This is Keith, and this is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans.

Today's topic is.

Well, it's a continuation of our talk with Dr. Mark Granquist of Luther Seminary, professor of Christian history there at the seminary. We're going to talk about extending from where we left off with our last episode with him. This will cover from the 1800s to about 1930 in America and how those things led toward the ELCA. This time period that we're talking about had a large establishment of Lutheran churches around the country in the. In various parts of the country. We'll talk about not the south in particular, but. But certainly in the Midwest and Pennsylvania in particular, and in that Middle Atlantic region. So that leads to, you know, we're looking at the 1800s. And when did Saint Matthews open?

1889. Yeah, we started as a Sunday school branch off of another Lutheran congregation. Not all that far away, four big city blocks, which by today's standards seems ridiculous. But at the time, it made perfect sense because you were only going to establish a church far enough away for people to, you know, be conveniently able to travel to by horse, by cart, by foot. And so St. Matthew started as a Sunday school, actually branching off or an outreach ministry, really, of union, I think, operated in that vein for a number of years, maybe, maybe 20 years. And then they decided to, you know, they had enough momentum to establish it as its own congregation. So 1889 was the official formation of St. Matthew in York.

Well, so it actually goes back maybe to the 1860s then. Yeah, yeah.

Which really is like that massive period of expansion where there were, you know, in Pennsylvania anyway. And in central Pennsylvania, where York is. Yeah. There's Lutheran churches all over the place, and many of them started in this vein, sort of as, you know, they sort of springboarded from one to another as time went on. Yeah.

And I guess we should note that York has a very industrial base, you know, now a Harley Davidson manufacturing facility. And what, York dumbbells or barbells.

Yep, yep.

Going back, back along.

Corbell was there. Yeah, the Harley Davidson plant. And then York was the name of a. A big, big name in H Vac products in the, you know, turn of the century, 18, 1900s. So you're talking about, you know, big boilers and then eventually air conditioning units.

Sure.

A lot of that stuff was produced in York. And then York has a big history in World War II. In the same vein with. With plants being repurposed for war effort.

And I think International Harvester had a plant there, too, come to think. Of it. So.

Yeah, I think they did.

Yeah.

So that. And they were. They were big right there at the turn of the. The 20th century. So.

Yeah.

So as the population was growing then, these, these churches were. So, you know, by this point, we're talking about immigration already, you know, being firmly established, but populations still shifting and growing.

Sure.

What about Unity, which is a merger congregation?

Yeah, yeah. The synod took three congregations and put them together about 10 years ago. I think we had just moved to this area when that had happened, and I wasn't part of any of that, but. Yeah, but the congregations that were brought together and all the congregations really that are in this area, we call it downriver, the part south along the Detroit river from Detroit. I would say most of the ELCA congregations were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, probably to meet the need. We'll talk about in the next bit. But it's not just the churches. The suburbs themselves are products of the 50s, 60s, and as you get further out, the 70s, 80s, and then more like today. I'm starting to sound like a radio station here. Yeah. So we'll get into Unity's time in the next talk that we have with Dr. Grandquist. But I think coming from. I was an architecture tour guide at one point, and if you think about the architecture, Unity's architecture is very much a 60s sort of thing compared to Saint Matthews. It's like a ranch. And yours is more like a farmhouse or some stately, you know, sort of place with lots of stairs which has pluses and minuses.

Right. Yeah, it is definitely a very sort of colonial style looking. Looking facade. Yeah, yeah. And even there. That's interesting too, because, you know, the current nave was built in the. During the Great Depression. The congregation had outgrown their. Their worship space at that point, and so they had. We actually are situated about a block from where the congregation was founded, and as they were growing, they had bought some additional land and then started building on it once they had the money raised. Yeah. So a nave that seats about 600 people, constructed for somewhere in the ballpark of a million dollars in the 1930s, with the actual construction happening during the Depression itself. So they were really, really committed to making this happen, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, well, we are really excited.

To share this conversation with Dr. Grandquist with you. So here we go.

Back to talk with us about the history of the ELCA is Dr. Mark Granquist from Luther Seminary, professor of the history of Christianity up at Luther Seminary up in. I Forget, is it St. Paul St. Paul?

Yes.

