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76 4 Lene, Sonny, Gitte I T wa s n oT always so easy to get people to agree to be interviewed by me. It wasn’t like I could just stand on a street corner or walk into a grocery store and stop strangers and ask them to sit down with me for about an hour to discuss their personal beliefs—with a tape recorder running, no less. For the most part, I had to have some “in” with people before I felt comfortable asking them for an interview. This “in” was usually established through friends, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, or people I met through my daughters’ schools and extra-curricular activities. However, there was an added difficulty. Many people were simply put off by the topic: religion. More often than not, if a person heard that my research had anything to do with religion, they expressed various levels of reluctance. They would either say that they weren’t religious themselves—in which case I would say, “That’s OK, I am also interested in people who aren’t religious”—or they would say that they honestly had nothing to say about religion one way or the other, and that their indifference would surely not be conducive to a good interview. One telling example was when a friend of mine in Aarhus asked around at his office if anyone was interested in taking part in my study. His co-workers initially expressed a willingness to participate, but as soon as they heard that my research involved questions about religion, their interest evaporated. He eventually did recruit two people who agreed to an interview with me, but these were atypical people who actually had a fair amount to say on the matter. The majority of my friend’s colleagues simply bowed out. How I wished I could have interviewed them. This was a constant theoretical and methodological question for me during my time in Scandinavia: how to study the relative absence of something . How do you investigate a pervasive lack of something? Specifically, how does one study the absence or lack of religion? For the typical, average , or “normal” person in Denmark or Sweden, religion just isn’t all that significant an element in their lives. They don’t think about it much and they have relatively little to share/offer. How, then, was I to find people and get them to talk about something for which they have little interest lene, sonny, Gitte 77 and relatively little to say? Part of the answer—as I stated above—was that I had to have some sort of “in.” Without question, most of the people that I interviewed actually only did the interview because they knew me—or they knew someone who knew me—and otherwise probably would have had little or no desire to sit down for an hour-long conversation about religious issues. The three people that comprise the heart of this chapter fit this description: they are all relatively uninterested in religion, but agreed to do the interview anyway, almost as a favor.1 lene I was able to set up an interview with Lene because she is the long-time friend of a second cousin of mine who lives in Copenhagen. So on a very sunny fall morning, I interviewed her in her third story apartment in downtown Copenhagen. Lene is 32 years old and works as a graphic designer . She is single. Her hair is very blonde—almost white-blonde—and she speaks English fluently. She offered me some tea and a few chocolate candies as we began the interview. Are you religious at all? Not at all. [laughter] And do you ever go to church? Uh-h-h, well, I do actually. It’s funny because I was baptized and I was— confirmation, yeah. And I did sing in a church choir for 3 or 4 years or something . But I was paid to. [laughter] And we had cookies and tea and stuff afterwards and all my friends were there so it was lots of fun. And then I just go whenever someone gets baptized or married. But you never go on a Sunday? No. Did your parents? My dad absolutely does not go into a church. My mom goes for Christmas Eve sometimes. Tell me about your dad. He is an old communist, [laughter] and now he also votes for the Social Democrats and he just doesn’t believe in any of that—at all...

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