The Burning Qur’an and the Benign Bible

In this article, we examine the way the (Christian) Bible and the Qur’an are represented in Swedish press in the wake of the Qur’an burnings that took place in Sweden 2020–23. Through critical discourse analysis we investigate debate articles and identify prominent discourses that stress the Bible as benign and the Qur’an as malign for Swedish society. The Bible is framed as harmonizing with Swedish values, including freedom of speech, while the Qur’an is framed as non-compatible with a modern, secular society. The result is then related to biblical reception studies on various notions of Bibles in the public sphere and the theory of the politicization of religion as applied in sociology of religion. Ultimately, we argue that an increasing politicization of the Bible risks reinforcing problematic notions of the religious Other, through framing sacred scriptures as contrasting symbols for groups of people, even in the world’s most secularized country.