The Right to Spiritual Health During a Pandemic : An Analysis from a Human Rights Perspective

Abstract: During the pandemic of Covid-19 the restrictions changed the abilities of gatherings, so also for the members of the Church of Sweden, and questions arose from spokesperson of the Church of Sweden on the behalf of the members regarding injustice or discredit of the right of freedom of religion. This thesis handles how the restrictions affected the Church of Sweden, if there was any discredit for the freedom of religion and if people in Sweden found other alternatives during the pandemic to express spiritual life outdoors when there were limitations indoors for gatherings. My main source of material has been Kyrkans tidning (The Church’s Paper), a newspaper for the Church of Sweden, with articles involving the Archbishop Antje Jackelén. In the thesis are both qualitative and quantitate methods used, an inductive document analysis combined with a manual content analysis with the codewords experiential, social, economic, and political, concepts from a theory of religion and politics. The inference in this thesis is that there has been an injustice committed against members of the Church of Sweden, with reference to some of the restrictions settled by the Public Health Agency. Even though the Church of Sweden and the Sweden’s Christian Council might not agree, the comparison made between the articles, the United Declarations of Human Rights, other convents, and the definitions of religions there was no indication that the freedom of religion was illegally affected in Sweden during the pandemic of Covid-19.