All About Lutherans in 1500 Words
For entwined reasons I discuss in a separate preamble—one of which is that the religious culture of Minneapolis was part of its “secret sauce” in resisting ICE—I extracted the sections that touch on Lutherans from my book, Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States. I republish them here with a few framing comments.
Excerpting this way is not an ideal showcase for these paragraphs, since in the book they evoke surrounding sections that are missing here. For example, I wrote more about ethnic immigrant religion in sections with Catholic and Jewish examples, and more about core Lutheran/Calvinist ideas in a section on Puritans. Maybe you should read the whole book! But, as my preamble explains, if you do that, it is quite possible that the Lutheran parts would get lost in the shuffle, unless you live in the darker parts of this map.
Anyway, this is what I’ve got today, and perhaps it is better than nothing. I won’t say more since that’s what my preamble was for. What follows has more information, in a tighter package, than you’ll hear about Lutherans in many US religion overviews--so let's shoehorn it into my "1000 words or less" series although it slightly overshoots. Knowing more about Lutherans could matter in various ways, including that if you care about Midwestern swing voters or why Minneapolis mobilized against ICE, it might help you.
Placing Lutherans in a (Very) Big Picture
These first excerpts from the book place Lutherans amid big structural divides in North American religion during the colonial era. We pick up the thread near the end of a section on four “key players”: Native Americans, Catholics, enslaved Africans, and Protestants. Of course, many Native Americans and African Americans eventually became Catholic or Protestant, but not quickly or easily. Meanwhile lets map Lutherans within a big picture on the Protestant front.
Since Protestants lack the unified structure that allows Catholic diversity to flourish as movements and niches within an overarching church, and since Protestants encouraged believers to interpret the Bible for themselves, Protestantism splintered into hundreds of denominations. We can sort out its key families—Anglicans, its Lutheran-Calvinist mainstream, and the Radical Reformation—based on how sharply they broke with Catholicism and shifted authority toward the grassroots. Anglicanism, or the Church of England, made the smallest changes. It began when King Henry VIII declared the independence of the English church from the pope, but otherwise changed little of the worship, theology, or authority structure based on bishops. One result was that later stages of the British Reformation proceeded as a revolt against Anglican bishops in addition to Catholic ones. Anglicans came to the Americas as an arm of the British government; after the American Revolution they reorganized as the Episcopal Church.
Lutherans, named after the monk Martin Luther who sparked the German Reformation, stressed the teaching of salvation through grace alone. Lutherans became dominant in Germany and Scandinavia; they came to the Americas with immigrants from these places. Calvinists, named after the Genevan minister John Calvin, shared Luther’s key ideas but put more stress on God’s sovereign power and made more radical changes to Catholic liturgies. Calvinists led the efforts to radicalize the English Reformation and thrived in many parts of northern Europe; they came to the Americas as English Puritans, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and German and Dutch Reformed Churches.
While Lutherans and Calvinists made peace with Protestant rulers and organized state churches, Radical Reformers saw such arrangements as too compromised. They favored selective (or sectarian) churches gathering serious disciples distinct from mainstream society. These groups are called Anabaptists because they considered Catholic baptisms invalid and re-baptized their converts. Persecution forced them to the margins of society in separatist communities, often pacifist, which came to the Americas as Mennonites, Amish, and similar groups.
The main concerns of Luther and Calvin were theological rather than political. They felt that Catholics obscured essential teachings about God’s grace and sovereignty by relying on priests, saints, and sacraments as intermediaries between individuals and God. No human works could bring sinners closer to God, since (as Calvin put it) human nature is “totally depraved.” However, shifts in theology had political implications. Ever since Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, European governments and clergy had been deeply entwined. There was no sharp distinction between tithes and taxes. Bishops were part of the aristocracy—which meant that questioning bishops was also rebellion against the aristocracy—and elites feared that chaos would result if all members of their societies were not subject to the same religious-political laws. Thus the Reformation was also about political shifts and alliances. Protestant-Catholic conflict was linked to the long-term rise of modern nation states and the middle classes; both gained power at the expense of feudal aristocracies who spoke for a unified Christendom. Largely due to such considerations, the Reformation sparked a series of wars.
Moreover, the Reformation and the conquest of the Americas began around the same time. Luther published his manifesto called “The Ninety-five Theses” in the same year (1517) that Cortez began his campaign against the Aztecs. In both Catholic and Protestant countries a key rationale for conquest was the goal of expanding the reach of Christianity; debates about what forms of slavery were justifiable were argued using evidence from the Bible and canon law. Religious wars in Europe translated into wars for empire in the Americas.
