FL Mauri Kinnunen tutki niitä erityispiirteitä, joita lestadiolaisessa herätysliikkeessä ilmeni sen toimiessa itäisen ja läntisen kulttuurin rajalla Karjalassa.
The purpose of this study is to seek special features in the Laestadian conviction when it functioned on the boundary of Eastern and Western cultures in Karelia. The contacts of Laestadianism in Karelia began in the end of the 1860s and beginning of 1870s. The mediators of the movement were mid-Osthrobothnian building workers and fisher-men. The rapid spreading era dates back to the 1880s, when the movement had reached almost all of the parishes. The seashore parishes of the Karelian Isthmus and the Liperi-Eno area in North Karelia were the most affected areas. In towns the Laestadian communities first consisted of builders and craftsmen. The close-knit community offered a secure network in towns to re-place the sense of security offered by family and village folk in the countryside. Laestadianism was a medium of protest of town craftsmen and rural area poor farmers and landless folk towards the clergy and officials. The town of St. Petersburg played an important role in the spread of
the movement. A reasonably large Laestadian community was born there as of the beginning of the 1870s. Many became acquainted with the St. Petersburg Laestadians on trips of work and merchandise and joined the movement.The Lutheran clergymen of the 1880s considered the movement a threat to the unity of the Church and it was held as a sectarian movement. The encounter of the movement with the Orthodox Church was surprisingly painless. The majority of Orthodox Laestadians dwelt in North Karelia. The movement was tried by a scattering beginning in the mid-1890s. The reasons lay in the rapid spread of the movement into various cultural and economical surroundings. Additio-nally, there arose schism about the strategies used when encountering challenges, which arose from the societal transitions. Of the newly established groups, it was a movement called the New Awakened that was first the most popular group. Another splitting called Narvaism, how-ever, tried this movement beginning in the year 1899. This group served as a route for the arri-val of the Pentecostal movement in the 1910s. Since 1902 some Firstborn communities were for-med mainly in Vyborg and Lappeenranta. The third group, the Conservatives, was first weaker then the New Awakened-movement. Very few Laestadians were elected into influential posts in society in the 19th century. Instead, members of the movement actively protected the rights of craftsmen in towns by working as influential officials in craftsmen associations. Similarly, there were few Laestadians in important instances of the Church in the 19th century. But, since the 1920s Laestadians were in important posts in many congregations. Politically Laestadians were conservative. Gradually, the Agrarian Party was broadly popular.In the 1930s Laestadianism was the largest and most broadly spread conviction within the Evangelic Lutheran Church in Karelia. The Conservative movement was the most popular group, gaining grounds from the weakening New Awakened-group. The Firstborn-movement also grew then. The three Laestadian group members were about one per cent of the whole studied population.
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