Mitt kors - En stötesten för kyrkan? En diskursanalys av initiativet Mitt kors.

Abstract

Father Jaques Hamel was murdered on July 26, 2016, while he was celebrating the morning mass in his small church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in northern France. Hamel was killed by two young men pledging allegiance to the Islamic State. It was a time of growing numbers of reports of political Islamic terror acts on European soil. This time the victim was a priest, brutally murdered while he was conducting the most central ceremony of Christianity. The situation for Christians around the world was getting worse day by day. To recognize not only the murder of Jaques Hamel, but to shed light on the situation for millions of Christians around the globe, Annika Borg, Johanna Andersson, and Helena Edlund started a Facebook group named Mitt kors (My Cross). A Facebook group where people could post images of their personal crucifixes and crosses of all kinds. Crosses that meant something deeper than just any neck wear or ornament on the wall for the person posting his or her cross in the group. Some of them also added a few lines about what their cross or the cross in general meant to them. The reaction from the Church of Sweden to My Cross was far from what many members of the church expected. Annika, Johanna, and Helena soon found themselves in a media storm on collision course with some of the highest authorities within the Church of Sweden. My hypothesis being investigated in this work is that normative patterns of power in the discourse concerning the event My Cross itself and connected fields such as dialogue with other religions and politics can explain why the initiative led to so strong reactions. By applying the method of discourse analysis, the aim is to uncover such normative and structural patterns to understand if that can explain the chain of events that unfolded in the back water of My Cross in the summer of 2016.