Situating Lutherans Amid U.S. "Evangelicals"
Now we situate the “evangelicalism” of Lutherans (se the bold parts below) amid US revivalist movements somewhat like Pietism in Northern Europe. Lutheran pietists were not big players in the US at large but were very important amid those dark spots on the above map. Notice before we move ahead that US “evangelicals” as a movement did not coalesce as a major force until 250 years after Luther and 150 years after the Puritans arrived, although of course they grew out of earlier developments. Against the background of long-running Puritan and Anglican establishments, their power rose alongside two other emergent movements: “Deists who stressed harmonizing religion and Enlightenment reason, and a set of religious innovators (such as Mormons and many more) who stretched the boundaries of Christianity or moved beyond them.” Here we're zeroing in on the evangelical part of this trio and looking for Lutherans there.
Evangelicals gained their following by recruiting the unchurched on a large scale—church membership had doubled to 25% by 1860—and creating schisms and spin-offs from established churches. Beginning with two waves of revivalism in the years around 1740 and the early 1800s—the First and Second Great Awakenings—revivalism became a permanent fixture on the landscape; evangelicals soon won a place alongside Episcopalians and Puritans in the religious establishment. Evangelicals appealed to working people, and this translated into a sort of counter-cultural rebellion as dissenters refused to defer to authority in expected ways. Their structures of institutional power were bottom-up as opposed to top-down; the contrast between Anglicans and Baptists was especially striking. More than Puritans they stressed the free exercise of human will and the importance of emotion. Many of them repudiated a Calvinist theology [that is, about human “depravity” and/or what Luther called “the bondage of the will”] by exhorting people to make a conscious choice to be saved and by stressing good works. Preachers raised emotions to a fever pitch in camp meetings that mingled ecstatic forms of African American religion and white evangelical styles. Even when evangelical worship was less raucous, it tugged at the emotions through sentimental music and preaching that instilled the fear of hell. All this was focused toward the trademark goal of evangelicalism: leading sinners to make a personal decision to accept Jesus as savior, also known as being born again.
Although revivalists emerged from a full spectrum of Protestantism—Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists—Methodists and Baptists made the greatest gains. Methodism began as an offshoot of Anglicanism; it was a renewal movement that sought a more profound piety and more effective outreach to working people. Eventually it broke away to become a separate denomination….Schisms somewhat like the one between Anglicans and Methodists were common. Presbyterians split between conservatives and a revivalist “New Light” faction. Lutheran Pietists battled Lutherans who maintained a stress on liturgies and historic confessions. People broke from Congregationalism to start Baptist churches. Wherever evangelicals perceived elite clergy becoming complacent, intellectualized, or corrupted by establishment status, schisms followed.
Situating Lutherans in the Liberal Protestant Establishment
Finally, here is a section placing Lutherans amid the so-called Seven Sisters of the Protestant Establishment—often called a “liberal” or “ecumenical” establishment by the 20th century. We pick up after I discuss Methodists and Presbyterians—alongside Lutherans the three largest sisters—and before I check back with the now-smaller sisters that once were state churches: Puritans (called “Congregationalists” for a time and later merged into the United Church of Christ) and Episcopalians. Rounding out the seven are Northern Baptists (“American” not “Southern” since the Civil War) and Disciples of Christ.
Next in line was Lutheranism, the tradition of most Scandinavians and many Germans. Lutherans were nearly as prone to schism as Baptists, with organizational divides reflecting dozens of differences based on ethnicity (Swedes vs. Norwegians vs. Germans vs. others), doctrine (more vs. less pietistic), region (East vs. Midwest), and time of immigration (earlier and more assimilated versus vs. later and more “ethnic”). However, Lutherans were coalescing into a three-party system by the first half of the century. One cluster included most Norwegians and was more Midwestern. Another included most Swedes and was stronger in eastern cities; it was somewhat less pietistic and its leaders were better connected in establishment circles. Germans were important in both branches.
As the 20th century opened, Lutherans were the least visible of the seven groups in the establishment, despite the efforts of some of their leaders. In many places, especially the rural Midwest, Lutheran churches were more like Catholic parishes catering to ethnic enclaves than like downtown Presbyterian churches. Although Lutherans (along with Reformed immigrants from Holland and Germany) faced less resistance to cultural acceptance than any other group of non-Anglo immigrants, such resistance was not trivial for impoverished rural people whose first language was not English. Like Catholics, Lutheran immigrants often built their communities around churches. By mid-century most Lutherans were entering the urban middle class or were reasonably prosperous farmers, and scholars mapped most Lutherans except the Missouri Synod in the Protestant mainstream. They played an increasingly significant role, due in part to a demographic weight that is now larger than Presbyterians.
