Separation of church and state?

Our second son was born in Nuuk three weeks ago. At the hospital, I was given a document stating his social security number and date and place of birth. So I went to the council office to register his name – to convert him from a purely numbered to a named human.

“Has he been christened?” asked the woman at the council office.

“No,” I said.

“Well, you have to take him to the church to be christened.”

“But we aren’t going to christen him at the church here,” I replied.

“Well, you have to,” she responded.

Some discussion ensued. Although we intend to christen him – but not in Nuuk – surely not everyone wants to christen their children? After another council employee was brought into the discussion, it was established that we wouldn’t need to christen him in Nuuk, but I still had to go to the church to apply for a name certificate.

Now I was a little nervous. Would the church approve the name we had chosen? It’s not like it was X Æ A-12m, but it wasn’t a standard Greenlandic or Danish name and I wasn’t particularly happy about approval of our son’s name being at the whim of the local minister. I knew another new mother whose chosen name for her daughter – Mouni – was not approved by the minister in her home town in Greenland. She was forced to bestow it as a second name (used in practise as her given name) and choose a more conventional first name. And I was reminded of my Danish teacher years ago back in Copenhagen, where they use the same system, whose given name – Rune, an old Norse name – is no longer accepted by the church as a woman’s name, as it was some decades ago. The fact that the church has this responsibility in Denmark seems odd given that despite Denmark having a state religion, it has a strongly irreligious population. While almost 75% of the population are members of the Lutheran church, which they become when they are christened, and thus pay church tax, less than 2.5% of those members regularly attend church services. That is a very low attendance. By contrast, church membership and attendance is much higher in Greenland.

I wheeled my sleeping son in his pram up the hill to the white church towering over the town centre. In a small office, I was greeted by the minister, a short, smiling woman, who addressed my request for a name certificate in a down-to-earth and friendly manner. She took copies of our passports and marriage certificate and carefully documented our chosen name, checking the spelling. And while I was organising documents for her, she gave our son a cuddle and walked him around the room. I left with his certificate in Danish and Greenlandic with our chosen name. I need not have been concerned. There may be no separation of church and state in the Danish realm, but being a foreigner, I suspect, probably made it slightly easier to jump through this first bureaucratic hoop with the chosen name for our son intact.