Legal status From a legal point of view, the current Danish Constitutional Act of 1953 (Danmarks Riges Grundlov) governs the framework for regulating religious communities in Denmark. Specifically, it governs the relationship between the state, the Church of Denmark and “the religious communities other than the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark”, as they are designated in Article 69 of the Constitution. With some reservation, it is fair to argue that religion in Denmark is embedded in two different regulatory regimes. The Church of Denmark is regulated as an administrative body in public law, whereas all other religious communities are regulated as associations, charities or private institutions. These may apply for ministerial recognition. Denmark has a history of regulating religion that on the one hand represents a particular understanding of Lutheranism in a majority context, and on the other hand regulates religion in accordance with the international conventions, especially regarding human rights. 

The constitution of Denmark has a number of specific articles relevant to religious minorities. Article 67 defines the principle of religious freedom and religious association, under which “members of the public are entitled to associate in communities to worship God according to their convictions, but nothing may be taught or done that contravenes decency or public order”. With Article 68, “no-one shall be liable to make personal contributions to any denomination other than the one to which he adheres”. Presently, more than 25% of the population are not members of the Church of Denmark and are not obliged to pay church taxes. However, through the general tax, they indirectly support to the Church. Article 69 states that “the affairs of religious communities other than the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark are regulated by an Act”. In December 2017, a bill was passed in the Danish Parliament that collected and clarified rights and privileges concerning the affairs of religious communities outside the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark. In many ways, this bill restated many of the existing executive practices in Denmark and gave clear and explicit language to the expectations and privileges of religious communities. Taking effect on 1 January 2018, this new Act on the Religious Communities outside the Church of Denmark sets the frame for state and religion relations in Denmark, and it does so by making the executive instruments that conferred recognition upon dissenting religious communities part of statutory law. Article 70 is a non-discrimination rule. “No person shall by reason of his creed or descent be deprived of access to the full enjoyment of civic and political rights, nor shall he escape compliance with any common civic duty for such reasons”. 

Representation Several national foreign Protestant churches are well-represented in Denmark due to geographical proximity, low language barriers, freedom of labor movement and strong commercial relations. The Swedish Gustafskyrkan in Copenhagen was built in 1908 and serves the Swedish congregation in Copenhagen. King Haakon's Church from 1958 belongs to the Norwegian Seamen's Church. The English St. Alban's Church is located in Churchill Park in Copenhagen, with a significant congregation and worship in English. The Roman Catholic Church seeks to address both the interested ethnic Danes and try to adapt language, form and traditions more to Danish conditions. At the same time, they address ethnic minorities and therefore maintain the language and traditions of these minorities. The Aleksander Nevsky Church in Copenhagen is the Russian church, and is explicitly Russian national. Traditionally it has not been particularly open to Orthodox believers of other nationalities, e.g. Greeks or Romanians, let alone to Danish converts who might wish to celebrate Orthodox services in Danish. In recent years, the Eastern European Orthodox community has been growing. A total of 11 churches and communities are considered traditionally recognized, from before 1970, and these are three Reformed Churches, the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, the Swedish Gustaf's Church, the Norwegian King Haakon Church, St. Alban's English Church, the Russian Orthodox Church and the[GFT1]  Catholic Church, as well as the Mosaic Faith Community. 

With early globalization, Buddhism was first introduced in Denmark with romanticism in the 1840s. At the end of the 19th century it appeared together with other Eastern religions as a component of new forms of religion, which consisted of a mixture of Eastern and Western religious elements. Buddhism has often been considered more of a philosophy than a religion and is frequently associated with meditation. Hinduism has had a harder time finding acceptance in the West, but its meditative practices and yoga have been combined with various Western mental health movements

A recent addition was the Indian so-called yoga and guru movement, which was represented by ISKCON, the Hare Krishna movement that came to Denmark in 1980; the movement is small, but the monks are sometimes seen dancing and chanting their mantra in the Danish cities. Also, there is a small Bahá’í community in Denmark, and in recent year the Forn Sidr religious community have begun practice based on old Nordic mythology.

Demography With increasing immigration in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, Denmark has a growing number of different religious denominations and faith communities. It is illegal to keep public registries on information about religious conviction or affiliation, except for members of the Church of Denmark. At Statistics Denmark, they have church statistics with information on the number of members of Church of Denmark, registrations and de-registrations as well as church actions such as baptisms, funerals, confirmations, weddings from 2006, and onwards. This is also the reason United Nations Statistics Division have no data on Danish religions.

The act of counting, categorizing and labelling is often criticized as an expression of a power relation between those who count and those who are being counted. It may involve nationality, ethnicity, religious practice, membership of organizations, or something else entirely. Considering that people may also have a religious belonging without formally being associated with a specific community, the numbers are rather difficult. Similarly, religious identity may be self-defined and unrelated to expectations and conventional assumptions about religious practice. Generally, however, the way of counting religious belonging is to calculate followers based on estimates reflecting the religious composition of immigrants’ countries of origin. 

Based on such calculations, demographers of religion estimate about 256,000 in total numbers and 4.4% of the Danish population are Muslims. They constitute the largest religious minority group in Denmark. Most are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and the largest groups have their origins in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran and Morocco. According to numbers from 2017, there are 47,673 members of the Catholic Church in Denmark, up more than 25% since 2008. This is mainly due to immigration, most significantly from Poland and other European countries. Buddhists are estimated at 33.000, with approximately 90% with an immigrant background. Hindus are about 20.000, and they mainly have a background in Sri Lanka and India. There are an estimated 8.000-10.000 Jews in Denmark, most of whom live in Copenhagen. About half of the Danish Jews are members of the Danish Jewish community.

Controversies In Denmark, there are a number of ongoing controversies and challenges that raises human rights concerns about freedoms and state limitations of minority religions and beliefs. Roughly considered since 11 September 2001, researchers in religion, law and human rights have spoken of a rising pressure to limit specific religious manifestations, particularly those of religious minorities. Central to this concern is the National Report on Denmark by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion and Belief, Heiner Bielefledt (2017). Arguably, there is a growing “juridification” of freedom of religion, by which the international standards on freedom of religion may potentially be at odds with the Danish developments, or at least, are not always fully reflected in Denmark. 

The examples are abundant. In 2014, a prohibition of religious slaughter without prior stunning was introduced by an administrative order. This has called on international criticism, and the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief in his report on Denmark recommended that the Danish government ‘reconsider the ban on ritual slaughter.’ In June 2017, the Danish Parliament abolished the ban on blasphemy, which has caused concern to many religious minority communities, and has been used by extreme right wing agitators to burn the Quran. In 2018, Danish Parliament passed a general ban on face covering, which is seen as directly regulating the very few Muslim women wearing niqab or burka. In light of recent debates, which are ongoing in Denmark and most of Europe, the Jewish community has expressed serious concern that a prohibition of male circumcision will threaten the very existence of Jewish life in Denmark. 

A considerable legislative agenda “aimed at religious preachers who seek to undermine Danish laws and values and who support parallel conceptions of law”, including rules on decorum, immigration, freedom of speech and criminalizing different aspects of perceived Islamic practice. This carries with it significant risk of discrimination, and some ambiguities on the lawfulness of certain religious practice, and questions about the necessity and proportionality of the legislation. Additionally, Muslims are increasingly marginalized against and a public political will to discriminate Muslims or even ban Islam altogether is growing. 

Niels Valdemar Vinding