Yeah, don't mix them up. I found that's a pretty hard line there. So yeah, we covered the Reformation up to sort of the immigration to the United States of people from the Lutheran areas. And we want to pick up here about that. The groups that came, we talked a little bit about how they organized into the United States, where they settled, why they settled in those places, and then the difficulties of those folks being Lutheran in a place where religion is voluntary. And so those groups, where did those groups, how did they spread out across the country? I know we've got like Finnish groups in say the Upper Peninsula, Michigan and Wisconsin. A lot more Swedes in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area and South Dakota, North Dakota. How does that happen from an immigration perspective?

Well, good question. Remember that the, the second, I mean the, the great, second great wave of immigration to the United states begins about 1830, 1840 and runs up through to the beginning of the First World War. All right. This is a period of time in which somewhere between 30 and 35 million Europeans come to the, in, to North America. And they come in waves. They come. There's a, There are push factors. In other words, there are factors that are pushing them out of their home countries. There are pull factors that, that are, are pulling them towards. Most of these immigrants are, are economic and immigrants they're coming for. And remember back for them that, that the most important thing was land.

And America has a lot of it.

America had. Well, yes, once we push the Native Americans out, but there, there, there just was this hunger and so they're, they're following the frontier because, because the, the land, you know, in central Pennsylvania, the land is all taken by 1800. But if they go out to Indiana or Michigan that, you know, there's the, the, the frontier keeps moving west. And so it depends on when you come and where the land is at that point in time. There, you know, by the 1840s, it's, it's Wisconsin and, and Iowa and, and Illinois. It's. Then it's the 1850s and 60s, it's up into Minnesota, it's into Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota event then eventually sort of run out of the good land. And then people have to decide what to do. They want to go to Montana or they want to go to Washington State. Some of them go to Texas. There, there are almost none of them going to the south because first the south is, they have to contend with either slave labor or low cost labor. And of course after the, after the Civil War, the South is an economic wreck. So they're not going to the south with the exception of Texas.

And you're not speaking of not Lutherans going to the South. You're talking about not immigrants.

Most immigrants.

Yeah, most of them, by and large, not journeying to the south at this point. Yeah.

And so the first wave in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s is heavily German starting in the 1850s. Then you start getting the Scandinavians coming over, and of course, people from Great Britain coming over. Starting in the 1870s, 1880s, you're starting to get the Southern Europeans and the Eastern Europeans. And of course, by that time, most of the land is gone, and they tend to go to the cities or the mining areas. That's how this Finns end up in the upper Midwest, in the mining regions in north, North Minnesota, northern Minnesota and northern Michigan, because they're going to where the mining operation.

Copper mines in particular. Copper and iron. Right.

Copper and iron. Right. So the settlements. And of course, then the one. One immigrant finds the, you know, a good place to settle and other people, and they send for other people and they come. And so the immigrants tend to clump. So it is a fascinating map, for example, of the state of Minnesota that shows the clumps of immigrants where they are. You know, so you got the Swedes here and the Finns there and the Norwegians here and the Danes and the Germans and the Bohemians and the Danes and the Dutch and the Irish and. And all sorts of people like that.

And so the. The churches begin to clump similarly, too. You've got all of these different Christian traditions that are coming from different parts of the world and that people are organizing around. And we mentioned in the last episode, you talked a little bit about the Pennsylvania Ministerium and how that was the first Lutheran body organized, you know, beyond the congregational level. You had this. First this group of pastors and then lay people that were choosing to align with one another for the sake of engaging in things that they couldn't do on their own. You mentioned some mission work, education of pastors, et cetera. You also, you happened to say in that episode that that model was borrowed from the Dutch Reformed tradition. And I'm curious if you could follow up on that just a little bit about, you know, where that tradition came from for the Dutch Reformed and why did the Lutherans use that one?

Well, the Reformed churches were less likely to do these state church things. Now there is a, you know, even in places like Scotland, for example, which becomes heavily Calvinist, the. The Church of Scotland is. Is organized on a Presbyterian Or a synodical line. First of all, their history, because they tend to less. Be less in places where. Where the government is going to sponsor them. And then also there's some theological stuff there. They're. They're thinking about the nature of what it means to be church. They're reacting against the bishops and other sorts of things like that. So it's a model. They get it. Americans get it from the Dutch reform, the German reform. They get it from the American Presbyterians. It's one of the three models, and it seems to work very well. Remember, Lutherans have no polity. Have no polity or church organization that is imposed upon them theologically. Lutherans are kind of pragmatic when it comes to church structures. They will adopt whatever works best in a given situation. So if in Sweden, the episcopate works for them, it works all right. But nobody says that the episcopate is what the nature of the church is.

