn of the 20th century, the labor movement was headed by several critics of religion. The labour movement in Finland adopted the program of Marxist atheism as a challenge to the State Church. The 1903 Forssa Program of the Finnish Social Democratic Party stated:
The magazine Euterpe, published between 1902 and 1905, was written by Rolf Lagerborg, Gunnar Castrén and Georg Schauman, among others. From 1909 to 1917, S.E. Kristiansson published . A.B. Sarlin wrote a series of books critical of religion under the pseudonym Asa Jalas.
In 1905, the Prometheus Society, a student society, was founded at the University of Helsinki with the aim of promoting freedom of thought. The association (1905–1914) included Edvard Westermarck, Rafael Karsten, Rolf Lagerborg, Knut Tallqvist, Wilhelm Bolin, Yrjö Hirn, Georg Schauman, Hjalmar Magnus Eklund, Harry Federley, Alma Söderhjelm, Gunnar Castrén, K.H. Wiik, Viktor Heikel and Ernst Lampén. The association demanded the abolition of confessional religious education in schools and the acceptance of civil marriage. Westermarck was also a member of the English Freethinkers' Association. The tense social situation in the mid-1910s contributed to the decline of the society's activities. Civil marriage was made legal in Finland by a separate law passed in 1917.
Freethinkers had high expectations of the Freedom of Religion Act of the independent Republic of Finland, enacted in 1922. The law came into force at the beginning of 1923 and allowed citizens not to belong to religious communities. The law gave full civil rights to atheists as well. People began to leave the church. The demand for separation of church and state did not materialise, which Jussi Pikkusaari has interpreted in his dissertation as a defeat for the Social Democrats' policy on religion.
Civil registration
Disappointed with the Freedom of Religion Act, freethinkers began to form civil register organisations in the late 1920s. The associations additionally set up their own cemeteries. In the early 1930s, it became more difficult for civil registrars to organise, but by the end of the decade they could continue to do so. In 1937, the Union of Civil Register Associations () was founded as a national collective body. Following the international, 65-year-old federation, the organisation took the name the Union of Freethinkers of Finland (, ) in 1945. The union's publication appeared in 1937 under the name , now .