Church discipline had an upswing in the 19th century in conjunction with the progression of the Free Church movement in Sweden. Harder and enhanced discipline was advocated, especially within the newly created Missionary joinder. This extended discipline also gives more space to explore and study, where demand has been made for a merger to see any differences in discipline, between the social layers of society. Few studies have been made that go into the depths of church discipline and social classification, not least within the Gävle Missionary Assembly. The purpose of this study is to give an overview of the church discipline in the Gävle Missionary Assembly and map out the frequency and design over an 18-year period between 1879 to 1897. As part of the survey, a categorization of the disciplined members social status, gender, age and form of punishment has been compiled. This is done to answer the question of possible correlation between the church discipline and the wealth of its members; this has been done by combining methods used by social and disciplinary classification studies. The sources used to answer these questions were original church texts, ledgers, and protocol minutes. To help explain the relationships studied between the assembly and its members, Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is used. The result shows that younger women in the lower working class were the most represented in the discipline, followed by middle-aged men belonging to the working class. An extremely weak representation can be found in the higher social layers. There were only a few cases of discipline due to sin or the like. Most disciplined people in the higher layers left by their own choice. The study also shows that people belonging to the higher layers paid 17 times more in annual fees than the average payment of a working woman / man did. Women were also often indebted with residual contributions from previous years payments. Based on the responses found, the data show that a link does exist; although underlying corrections and internal conflicts cannot be addressed in this study. Disciplinary dissemination of social layers does not correspond to the social classification of the congregation as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-26058 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Håkansson, Mattias |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Gävle, Religionsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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