🔗 Share this article

Set against crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, the church leader, announced this Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason I offer my apology now.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to take place after his statement.

The apology took place at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in prison for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology elicited a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “strong and important” but was delivered “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the crisis as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but remained staunch in its belief that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We have wounded people instead of seeking wholeness. We are sorry.”