Frederik Samuelsen

Frederik Ferdinand Samuelsen was a member of the city council from 1900 to 1917, and the Danish Rigsdag (the national legislature) from 1906 to 1918 in Aarhus, Denmark. He became the first Latter-day Saint elected to a European parliament.

He was born in 1865 in Copenhagen. He trained as a locksmith and machinist. After moving to Aarhus, he married Marie Marianne Florentine Jensen. They had five children together.

He and his wife joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1892.

In Parliament, Samuelsen focused on the needs of Aarhus and the working class, but he was also able to advocate for the rights of Latter-day Saints and other religious minorities. In 1910, for example, he successfully petitioned Jacob Appel, the minister of culture, for protections on minority faiths’ newly won right to conduct their own graveside services. The next year, a Danish silent film called A Victim of the Mormons drew huge audiences. Many people, treating the fictional film as realistic, called for action against the Church. Samuelsen soon read a newspaper report that Appel was in talks with Norway and Sweden to expel Latter-day Saint missionaries from all of Scandinavia.

Despite the political risk, Samuelsen decided to speak up. After explaining he was a Mormon, Samuelsen called on Appel not to reduce “the already very limited freedom of religion of the non-recognized religious societies.” His speech was printed in newspapers throughout the country. Though some attacked Samuelsen, his argument for religious tolerance won the day: Appel disavowed any interest in the plan and missionaries were able to remain in Denmark.[1]

In 1918, “a disagreement between Samuelsen and the local party organization drew the attention of a party newspaper. The paper’s editor confronted Samuelsen and demanded he sign a statement vowing to resign. Samuelsen did sign, later writing that he thought of his father—who had died 43 years earlier on that very day, when Samuelsen was nine years old. ‘It was as if he came and requested of me that now I should go to the temple of the Lord and perform the ordinances for which he has waited on me for so many years,’ Samuelsen wrote. He finished his term and emigrated to Salt Lake City, where he and Marie diligently performed temple work for their ancestors, serving actively in the Church and in Salt Lake’s Danish community for the rest of their lives.”[2]

He died in 1929.