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akademiskacademic quarterkvarterReligion in Scandinavian Crime FictionKim Toft Hansenprovide sufficient solutions to these difficult questions, modernitybecomes self-constrained. Being self-constrained, modernity thentransgresses back into religious and spiritual thinking. Though, itis, nevertheless, still religion in an appropriate reflexive distanceapplied by modernity. This renewed interest in spirituality combinedwith reflexive criticism has been called post-secularism (Sigurdson,2009). A post-secular society is a society that blends an awarenessof questions of spirituality with an inclination towards reflexivecritique. The prefix post- alone signifies that a transgression of thesecular has been going on. Post-secularism has, as well, come torealize that religion has far from been removed from the publicsphere, which is why this philosophical trend shows an interestin reflexive spirituality rather that institutionalized religion orhard secularism. Even Jürgen Habermas has – by way of a critiqueof the post-secular – underlined that secular citizens may“learn something from religious contributions”, though he is stillmaintaining the stanza of a political secularization of society (Habermas,2006, p. 10). Allegedly, Habermas himself coined the termpost-secular society (Habermas, 2001).In other words, what I locate in Schanz’ philosophy signifies thesame middle course as found in contemporary crime fiction suchas especially The Protectors and the novels by Nesser and Kazinski.This means that if crime fiction is, at first, connected to modernity,and modernity, secondly, becomes self-constrained, the genre mustas well open up towards religion and spirituality. But as we haveseen in my examples from Scandinavian crime fiction, the genredoes not alone apply an apologetic and dogmatic religiosity – itoften places itself somewhere in the middle of a parameter betweensubversive critique and affirmative spirituality. The examplesof subversive critique of religion from Tomas Lagerman Lundmeand Stieg Larsson are alone more in line with this type ofmodern reason. In many ways, the new mode of post-secular spiritualityis, however, reflected in an obvious and precise way in particularlyNesser’s novels about Barbarotti’s negotiations with God:God is not just a customary fact – spirituality is there to be discussed,but it is as well very present in especially The Protectorsand Kazinski’s The Last Good Man.With these analyses and this socio-philosophical background itseems suitable to discuss this genre development as post-secularVolume03 242