Okay, so I take it then the Episcopal bottle is another. Is another of the three. What's the third one?

Congregational.

Okay.

You know, just absent. And there are Lutheran groups in the United States that organize on a congregational basis, both historically and recently. And again, there's nothing in the Lutheran Confessions that says you have to have this model or that model of church organization. People will argue that, but.

But, but it's how we've always done it. Isn't that good enough?

Well, right, but it's. It. It was. No, remember that the synodical model also parallels the rise of participatory democracy. In fact, some people will say that that's where it comes from. And so the reinforcement here is that the synodical polity or the Presbyterian polity mirrors the development of American democratic institutions. Right? Where you have everybody in a given body elects representatives, and they go to make decisions for you, and then you come back and then you abide by the decisions. And. And, you know, there's a lot of interplay here that just seemed to. It worked out best for the Lutherans that most of them decided that this sort of democratic church polity seemed best.

You reminded me of something our. I'm a licensed lay minister. So we had a class in our synod about church history. And one of the things that the instructor, he's a professor of history at University of Detroit Mercy. He said that the church tends to choose the government structure they're familiar with when they set up their organizational structure. And I wonder if that plays into it.

He said, I mean, think about the. You know, those countries that had a state church that had a king. The whole idea of somebody at the top, a king being. Then you might. You might pick up an episcopacy that might be. Seem to be the best model.

Yeah. And I think his point was, like the Congregationalists would have. They were trying to get away from that kingship and try to, you know, we're all responsible for ourselves, so therefore our church will be that way too.

Yeah.

So we talked about how the Lutherans or the immigrants of these eras were moving out to the edge, the edge of the frontier and that part of the existence of the frontiers, because people are being moved off of that land. So our. As we look at our responsibility as a. As a church, you know, we're now recognizing the native populations that were on our property, that our churches are built on. What is. Did those, did those groups, Were they passive in this? Were they. Were they pushing for removal of Native Americans from those spaces?

Were we.

We benefited from it, certainly, or those people did anyway. Were they passive or were they active in that?

They tended to be passive in it. I mean, most of the, the removals, the, the pushing of the Native Americans off their lands and into reservations, most of that happened before the, the immigrants got there. All right, now, did they benefit from it? Absolutely. Would they be afraid of Native Americans? Possibly. Like I said, they, they. It doesn't absolve them in the responsibility that the whole nation shares for this. You can't just say, you know, I didn't come until. I didn't come until my ancestors didn't come until 1880, so I'm not responsible for slavery, for example. I mean.

Right.

Okay. I mean, it's just. But they weren't active participants in it really.

And, and also with slavery, then, Exactly. Since, since our Lutheran churches avoided the south because land wasn't available, were Lutheran synods, were they outspoken on the issue of slavery leading up to the Civil War, or did they ever take a stand?

Most of them avoided it like the plague. I mean, you know, they, you know, it's. It's like much in politics, you know. You know, they had managed by 1820, 1830 or so, to develop not only synods, but they had a national organization called the General Synod. It had synods from. It was a synod of synods. It was the. It had synods from the Carolinas and Georgia and Virginia and Pennsylvania and Ohio and other kinds of things like that. You know, if, if you'd have started talking about slavery in the General Synod, you would have blown the whole thing apart. There were a few Senates Like I said, you know, oftentimes people would split off. There were several split synods that were split off specifically to be stronger voices for the abolition of slavery, especially in New York State. But most of the, you know, the southern synods, when the war came, the southern synods supported the Confederacy, no question about it. The northern synods supported the union mostly.

Because their kids were fighting.

Well, the northern synod started to be able to be more vocal about it because the southern synods weren't there anymore.

Oh, that would do it.

Yeah. It's easy to be more outspoken when you're surrounded only by more like minded.

Peoples or when the issue was forced upon you. Right now, a group like the Missouri Synod, for example, like that in a border state, that was particularly problematic for them because they were right, you know, they were right there in, in the middle of it and kind of thing like this. But the Scandinavians especially when they came over, they were, they were very strongly, the Scandinavian synods were very strongly anti slavery from the beginning, but they didn't have any church congregations in the south anyway, so.

So it's easy to take that stand.

Well, it was easier.

Easier, yeah. So speaking of things that get thrust upon folks, industrialization, you know, we, we reach this industrial age after the Civil War. After when? Well, actually a little before too, but the industrialization sort of bringing the populations into cities to do this. Eventually we'll get the great migration up to Detroit and the north for factory work. How does that affect the churches especially? You know, we're talking about folks that moved to the United States for land and now their kids are going in for factory jobs and leaving the farms.

