06/21/2021
An essay on Icelandic Unitarianism that I prepared for Icelandic Roots in response to the frequently heard question among Icelanders doing genealogy, "Why Unitarians?" The National Church of Iceland is a Lutheran body, and as recently as 30 years ago, more than 90 percent of the population belonged to it, although its share of population has since fallen to 62 percent. Still, when people think of Icelanders and religion, they think Lutheran. So, many are surprised to discover that a significant number of Icelandic immigrants to North America adopted Unitarianism as their faith, and they naturally ask, how did that happen? While Unitarian sentiment can be traced within the Church of Iceland itself as far back as 1800, perhaps even earlier, it wasn’t until Icelanders immigrated to North America that it found institutional expression. Conflicts surrounding the organization of the Evangelical Icelandic Lutheran Synod on this continent paved the way for the Icelandic Cultural Society in North Dakota in 1888 and the first Icelandic Unitarian congregation in Winnipeg three years later. By 1921, about 15 percent of the Icelandic community in Canada had become Unitarian, where two-fifths of the country’s Unitarians were of Icelandic origin, and pockets of Icelanders in the U.S. joined them. At their peak, Icelanders were the largest ethnic group in the American Unitarian Association and Unitarians were the second-largest religious community among the Icelanders.
During the last two decades of the 19th century and well into the 20th, there was an extensive Unitarian mission to the Nordic immigrant communities in Canada and the United States. At least 61 Nordic congregations and preaching stations were organized.
