ABSTRACT
The following letter from the Bishop of Iceland intending to deal with a clergy problem opens Halldór Laxness’ book on the Icelandic church, Under the Glacier (Laxness, 1990). 1 The cast of the letter provides a fruitful entry-point into religion in the country. While Chapter 2 explored the meaning of hypocrisy in sport and religious institutions within the United States, Chapter 3 will add geographic expanse to the generality of the argument about hypocrisy within the institutions of religion and sport, and associated implications for trust in societies, by examining instances and contexts of hypocrisy in Iceland and France.
The bishop handed me a dog-eared scrap of paper which could barely have come through the post; it looked as if it had been carried from farm to farm and shuffled from pocket to pocket through many districts.
Nonetheless, the letter evinced a mental attitude, if you could call it that, which has more to it than meets the eye and which expresses the logic of the place where it belongs, but has little validity elsewhere, perhaps. The bishop rattled on while I ran my eyes over the letter:
And then he’s said to have allowed anglers and foreigners to knock up some monstrosity of a building practically on top of the church—tell him from me to have it pulled down at once! Moreover, he must get around to divorcing his wife. I’ve heard he’s been married for more than thirty years, since long before I became bishop, and hasn’t got round to divorcing his wife yet, even though it’s a known fact that she has never shared bed nor board with him. Instead, he seems to have got mixed up with a woman they call Pestle-Thora, of all things! Is Christianity being tampered with or what? (Laxness, 1990: 12).
