Pål Mathiesen

Pål Mathiesen is a Christian writer on theological issues whose interview complicates the book’s account of Norwegian Black Metal and Satanism. Rather than treating hostility to Christianity as self-explanatory proof of religious conviction or dismissing it as mere provocation, he asks what that hostility means within a culture still shaped by Christianity. His perspective holds together criticism of destructive acts, attention to local consequences, and insistence that those who commit wrongs remain people who should be heard and offered the possibility of forgiveness.

Identity and Place in the Book

Mathiesen is introduced as a writer on theological issues for Morgenbladet and a professed Christian. The book presents him after its conversation with Simen Midgaard, setting his interview alongside arguments about Black Metal’s relationship to Satanism and the Church. The framing identifies him as something of an outsider to the scene, but not as a voice content with the Church’s most reflexive response. The book notes that official reactions to arsons and attacks were largely expressions of outrage at the perceived rise of Satanism among young people; Mathiesen’s contribution takes a more searching route, considering how Christianity itself figures in that opposition.

That position gives his interview a double focus. He discusses what church burnings do to particular congregations, and he also considers the emotional and cultural relationship between Norwegian youth, Christianity, and Satanism. He does not present these observations as a single explanation for the whole scene. Instead, he distinguishes local effects from national religious change, and deliberate ideological commitment from opportunism.

Church Burnings and Their Local Effects

Mathiesen describes a marked increase in community interest around congregations affected by church burnings, especially where damaged churches were rebuilt. People who might consider having their children baptized, despite not attending church, became newly involved. He characterizes the result as a kind of local Christianization: the congregation and its surrounding community were affected, even though he does not believe Norwegian Satanism made more people Christian across the country as a whole.

The distinction matters to his account of consequence. The fires did not, in his view, produce a general national conversion; their effects were concentrated in the communities that experienced the burning and rebuilding of churches. The renewed interest could bring people nearer to church life without demonstrating a corresponding increase in personal religious practice throughout Norway. Mathiesen thus separates visible community response from a broader claim about what Norwegians believe.

He makes a similar distinction when describing Norway as a Christian country. For him, Christianity has a deep cultural presence, while belief in religious rituals is comparatively weak. A sense of connection to a shared culture can persist without strong churchgoing or devotional life. This distinction helps explain how a country may remain culturally Christian while many young people have little active relationship with Christian institutions or practice.

Opposition as a Relationship to Christianity

Mathiesen regards young people’s hatred of Christianity as emotional rather than reasoned. He relates this interpretation to his own adolescence: at fifteen or sixteen, he hated Christianity despite not having been raised with Sunday school, regular church attendance, Bible reading, or prayer. Looking back, he interprets that opposition as having been, in a sense, Christian: the intensity of rejection showed that the religion mattered to him and that he had a relationship with it.

He extends the possibility cautiously to Satanists. Hostility to God or the Church, he suggests, may sometimes reveal an underlying attachment to Christianity or to Jesus rather than complete indifference. In this reading, hatred can indicate concern and emotional investment; opposition does not necessarily mean that a person stands wholly outside the tradition being attacked. Mathiesen presents this as an interpretive possibility, not as a definitive account of every Satanist or a claim that destructive actions are secretly Christian.

His point also sharpens the book’s distinction between cultural Christianity and formal religious practice. Even where young people have little ordinary connection to the Church, a forceful rejection of it may still take shape in relation to the Christian culture around them. Mathiesen therefore treats the conflict not only as an encounter between separate camps, but also as a charged relationship in which the rejected faith remains a central point of reference.

The Character of Norwegian Satanism

Mathiesen distinguishes what he calls an opportunistic side of Satanism from a more serious one. In his account, some participants may adopt the label opportunistically, while leaders can hold deliberate views about religion. He argues that Norwegian Satanism has been especially intense and judgmental, unlike the life-enjoying emphasis he associates with LaVeyan Satanism. At its most severe, he sees it as an aesthetic commitment to destroying the Church and Christianity, which its adherents regard as weak and undeserving of continued existence.

He also proposes that this severity carries the conditions of its own decline. A life organized around such a despotic form of opposition is difficult to sustain for long, he argues, while the Christian tradition itself is moving away from the harsher forms that have helped define the conflict. His claim is not that all forms of Satanism are identical, but that the particularly intense Norwegian version may fade because of the demands its outlook places on those who try to live by it.

At its most basic, Mathiesen defines Satanism as protest against civilization, whether understood as Greek or Christian civilization. He links that protest to resistance against moral rules governing conduct, including prohibitions on killing and expectations of kindness toward people who differ from oneself. He describes its appeal as a turn toward animal existence and nature, away from a life governed by spirit and morality. This is his account of the ideology, not an endorsement of its rejection of moral restraint. He also doubts that such a stance can be constructive: as he sees it, a position organized against society and centered on itself does not supply a shared basis for collective life.

Judgment, Condemnation, and Mercy

Mathiesen accepts that Satanists commit sinful acts, but resists treating the people who commit them as irredeemable. He criticizes a culture in which being labeled a Satanist or a Nazi can become a permanent sentence, leaving no room for a second chance. In his Christian understanding, wrongdoing should be condemned without erasing the wrongdoer’s humanity or foreclosing forgiveness.

He applies that criticism not only to public condemnation but also to the conduct of Satanists themselves, whom he says can condemn others and deny them another chance. For Mathiesen, mercy is not an excuse for the acts under discussion. It is a moral response that makes forgiveness possible and requires the Church to see accused or stigmatized people as human beings worth listening to, rather than freezing them out. This insistence gives his interview its defining tension: he takes the destructive conflict seriously while refusing to let condemnation become the final word.