 He worked hard to promote western Swedish Pietism, an outlook that strongly resembled Neo-Lutheranism.Mostly it was a piety that took Scripture seriously, though not in a fundamentalist, literalist sense, and that centered Christian life on sacraments and prayer.Giertz's combination of pietist pastoral care with High Church Lutheran theology, which can also be noticed in his novels, gained for him a wide readership and made his novels as well as non-fiction books about Christian faith popular in Scandinavia.