5 Kati Niemelä and Henrik Reintoft Christensen 1 RELIGION IN NEWSPAPERS IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES IN 1988–2008 Abstract This article examines the coverage of religion in Nordic newspapers during 1988, 1998 and 2008. Through quantitative analyses of 5,000 articles in 14 newspapers, we examine the differ- ences between the five Nordic countries and changes from 1988 to 2008. The results show that the coverage of the Lutheran majority churches in newspapers is generally declining, especially in Sweden. This is the case also during major Christian holidays. Newspapers present religion differently, in the sense that regional papers present a more traditional view of religion and reli- gion is least covered in the tabloid press. There are differences between the five Nordic coun- tries. The newspaper media seems to serve both as a secularising force in society, contesting the role of the majority churches – especially in Sweden and Denmark – and as support for a greater visibility of religion in the public sphere. Keywords: religion, newspapers, Nordic countries, NOREL, mediatisation, secularisation Introduction For decades, secularisation theory has dominated the research and debate related to religious change. While it was first seen as an accepted explanatory model it has sub- sequently been seen as a model to be largely rejected (see Berger 2002; Wilson 1982; Swatos and Olson 2000). The current transformation in the religious landscape has been increasingly described in other terms such as «de-secularisation» (Berger 2002) and «deprivatisation» (Casanova 1994). Recently, there have been many claims that religion has become more visible, and perhaps more significant, in the public sphere (Casanova 1994; Habermas 2006, 2008; Taylor 2007). The debate about a «new visi- bility» of religion in the public life of Western European society has been a pervasive theme in the sociology of religion. A key issue concerns whether this debate is a result of empirically supported changes in the presence of religion or primarily a turn in the scholarly discourse (Casanova 1994; Davie 2007). Research on religious change in Europe has repeatedly given at least partial support to the secularisation theory (see e.g. Bruce 2011; Crocket and Voas 2006; Bertelsmann Nordic Journal of Religion and Society (2013), 26 (1): 5–24