Aarhus priest challenges hateful comments with feminist theology

Mia Schmidt-Mikkelsen, a 37-year-old youth priest in Aarhus, is calling for queer and feminist theology to play a larger role in Denmark’s Folkekirken after repeatedly facing hostile comments from young men on social media, DR reports.

Known as the “TikTok priest”, Schmidt-Mikkelsen uses videos featuring priestly “fit checks” and reminders about women in the Bible to reach a new generation of young Christians. She says criticism follows almost every video she posts.

One recent comment quoted a passage saying that women should not teach or have authority over men, but remain silent. Another said: “Twelve disciples, twelve men, no women.”

Schmidt-Mikkelsen believes confirmation classes would be a good place to begin teaching young people that the Bible can be read in different ways.

“If we keep pretending that this does not exist and continue teaching as before, we may fail,” she says.

She says she can cope with the comments herself, but worries about how a young woman with no knowledge of Christianity might react if she saw people arguing that women should remain silent and that this was a Christian position.

Putting Mary at the centre

Schmidt-Mikkelsen says she sees the same tendency more broadly on social media, where so-called Christfluencers preach Christian and conservative values to thousands of followers. She points to the nuclear family as an example.

“It is not as if Jesus can be used as a very good example of the nuclear family. He spent most of his time with 12 other men, so in that sense he was himself a rule-breaker,” she says.

She also points to historical convents where, she says, nuns lived in lesbian relationships.

“If you are a young queer person who reads that the nuclear family is the only right way to live, I would dream of priests in the Folkekirken having taught that young person beforehand that many priests have questioned that reading of the Bible for many years,” she says.

Queer and feminist theology involves reading the Bible critically towards established norms and paying attention to people who are not represented by the traditional narrative, she says.

She uses the nativity play as an example, asking what might happen if the Virgin Mary were made the main character. What is it like to be a woman who must give birth, she asks, while having nowhere to stay?

She says this perspective may help people discover ways of being human that have been overlooked or labelled strange, even though they are also present in biblical stories.

Schmidt-Mikkelsen acknowledges that focusing on women’s perspectives is also a selective reading of the Bible. Her aim, she says, is not to claim that queer theology is the only correct approach, but to make Christianity and theology broader by offering different ways to interpret them.

Different interpretations

Schmidt-Mikkelsen is a priest at UngK, a youth church in Aarhus, where traditional services have been replaced by yoga classes, drag bingo and lino printing, alongside conversations about faith and God in new ways. She also hosts the Folkekirken’s official TikTok account.

She believes Danish priests have a duty to explain that the Bible can be interpreted in different ways, regardless of their personal views.

Anders Damtoft Kaufmann, who teaches priests and develops confirmation teaching materials at the Folkekirken’s Education and Knowledge Centre, does not use the word “duty”.

“It is expected that the priest teaches about what takes place in the church and about the Christian faith. When it comes to understanding Christianity, each priest has considerable freedom of interpretation,” he says.

He says it is not possible to dictate what priests must teach young people. The Folkekirken has no pope or central church council to establish a single theological interpretation, he says. It is therefore up to each priest what the young people learn.