The Missionary Era · 1796-1842 · Norway
The Haugean Awakening
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About This Movement
In 1796 a Norwegian farmer's son named Hans Nielsen Hauge had a religious experience while working in his father's field, and set out on foot to tell people about it. Which was against the law, because Norway's Conventicle Act reserved religious meetings to the parish clergy. He wrote thirty-three books and tracts, walked thousands of miles, and founded mills, paper works and trading businesses to support the network of "friends" that grew around him; the state answered by arresting him in 1804 and keeping him in prison and under prosecution for most of the following decade. The movement long outlasted the man: after his death in 1824 the friends' societies went on meeting and trading, and in 1842 the Conventicle Act itself was repealed.
Sources
- Hauge's own corpus: his 33 books and tracts (from Betragtning over Verdens Daarlighed, 1796), his letters to the friends' network, and his Testament to his Friends (1821) (primary) — Hauge was a lay peasant preacher who ran his own itinerant press. Most editions are in Norwegian, with only limited material translated into English.
- The prosecution record: the 1804-14 case under the Conventicle Act - interrogation records, commission files, Hauge's prison writings (primary) — This is hostile legal material: the founder documented at length by the state church that prosecuted and jailed him.
- The friends' societies' records: haugianere society minutes, correspondence and business networks, lay preachers' memoirs; Hauge's authorization of women itinerant speakers in his letters (primary) — These records show the movement's own societies continuing to meet, correspond, and run businesses well beyond Hauge's own lifetime - evidence the movement outgrew its founder. Hauge's letters also document his authorization of women as itinerant speakers.
- Andreas Aarflot, Hans Nielsen Hauge: His Life and Message (Augsburg, 1979), with Joseph Shaw, Pulpit Under the Sky (1955) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8 (chapter assignment hedged): nearest Bebbington's voluntary-religion and Thompson's popular-religion chapters (reference) — This reference volume has no dedicated Scandinavian or Nordic chapter; these are the nearest topical fits.