The purpose of this study is to investigate high churchmanship in the Church of Sweden during the first half of the 20th century from the perspective of movement and identity. Published and unpublished sources have been studied in order to reconstruct the network, organization, practices, strategies and self-understanding of the movement in relation to its national and international context. Several theoretical tools have been discussed and adapted to focus on how an ‘ecclesiastical movement’ can be studied from the perspectives of movement and identity. These tools also seek to analyse how notions of the church, as well as of the past, the present and visions of the future generated narrative and identity. The study is divided into three parts. Part l covers the background and the period 1909–1918 and investigates the national and international context of the Swedish High Church Movement. Part 2 covers the period 1919–1935 and studies how associations were formed within a network with international influences, how they organized themselves and what conditions and obstacles affected the growth of the movement. Part 3 discusses the period 1935–1946 and how the movement established itself within the Church of Sweden as well as the way in which it became marked by the impacts of a changing society. The Swedish High Church Movement was a minor movement that consisted of several associations linked to each other in an informal network. The movement encountered opposition because of the anti-catholic discourse that characterised Protestantism in Europe at that time. It stressed the notion of the Church of Sweden as part of a worldwide catholic church. It was not a common theological interpretation of this notion that unified the agents of the movement, but rather the desire to allow it to encompass the practical renewal of the spiritual and liturgical life of the church. Therefore, it aimed to influence parish life through individuals and parish clergy. The movement was ‘glocal’ in the sense that it was part of an international movement but manifested itself in the local parish. Through its self-understanding and practices it expressed an imagined community of a catholic church as a super-national meta-narrative set against the hegemonical national meta-narrative of the Swedish Folk Church. By studying the movement and relating it to its surroundings, I have shown that it contributed to a process within the Church of Sweden that reflected the individualisation and pluralisation that marked contemporary society.