Yeah. Remember that. You know, by 7, 1870s, 1880s, most of the good land was gone. All right, My, some of my ancestors arrived in Chicago in the 1880s, all right? They got on the train and went to where there was free land, which was central North Dakota. They lasted six months and got on the train and went back to Chicago and they stayed there ever since. The, you know, the, it wasn't just industrialization and the jobs and everything like this, but the increases in agricultural productivity that lead. You need less and less people to actually do the farming. And you've got all these kids and, and they're all headed to the cities. And, and so from 1860 to, to the First World War, you get this. I think some, I can't remember exactly, but I think sometime by the 18, by the 1920s, more people are now in cities than are in the rural areas. And of course that's very different kind of religion work now. Of course, there's still lots of immigrants speaking immigrant languages in those cities, but increasingly, especially after World War I, the, the churches are, are all converting to speaking English. And so you have to do, you have to do religion quite differently now. Oftentimes what a lot of these groups tried to do was to replicate small town Christianity in the big cities. I mean, that's, for example, you know, people, people are wild about this when I tell them that. But this is how the YMCA's got to start. YMCAs, YWCAs, those were supposed to be little havens of, of small town Protestant respectability in the middle of the big bad cities.

Wow.

Young Men's Christian association, they don't talk much about that anymore, do they? No, it was, the YMCAs were the leading, even one of the leading evangelical and evangelical in the sense of spreading the gospel around the world.

What denomination were they connected to or they were interdenomination.

There was no denomination whatsoever. So anyways, all I'm saying is that this idea is you sort of try to replicate that small town Lutheran ethos in a congregation.

Yeah.

One of the things in the part of the country that I'm in that we face quite a bit is that even just, you know, say where I'm at in the city of York, there are so many Lutheran churches. York is not a very big city. The city limits are. It's shaped kind of like a big plus sign. It's about five miles from east to west and about four and a half miles from north to south. And except for for one, the other three corners are all cut out. So it's sort of like a misshapen cross. And you know, inside that city there are, I'm not positive, but I think about eight ELCA Lutheran congregations today.

I wouldn't be surprised.

No, no. And, and the, the notion being, you know, what we were always told was that the congregations were planted, you know, along the, the route that it, you know, however, whatever was considered the, the longest that you were comfortable riding in your buggy to get to church.

Transportation.

Yeah, that's, that's how they were planted. But, but you know, today, you know, transportation being so different, that's, that's really shifted.

Yeah, exactly. There's a, there's a town just south and east of where I live here. I live just south of the Twin Cities and there's a little, a little town very, very Norwegian. I'd say there are probably 10 or it's a town of about 3,000. There are probably in the town and around the town, eight to ten different Norwegian Lutheran churches.

Yeah, yeah.

Sometimes you go to. Sometimes you go to these cities out in the. In the rural area, you know, small towns in the rural areas, and they'll have a Norwegian church on one corner and a Swedish church on the next quarter and a German church on the other quarter and, you know, a Danes or Finns or whatever, you know.

Right.

We got an email from a fellow in Iowa who told us about his congregation. It's two separate parishes that the country church decided to evangelize the town two miles away. And so they started a congregation in the town for those folks. Town of Maybe, I'm guessing, 800 people or something like that. And so there are these two congregations that are historically tied together, and so they are operating as one in a way now. But he was talking about that, and that seems like it fits the model.

It does, yeah.

Yeah.

So in addition to. We've got these shifting populations, are there other effects of industrialization on the church, or is it really once we start getting into more of the modern era that that church culture begins to tip and. I'm sorry, I may have asked that question really stupidly.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just trying to. No, no, it's a great question. I'm just trying to figure this here. Remember that now we're. I'm not talking about those colonial Lutherans who came and their descendants. They're using English by the 1820s. But in most of these Midwestern cities. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Omaha, Fargo, these different Lutheran groups are still using their immigrant language predominantly until the first World War, both in.

Church and in daily life.

Mainly in church.

Okay.

All right. It becomes. For. For a lot of them, it becomes a sort of a. Almost a quasi liturgical language. It's like the. Like the Catholics who used to use Latin right into the early 1960s. Right. My father.

If you. If, for example, you went to your church service on a Sunday morning, you would speak German or Swedish, and then you go to, say, the fellowship hall and have coffee and donuts afterwards, you would switch to English.

