Police were called last month to break up a group handing out free Bibles near a school in the Swedish municipality of Orust, a traditionally strongly Christian island off the country’s west coast, in an incident that has sparked criticism and accusations of double standards over public expressions of Christianity.
Church newspaper Kyrkans Tidningclaims the volunteers, from the Goda nyheter (Good News) organisation, made sure to stay off the school’s grounds. The group said that students came forward to talk to them voluntarily.
Staff nevertheless asked the group to leave, and contacted the police, saying they found the bible distribution outside the schools to be “unpleasant,” according to a police statement. The distributors chose to leave voluntarily once the police showed up.
Swedish news site Samnytt has criticised the events, highlighting that “when Muslim groups stand in public places to try to arouse interest in Islam and in some cases hand out free copies of the Quran, it rarely leads to any outrage from surrounding businesses and institutions, let alone the police being called.”
The news comes just after reports showed a man telling young Muslims in Sweden that democracy is incompatible with their religion. He was reportedly connected to the Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is banned in many countries.
One popular Swedish political commentary page supportive of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats reacted to the incident by asking: “Is open Christianity banned in Sweden now?” It added:
We Swedes are expected and forced to be tolerant against the intolerant and easily offended.
Goda nyhetersaid police officials told them similar interventions will not take place again.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
