According to the Estonian Lutheran clergy who participated in the 19th century Estonian national movement, Lutheranism formed an inseparable part of the Estonian identity. The Church, and religious life in general, were thus evaluated on the basis of criteria that derived from the nation and language, as well as from wider national interests. The Church and religious life were nationalised, and in the 19th century it became normal to call Orthodox Russian believers, Roman Catholic Polish believers, Lutherans and members of the Moravian Brethren who were close to them German believers. Since the 19th century, the Estonian settlers in Russia have called the Lutheran faith the 'Estonian faith'.

The parallel life of Estonians and Germans functioned from the start in the context of Christianity and the Church. Despite their relatively long co-existence, the Christian Church could not avoid becoming colonialist towards Estonians, evident in the fact that there were no Estonian clergy. Emphasising the significance of the mother tongue, the Reformation created a kind of 'paper wall' between Estonians and Germans. Even during the Lutheran centuries, the Estonian and German Churches remained separated until the Second World War, when Germans left Estonia.

A sense of being harassed and persecuted and having no right to decide for themselves strengthened the Estonians' motivation to build up their own world. Due to various censuses and discriminatory laws, Estonians could not perceive themselves as a nation, not even in church, as the Lutheran Church, with its colonial mentality, did not support the national aspirations of Estonians. The colonial character of the Lutheran Church therefore drew a clear line between the nations, between 'us' and 'them'.

Lutheran theologians of Estonian origin turned Jesus into an 'Estophoros' - the foundation and bearer of Estonian mentality. The colonialist Lutheran Church, with its notion of superiority, could not, indeed, represent Estonian national interests; thus the only thing to offer instead of the Church was Christianity. The close connections between Christianity and nationalism were noted by more conservative politicians before Estonia regained independence in the early 1990s, when Lutheran nationalism flared. This happened in 1939 and 1940, when the Baltic Germans left Estonia. This kind of foundation, at least in the opinion of Jakob Hurt, one of the leading figures of the 19th century Estonian national movement and a clergyman, not only constituted abstract Christianity, but also the popular Lutheran Church, or a dialectic synthesis of nationalism and Lutheranism. Hurt's cultural-nationalist Lutheranism wanted the Church to be in the service of the people, the bearer of nationality, something it had never been before. Hurt himself worked in the Estonian congregation in St Petersburg. He did not approve of splitting the Church into Estonian, Latvian and German national Churches. His views would have involved large-scale Church reform, which was not possible in the 19th century. Instead, Hurt hoped that the Germans would change their view of Estonian national aspirations. In this way, the Estonian popular Church, with its German pastors, could have become national. By the end of his life, Hurt had abandoned this hope.

Despite all its faults, for the Estonian pastors the Lutheran Church nevertheless constituted the foundation of the life of the Estonian people. Love for their homeland could only exist if people loved the Lutheran Church as well. For the Estonian clergy, Christianity signified its evangelical or Lutheran form, and not its Orthodox or Catholic form. Although southern Estonians maintained lively and direct contacts with Catholic Christianity until the first quarter of the 17th century, Lutheran Christianity never regarded the Catholic centuries as totally their own. They saw themselves as the restorers of the Gospel.

Estonians of the 19th and 20th centuries, who were mostly born as members of the Lutheran Church, were unable to distinguish what was Lutheran from what was Estonian or national; they relied on historical or social circumstances. Opposing themselves to the Orthodox Russian state, Estonians back then (and this is still true) chose German Lutheranism. They therefore found themselves in a situation best described as follows: the history of the Estonian identity has focused on finding a synthesis between oppression and education, and both arrived with the Germans and their Church. Until the early 20th century, Lutheranism had a colonial nature here. In order to get rid of the Herrenkirche mentality, the Estonian Johann Köler, an imperial court artist, even suggested the idea of an Estonian-language evangelical Church, without reference to Lutheranism, that would accept Orthodox pneumatology (but not its festivals and rites). However, the mentality showed its first signs of retreating only in the 1920s.

August Bulmerincq, professor of international law at Tartu University, had already advised his fellow Baltic Germans in 1865 to involve Estonians and Latvians in the government, which of course did not happen. In churches, however, very few German pastors dared voice similar ideas. At the Church Convent in 1869, the Livonian Landtag (diet) decided to grant the parish representatives the right to have a say in local matters. The Livonian Superintendent-General, Friedrich August W. Hollmann (in office 1889-1900), regarded the Estonians' wish to elect their own pastors as purely a matter of power (eine Machtfrage). Abolishing the advowson rights would have afforded the Estonians more extensive opportunities to participate and make decisions on the local parish level. However, Estonians began moving in that direction only at the First Tartu Church Congress on 31 May 1917, which decided to reorganise the existing colonial Lutheran Church into a free national Church.

Considering the advowson rights from a purely national point of view, they suffered from a major drawback. The Baltic German landowners in rural congregations lacked any backing of German origin in the population or, in other words, their social-demographic basis was extremely narrow. In 1910, in all congregations in the Estonian area of the Livonian province (southern Estonia and northern Latvia), only 3% (approximately 15 700) and in the Estonian province (today's northern Estonia) about 4% (17 000) were in fact Germans. Therefore, in the second half of the 19th century, when Estonians began demanding the right to choose their pastors, it inevitably led to bitter rows in the Church. In previous centuries, Estonians had expressed dissatisfaction mainly with the poor standard of the Estonian language of their foreign pastors. The nationality of the pastors was not really an issue. That problem emerged in the second half of the 19th century, culminating after 1905 when the church became involved in politics. The Estonians increasingly wanted pastors of their own nationality, and their own national Church.

