The Free Church and the Holocaust: The Swedish Pentecostal Movement’s Relation to Antisemitism 1930–1974

This project outlines the Swedish Pentecostal movement’s relation to antisemitism.

Despite being a fundamental social movement in the history of Sweden, Pentecostalism has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Its relation to antisemitism and the Holocaust has not been studied at all. The purpose of this study is to produce new and critical knowledge on this complicated relation.

The aim is to document linkages between the Pentecostal movement and antisemitic ideas and actors from 1930 to 1974.

This era of Swedish Pentecostalism began with the inauguration of the remarkable Filadelfia church in Stockholm, where the renowned Pentecostal leader Lewi Pethrus served as pastor and later as a prominent member until his passing three and a half decades later.

The project´s source material includes personal archives of Lewi Pethrus and Eric Wärenstam, a pioneering fascism scholar and a Pentecostal writer.

The sources also include two periodicals (Den Kristne; Evangelii Härold) and one newspaper (Dagen) published by the Swedish Pentecostal movement during this period.

The empirical material will be analyzed through the lens of social movement framing theory to identify antisemitism´s function for the social mobilization and political framing of the expansive Pentecostal movement led by Lewi Pethrus.

The project thereby offers new and critical knowledge about the role of antisemitism in one of the most fundamental social movements in Swedish history.