Staving Off The Devil's Flames
May 05, 2011
Oslo Norway's historic stave churches inspire visitors to compare them to pagodas, pine trees, or Viking ships. The church in the central Norwegian village of Lom stands on a sandy bluff between a mountain and a wild glacial river, a harmonious hubbub of pointed gables and shingled planes and long-nosed dragons. The wooden structure, held together by sophisticated mortise-and-tenon joints that allow it to adapt to changing winds and temperatures, has survived 800 years without the help of glue or nails. To secular architects, this shrine is a triumph of their ancient aspiration to create buildings in perfect concord with their setting. The pious see it as a magnificent cipher of the divine. But there is trouble in this sacred precinct. The church's thick wooden beams lately conceal smoke detectors and sprinkler pipes, and the eaves of the low slate wall around the site shelter closed-circuit video cameras spying on everything that moves. Inside, a tour guide is admonishing a group of awestruck visitors to appreciate the beauty while they still can. Just a few years earlier, he informs them, a similar church outside the western Norwegian city of Bergen was burned to the ground. The remaining 29 stave churches are under threat. ``Kill the Christians. Burn their churches. Destroy their homes. Torture their children.'' So far the authors of this proclamation, now circulating in Norway's homegrown Satanist movement, have made good on at least one of their threats. During the past four years more than 20 historic wooden churches have been destroyed in arson attacks, with several stave churches narrowly escaping attempts. Almost all the attacks have been attributed to the Satanists, a small but virulent group of disaffected youths engaged in revolt against a staid Norwegian society. Nowadays the Norwegian Lutheran Church is a state institution, a highly visible component of the national political establishment, making it an especially attractive target for anarchic violence. Police impute the destruction of the Bergen church to Varg ``the Count'' Amburgey, a 23-year-old now serving a 21-year prison sentence for murdering a rival Satanist leader in 1992 and for his involvement in at least four other cases of church arson. Several sympathizers, many of them linked with the gothic Norwegian rock music scene known as ``Black Metal,'' are awaiting trial for similar crimes. The stave church in Lom