We should bear in mind that Baltic German Lutheranism did not, in fact, mean a national Church for the Baltic Germans. A large number of Baltic Germans only formally belonged to the Lutheran Herrenkirche. In the second half of the 19th century, it quite often happened that a German-language service had to be cancelled because of a lack of a congregation, and the reasons for not attending a German service were not always national. In 1904, Postimees wrote that the German advowson right holders had not been up to their tasks for a long time, failing to look after the church buildings or going to church in order to set an example to the peasantry. By the time the Livonian Superintendent-General Gustav Oehrn was in office (1901-1906), the German congregations had nearly lost all their congregational self-awareness. Oehrn was amazed that even the German church wardens and patrons had lost interest in religious life. He asked them to participate in services merely to set an example.

However, during the national awakening of the 19th century, Estonians did not take to the Lutheran form of Christianity quite so strongly as to never consider abandoning it. Due to religious conversion, about 65 680 Estonians had joined the Orthodox Church by the late 1840s. Another wave of conversion to the Orthodox Church reached the Estonian province in the 1880s. Mass-scale conversion to the Orthodox Church did not mean that the converted abandoned Christianity; instead it showed that the position of the Lutheran Church among Estonians was weaker than previously believed. But was this step undertaken because people understood something of the Orthodox faith? Hardly. Even the governor of the Estonian province, Slavophil Prince Sergei Shahhovskoy, did not quite believe that. For the Estonian people, the Orthodox Church was their only hope of getting some land. Those who converted still included a large number of peasants who already had some land, who obviously had other reasons, such as conflicts with Lutheran pastors and manor lords and a wish to belong to the same Church as the emperor and take part in a service that captivated all the senses.

In Hurt's opinion, Lutheran Protestantism was a firm part of the Estonian identity. The result of his opinion, alas, was the fact that the Estonian Orthodox believers were distanced from everything Estonian and they were seen as ethnological curiosities. Estonian students belonging to the Orthodox Church were even forbidden to join the Estonian Students' Society. In the late 19th century, Lutheran cultural nationalism thus became a serious problem for the Estonians who belonged to the Orthodox Church. The Lutheran pastors, on the other hand, hoped that it was merely a matter of time before Orthodox Estonians would return to the Lutheran Church, perhaps when the political situation changed. When this chance finally arrived in 1905, the number of people who reconverted was not as big as expected. Quite the opposite – by early 1910 there were at least 83 Estonian Orthodox priests working in Estonia and Livonia, whereas the number of Estonian Lutheran pastors was a mere 46.

Orthodox believers were mostly seen as a political danger to Estonian nationalism, and the Orthodox Church was seen as an attempt to turn Estonians into Russians. In fact, this did not pose a cultural threat to the Estonian identity, as German Lutheranism was culturally stronger and more elitist than the Orthodox Church. The cultural emphasis was based on the Estonians' aspirations towards elitism, because for Estonians the Orthodox faith had connotations of stupidity, ignorance and superstition, and still has even today. For example, Lutheranism regarded the Orthodox perception and way of life of the Setu people as slow-witted and reactionary. This kind of opposition continued even later, among those who escaped to the West during World War II and lived in exile. "The [Lutheran] Church has laid the foundations for the morals of our nation, for its respect for work and truth, education and school. In this we greatly differ from the big Russian nation "...whose piety mostly means ecstatic enjoyment," preached the archbishop in exile of the Estonian Lutheran Church, Johannes Oskar Lauri, to his congregation in 1967.

Due to active Russification from the late 19th century to 1905, Orthodoxy also acquired the stigma of oppression. The Estonian Orthodox believers remained in the field of power of the Baltic Germans, Russian nationalism and Lutheran cultural nationalism. They became alien in their own country, and a suspicious element as far as Estonian ideals were concerned. Political demagogy aimed at Estonian Orthodox believers received its first strong set-back due to the fact that some of the major players at the birth of the Estonian state were well-known Orthodox believers: Konstantin Päts, Konstantin Konik and Jaan Poska. Despite that, the phrase 'Orthodox Estonian' was quite problematic even during the Republic of Estonia. This policy culminated in 1928 with an attempt of 'national therapy' to demolish the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which spoiled the Western Christian (Lutheran) city silhouette of Tallinn.

In the early days of the Republic of Estonia (1922), Orthodox believers made up about 2% of the entire population (Estonian Orthodox 56%) and this percentage survived unchanged until the 1940s. After the harsh Soviet era, Estonians constituted 11% of the Orthodox population of the country. It is still difficult for Estonians to abandon their political fear of the Orthodox Church and the related political demagogy, especially now when, besides the Orthodox Church ruled by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Estonia also has another Orthodox Church that takes its orders from Moscow and is far bigger in number. Their joint number of members exceeds that of the Estonian Lutheran Church, or is more or less equal to it - depending on which statistics are accepted. Political fears and demagogy last forcefully emerged in 2003, when Estonia joined the European Union. The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church and several politicians expressed their expectations of being united with the 'Christian cultural space and traditions' as opposed to the Russian field of influence. This indicated that they did not regard the Orthodox faith as Christian cultural space.

In 1993, Jaan Kiivit Jun, Archbishop of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, read a paper in Otepää at the Finnish-Hungarian-Estonian theological conference "Lutheran identity today and tomorrow", where he said: "It can be claimed that for an Estonian to be a Christian (before WW II) almost always meant being a Lutheran. There was no need to contemplate what exactly the Lutheran faith stood for, compared with other Christian confessions." Estonians are, culturally, overwhelmingly Lutheran, their mentality is Lutheran, and the German influence, with its sceptical, critical individualism, is still going strong. In that sense, Estonians can be regarded as cultural Lutherans, and not confessional Lutherans.

Riho Saard(1961) is a docent at Helsinki and Joensuu universities, and Extraordinary Professor of the Institute of Theology of the EELC.