Trump’s Greenland Obsession Overlooks A Spiritual Iceberg: Inside The Religious Revival Near The Arctic
NUUK, Greeland — A week doesn’t go by without President Donald Trump talking about “needing” to acquire Greenland.
As reporters rush to cover this mysterious territory, much has been said the island’s politics and melting ice — but nothing about the island’s eclectic religious mix of Lutherans, Pentecostals, Baptists, Baha’is and Catholics.
Following Donald Trump Jr’s example (he recently toured the island), journalists could begin with the statue of Hans Egede, the country’s “apostle to Greenland” — credited with bringing the Lutheranism to the native Inuit in 1721. It overlooks downtown Nuuk and is impossible to miss.
Next to it is the historic wooden red Church of Our Saviour, the Lutheran cathedral that I — during a weeklong visit in September 2021 — could never find open. Nor was the other Lutheran church in town that I dropped by on a bitterly cold Sunday morning, so I turned around and began to wander about downtown Nuuk. I ended up on Ilivinnguaq Street, where I found a blue and white building filled with about 60 Inuit worshippers, led by a band and a team waving colored flags.
This was Inuunerup Nutaap Oqaluffia/Nuuk, the largest branch of the INO, a Pentecostal denomination with 14 outreaches around Greenland, which is a territory of Denmark. According to British religious historian Rebecca Jane Morgan’s recent essay, fresh ways of worship, evangelism and the efforts of few diehard missionaries from the Nordic countries led to the Pentecostal movement becoming what she terms “the single most successful new religious phenomenon in Greenland.”
This particular service was definitely full, and entirely in Greenlandic, so I had to wait until afterwards to snag a Danish man who spoke English.
He was John Østergaard Nielsen, a legend in the history of Greenlandic Pentecostalism and the former pastor of the church for nearly two decades before turning leadership over to a younger man under whom the church unfortunately split. Nielsen was in town to help reconcile opposing sides.
“You’ll find more people here than in the Lutheran Church,” he said.
It should be noted, however, that a series on the Lutheran Church of Greenland by the World Council of Churches in 2019 insists the opposite: That churches are full, but there is a shortage of clergy and trained musicians.
Although most of the population is Lutheran, other Greenlanders told me they only attend church for weddings, funerals and confirmations, which left the door wide open for other claims. Pentecostal churches are widespread; the island’s first Baptist congregation is alive and kicking 300 miles to the north in Ilulissat and whiffs of the island’s shamanic past linger in out-of-the-way Qeqertarsuaq, a village on the vast Disko Island off Greenland’s west-central coast.
Non-Lutheran faiths were only allowed in Greenland as of 1953, when a new Danish constitution dissolved Greenland’s colonial status, abolishing the Lutheran Church’s religious monopoly.
Photos by Julia Duin
The first form of Christianity in Greenland was Catholicism, imported by the Vikings around the year 1000 AD from nearby Iceland. For 400 years, the Catholic Church sent clergy to the island until the Vikings left in the 1400s.
Egede’s journey to Greenland 300 years later was to look for descendants of those Vikings. First landing on July 3, 1721, on a small island, he baptized some Inuit, then moved to a more sheltered spot inland, which he called Godthåb, since renamed Nuuk.
When Egede’s wife died of smallpox 14 years later, he returned to Europe, leaving his two sons to continue his work. When 2021 arrived, the country was in an anti-colonial mood and mixed about Egede’s legacy. It was decided not to celebrate the 300th anniversary of his arrival but rather the 300th anniversary of Nuuk’s founding in 2028.
One belief system Lutheranism displaced was shamanism, which uses rituals or trance states to communicate with the dead or spiritual beings. Some Inuit continued to practice it, but Ole Jørgen Hammeken, a Greenlandic explorer and actor I met on the boat to Qeqertarsuaq, told me the last genuine shaman he knew may have died in the 1990s. Training was a 15-20-year slog and mentors were few and its solitary nature with dark spiritual encounters did not draw many adherents.
Qeqertarsuaq once hosted a “shamanic university,” for the Angakkut, the shamans of the Arctic. They were reputed to fly above and under the sea, pass through solid landforms like rocks and ice and see beyond the horizon. I did not get to see the legendary Angakkussarfik, the actual place on the island where the shamans trained, as it’s not shown to tourists.
Across the bay from Qeqertarsuaq was Ilulissat, Greenland’s tourism capital thanks to its famous glacier, the Sermeq Kujalleq, which features more icebergs than any glacier in the world. Close to the center of town is the 2,000-square-foot Ilulissani Baptistit Oqaluffiat at 14 Nuisariannguaq St. Instead of the red carpets and white pews of the Lutheran sanctuary up the street, the Ilulissat Baptist Church with its neat rows of plum-colored stacking chairs looked more like an American conference room.
The one difference was — via the windows — were the icebergs in the distance.
The pastor, Chris Shull, 46, and his wife, Carole, 49, from Elkton, Maryland, have raised their five children there since they arrived in 2007. Over the years, they developed prison and children’s ministries and slowly gained peoples’ trust. One of their biggest challenges are suicides, a scourge of Arctic societies.
“It breaks your heart,” Chris Shull said. “We’ve known quite a few people who commit suicide. A lot is because of the alcohol. With the young people, their boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them, and to escape their problems, they commit suicide. That’s why we work with the children.”
When I asked what their solution was, “It’s just talking to them and trying to encourage them and saying life is important and God loves them,” he replied. “With some adults, I can tell where their thoughts are going, and I say not to go there. Sadly, there are people I have tried to help that I didn’t know were considering suicide and then they committed it.”
A younger couple, also from the United States, is training under them to plant a second church elsewhere in Greenland. The Shulls seem to feel competition from the Lutherans is minimal; “only a handful” of people attend one of two Lutheran congregations, they report, other than on special occasions.
Morgan has found a lively group of Baha’is in Greenland, which she wrote up in a post on Medium. Should the island convert to that faith, Baha’i leader Abdu’l-Bahá prophesied: “All the ices of that continent will be melted, and its frigid climate will be changed into a temperate climate… that country and continent will become a divine garden and a lordly orchard.”
Why is Greeland so attractive to Trump? Golf courses. Greenland only has one nine-holer near the Nuuk airport. There is another in the northern hamlet of Uummannaq, but it’s covered in snow and surrounded by icebergs and glaciers. And once the president sees the polar bear tracks on the fairways, even he may turn to prayer.
Julia Duin is a Seattle writer and author of seven books. Her fourth book, “Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing” (2008), lists singles as one of the top unchurched demographics in contemporary religion.