The conversion of Norway from paganism to Medieval Roman Catholicism (c. 1030) and the transition five hundred years later to Reformation Lutheranism obviously entailed programs of re-education without recourse to programs of mass literacy production as a means to these changing ends. Even after the Reformation (1536), the major modes of religous expression among the laity were participation in life-cycle and annual ritual occasions and the rote memorization of doctrinal statements. We may imagine, however, that as the Lutheran sermon and congregational hymn singing displaced the Catholic sacramental emphasis in Sunday services, the intellectual and ideological dimensions of popular religiosity were thereby somewhat expanded and deepened.

A crucial break in this system occurred with the first sustained effort to promote mass literacy as a concomitant to the reintroduction of Confirmation as a life-cycle ritual occasion under Pietist auspices in 1736. The very partial ascendency of this clerical party over their Orthodox predecessors and opponents in state church administration and at the University of Copenhagen, where all pastors were trained for the parishes of Denmark–Norway, was facilitated by the Pietist proclivities of Christian VI. Later in the century, Rationalists began to displace Pietists at these centers of power and training, aided in their turn by the religious preference and/or indifference of elite figures within the administrative structure of Danish absolutism. Thus, a third distinguishable theological orientation appeared at the clerical level in the religious order.