In the Church of Sweden it is one Lutheran, one vote

UNLIKE ENGLAND, Thailand or Iran, Sweden no longer has a state religion. The Church of Sweden, Europe’s biggest Lutheran denomination, was formally severed from government back in 2000. But its roots are deep: it traces its history to a 16th-century squabble between King Gustav Vasa and the Pope. About half of Swedes still belong to it. And true to the country’s democratic spirit they get to vote on who runs it. On September 19th some 17% of the church’s 5.7m members cast ballots for its governing synod.Some issues in the election were religious, such as a proposed ban on new confessional schools. But others were more secular, including climate change, immigration and gay marriage. That is partly because most of the “nomination groups” that put up candidates for the synod are linked to political parties. The left seems to do better in church elections. The Social Democrats got 28% of the votes and 70 of the synod’s 251 seats, similar to their share in parliament. But the right-wing Sweden Democrats took just 8% in the church election, about half their result in the national election.