Churches and Religious-Secular Interaction in Welfare in Croatia and Finland

The welfare state reforms have changed the position of actors and put cooperation between public and private stakeholders in Europe on the agenda. In this situation, the Churches are also taken more seriously as partners of welfare services and they have an opportunity to expand their activities on the secular sphere. At the same time, the question regarding the position of the religious in the interaction must be taken account. Growing religious-secular interaction sets Churches to a different position than the religious institutions had during the modernization process. Thus, the situation differs also theoretically from the classical views of secularization: both differentiation and dedifferentiation are equally relevant viewpoints for the analysis. In the context of predominantly Lutheran and Catholic countries, which are analyzed in this paper, the interaction may also support the impact of the religious on the secular domain.

The paper focuses on the role of Churches in the welfare sector in Croatia and Finland. It presents  results regarding the local-level interaction between secular and religious organizations in the field of the welfare sector. The data includes the interviews of secular public sector and the social work of the Churches gathered in 2013 in three regions in Finland and Croatia. On the basis of the empirical work and background analysis the paper demonstrates the multifaceted reality of interactions between religious and secular institutions and discusses theoretical consequences of changing ways of interaction in different social and religious contexts.