Have I talked about dancing on this blog yet? I probably have. But if so, it was long enough ago that I’ve forgotten about it.*

My earlier post about that appalling video from Jared at Thinklings got me thinking about the old dancing taboo. I suspect a number of us grew up with it, and those who didn’t wonder how such an odd rule came to be.

My own childhood church was in no doubt about the sinfulness of dancing. (This is kind of unusual for Lutherans, by the way. Lutherans in general tend to be party animals, a lot like Italians, only less outgoing. Just substitute beer for wine. The dancing is different, but the spirit is the same.)

But I come from the Scandinavian Lutheran pietists, who objected to dancing on two grounds:

1) It used up valuable (and scarce) leisure time that could be better spent studying Scripture or praying in a meeting, and

2) It involved spending that wasted time in rowdy company, in situations where bad things often happened. And by bad things, I don’t only mean sex, but also fights and serious accidents.

I recall a story I read while doing family history research. This story wasn’t about any of my ancestors, but about a neighbor in the area where they lived. This was in western Norway, sometime in the late 18th Century, if I remember correctly.

This particular fellow got into a fight at a party. Knives got pulled, and he stabbed the other fellow. The victim wasn’t seriously hurt, but he went home and had to go to bed with his wound. The next day the stabber went to visit the stabbee and apologized, and they were reconciled.

Then the wound mortified, and the guy died. The assailant, a young farmer with a wife and child, was taken to prison in Bergen, tried and eventually beheaded.

Incidents like this were one of the main reasons for the old rule against dancing. Dancing happened at parties, and parties involved drinking (also a taboo), and drinking led to tragedies like that.

One of the triumphs of pietism was getting large numbers of peasants to adopt rules like that (and to force them down their neighbors’ throats, as they say). Because that turned peasants into simply poor people, and a new term, “the honest poor,” came into use. Talking of “the honest poor” before the pietist revolution probably would have sounded very strange to people who assumed that “gentlemen” (men born to the nobility) were virtuous, while “villains” (poor people who lived in small villages) were immoral.

Unfortunately these useful rules got so ingrained in pietist culture that the pietists stopped noticing that they were not biblical rules, originating from God, but cultural rules, originating in a particular social situation.

But it ought to be noted that the original intention was not to drive young people crazy.

That was just a collateral benefit.

*If you remember, don’t mention it to me. It’s not polite to remind an old man that he’s forgetful.