Who Cares About Lutherans?
A curious thing about being rooted in Minnesota, as I am, and having taught on US religion, is that I notice—more than most—how often Lutherans get squeezed out of a big picture when pundits map the US religious landscape.
In some ways, perhaps, I am like a Minnesotan unsatisfied when my state is barely mentioned in histories of US music, coming in far behind New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. We have Prince and Bob Dylan, how marginal can that be? Also, I have a pet peeve about the scant attention that scholars of labor and working-class history give to Farmer-Labor politics in the upper Midwest, compared to the forests they chop down to document the paradigmatic left in New York.
Maybe this is like the challenge that would arise if we attempted a concise survey of “sports in America.” Clearly we would have to address football, baseball, and basketball. And shouldn’t we make a longer list, moving at least through golf, boxing, and tennis before stopping somewhere amid pickleball, dog sledding, and beer pong? But if so, how much time will be left just for basketball? That includes men and women, college and pro, youth teams, and playground. We can’t fail to namecheck GOATs like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and and Lebron James. And we can’t skip how Magic’s highly racialized Lakers and Bird’s highly racialized Celtics just happened to fight down to the last minute of so many NBA finals, somehow entangled with dubious refereeing and the NBA's business model.
By the time we finish trimming and prioritizing, will the Minnesota Lynx (one of the best women’s teams) or the men’s basketball Gophers get their five minutes of fame? Or will they be sidelined, even forgotten? Is Minnesota in the orbit of Magic or Bird? (Hm, maybe Magic since the name “Lakers” references Minneapolis? Or is it Bird for whiteness?) If neither, it’s too complicated and who really cares? Also, Minnesotans would riot if we covered the basketball Gophers but not the hockey Gophers.
Lutherans are prone to get squeezed this way in big picture treatments of US religion, and one might barely notice. They are barely visible in big coastal cities. Historically they are paradigmatic neither for a WASP establishment nor immigrant ethnic parishes. They call themselves “evangelical” and Luther was a Protestant GOAT, yet most Lutherans are aligned with a liberal establishment alongside groups like Presbyterians. Their liturgies are closer to Catholics than Baptists. Amid the binaries that scholars and pundits use for shorthand—evangelicals vs. liberals, religious vs. “nones,” Catholics vs. Protestants, white supremacists vs. anti-racists, Christian supremacists vs. Jews/Muslims/Buddhists/etc.—they don’t stand out sharply even if we can shoehorn them in. So when students become impatient with endless lists of white denominations and demand flashier-but-tiny groups to discuss such as serpent-handlers, Ghost Dancers, or UFO cults, the pressure builds to say “never mind Lutherans, let’s just lump them with the dog sledders.” Unless you are from Minneapolis.
When I was dealing with my tight word counts for Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States I inherited this problem, and today I revisited it for an idiosyncratic reason I will quickly note. I’m preparing to lead a discussion about a 19th century Dane named N.F.S. Grundtvig. This guy matters a great deal to certain Lutheran compatriots in a Wisconsin town, near Minneapolis, where I spend my summers. Also Kierkegaard criticized him which matters to a few scholars. But most Lutherans who aren't Danish—a huge majority of them—have never even heard of him.
Set him aside. The point at hand is that for our session, I want to place this guy's immigrant followers in a big picture of US religion—and do so concisely. Where do they fit within nesting dolls?: kinds of Danish Lutherans, kinds of Lutherans period, Protestants, all Midwestern religions, and so on. What developments in the US during his lifetime—Jefferson’s Deism, Thoreau’s environmentalism, revivalism, Manifest Destiny—are reference points for grasping what he accomplished with Danes? The sources I’ve found are not great for clarifying this—not least because, as we have noted, surveys often punt on Lutherans.
In this context, I extracted the sections on Lutherans from my book. Reading these few paragraphs alone, without the contexts I built around them, is far from ideal. Still they might be useful in two ways.
In the immediate, highly delimited, use case, they give context for our Grundtvig session, since many sources start much further in the weeds. Compare this to Minnesotans who want to explore how Clem Haskins—later the Gophers basketball coach—began as a sort of Jackie Robinson of Kentucky basketball. One wants more context! But now we’re talking about people passionate about Danish churches in Wisconsin instead of college basketball in Minnesota.
For wider use cases—for those who don’t care about Grundtvig or the Gophers, but do care about Lutherans for other reasons—these excerpts may also be worth posting. Why not do that since I already worked on it? There could be many “other reasons,” and I encourage you to fill in the blank. I’ll start: Prince and Bob Dylan both went to summer camp near my community formed by Scandinavian Lutheran immigrants. Maybe if you are big fans you would be interested in that. Maybe your taste as a fan is more toward Prairie Home Companion with its Minnesota-centric music and Lutheranish homilies. Maybe your cousin is dating a crazy Wisconsin Synod Lutheran and you want to know what that implies.
There is another reason I will underline, although I won't get deeply into it now since it deserves a separate post. If you care about how religion relates to voters in upper Midwestern swing states, you must care about Lutherans—especially although not solely in Wisconsin—even if you don’t realize it yet. Lutherans, alongside Catholics, are a decisive swing demographic. It is not too much to say they could be ground zero for deciding the balance of power in the 2026 midterms and 2028 elections.
Relatedly, if you care about why Minneapolis became a forefront of resistance to ICE, take note: The Lutheran-inflected civic culture of the city, plus the history of Lutheran refugee resettlement, were non-trivial parts of the secret sauce. (Here again let's pair them with Catholics, partly to humor big-picture pundits too impatient to notice them; in Minnesota these two demographic slices are on par). My point is not to put most Lutherans on the front lines fighting ICE—about half of them vote Republican, leading back to those swing elections—but to think about how their sense of the common good is part of the overall recipe.
By extension, if we pull on these hanging strings, we will unravel quite a bit of pundit wisdom about “Christian Nationalism”—although let’s bracket this all-too-imprecise phrase and say “about how middle-of-the-road Christianity's sense of the common good relates to hardcore Christian Trumpism.”
These last two connections are too much to unpack now. But meanwhile I can post my excerpts—starting up fresh at this new URL—for whatever they are worth.
