Paper short abstract:

According to Icelandic researches, untraditional religious ideas seem to be a part of the daily life experience of many people. Even though most of the population is registered in the National Church of Iceland, they think that these untraditional ideas can easily go together with Christian beliefs.

Paper long abstract:

My paper is built on a qualitative research I finished in 2015, including 15 people (12 women and 3 men in Iceland) on their religious ideas, focusing on their belief in afterlife and communication with deceased relatives. Most of them were chosen from a sample from "Könnun á íslenskri þjóðtrú og trúarviðhorfum", conducted in 2007-2007 by Haraldsson, prófessor emeritus in psychology, and Gunnell, professor in folkloristics, both at the University of Iceland.

According to the results, my informants are open-minded and informal regarding their religious ideas. Most of them are registered in the National Church of Iceland (Evangelical Lutheran Church) but nevertheless they think that untraditional religious ideas, like spiritualism, new age beliefs and folk belief, can go together with Christianity. Most of my informants believe in an afterlife that is more related to spiritual ideas than Christian doctrine.

They believe that communication with the dead is plausible and see it as a part of their everyday life experience. The deceased have to do with fate of men and their role is to protect, help and give advice, mainly in difficult situations but also to sort out mundane problems. Somehow, my informants can find a harmonic coexistence for possibly discordant beliefs. Connected to this subject is the secularization thesis which involves the idea that a growing materialism, modern science and technological progress will lead to religion and its institutions changing their role from being a governing force to one of influencing individualism and private belief.