The old people would seek. Would speak the immigrant language, and the young people would speak English.

Gotcha. Okay.

And it was the. It was the. It was the generational push that. That really won the day in that. In the immigrant language transition. Remember, very early on, the immigrants are. Very early on, they learn enough English to get by. They have to. And when they have their kids educated. They wanted their kids educated in English. No question about that. They, they weren't stupid. They understood that to get a job and get ahead, the, the young people needed the years lose English. But remember that that religious language is very high concept language. And you don't. You, you know, you learn enough English to go to the store or to, you know, to deal with, you know what the daily things that you need to do it.

Yeah.

And so, and so there's this, there's this, there's this, there's this sort of tug. They know then the younger generations are demanding to worship in English. But the, the old people, they've got to maintain that, the language as long as they, they possibly can. And remember after World War I, they were fully expecting these, the immigration to boom back up again. Remember that the height of the, of that great immigration was in from 1900 to 1919 14. It peaked in 1910. 1914. And so in the cities, they still have these little immigrant populations. They're aware of the issues of the larger world around them, but it's not an immediate problem to them. They, they have problems and issues that they're dealing with of their own. So industrialization, urbanization, I mean, it concentrates people in, in cities, but it, it doesn't. Until they start really using the English and moving into the mainstream of American society, they're not, it's not going to affect them as much.

And to them, evangelism then is trying to get. Make sure their kids go to church when they leave the house and their neighbors that just moved from Slovakia or something.

Right? Exactly, exactly. I remember one pastor was telling me that he went out into the mission field, into the whole mission field in Oregon in the 1950s. And he said, the first thing I did is I got the phone book and I looked up every. Everybody's last name that looked to be German.

It reminds me of there's a Northern Exposure episode where they're trying to get the doctor he wants to say, wants to do the memorial rites for his, I think, for a rabbi. And they look through the phone books for all the Jewish sounding names in Alaska. Right. Trying to pay them to come and sit Kaddish for them. So, so yeah, it reminds me of that quite a bit.

And it worked all right. Lutheranism grew. By 1900, Lutheranism was the third largest Protestant group in the United States after the Methodists and the Baptists. And behind the Catholics, it was the Catholics than, than the Baptists and the Methodists. Then the Lutherans were more Lutherans. There were more Lutherans than Presbyterians. There are More Lutherans than Episcopalians. There were more Lutherans than, you know, some of these, many of these other groups. It worked.

But the Baptists. The Baptist and the Methodists were less ethnic, right?

Yeah.

They were more American.

Right. Well, there, there were, there was, there were all sorts of ethnic.

Yeah.

Ethnic divisions of both. But. Yeah, but yeah, mainly.

Mark, I'm curious if at this time you mentioned the shifting of population from country to city in these synods, which I understand are still somewhat loose in this part of history. Was there tension between the synods affiliated with sort of rural communities versus synods affiliated in more urban areas? Or did they just, you know, each have their own territory? Or were there synods that incorporated congregations from both kinds of setting?

Well, you would have, you would. Of course, there were like I talked about before, synods of synods or national church organizations. Right. And so there were several in the east coast. Missouri Synod was growing into that. The larger of the Scandinavian groups were, you know, were including congregations from around the country. So they would have both rural and urban kinds of things like that. I don't know that there was a lot of tension that way between rural and urban. They tended all to share the same values, the same, the same ethos. Now the, the congregations in the cities might be, you know, I don't know, they might be more affected by, by some of the things that are going on in American society, but not really. I mean.

Okay.

The divisions tended to be ethnic and theological.

Okay. So when you said that as, as people started moving into cities and being, being church in the city environment was different than being church in the, in the country, it wasn't to the point where those two folks weren't speaking the same language. Metaphorically. Not literally, no.

Literally, no.

Okay.

You will find what you will find in the urban areas. The urban areas will be the pioneers of say, what sometimes are known as English churches. Okay, so in the cities you would have a group, you know, say that there was a congregation in the city and then there was a group from that congregation that wanted to have an English speaking congregation. They'd split off and form an English congregation. Yep, I remember that was the major split.

Yeah. There was the first English Lutheran church in Columbus when Ben and I were there.

Right, yeah.

But would they consider themselves still equally Lutheran? Would they still maintain their presence in a synod? Yeah, you would have some English and some German speaking or.

Right.

Swedish or.

Right.

Yeah.

Remember, it was the, it was the speed of that transition after the first World War which really sort of caught everybody by surprise. That they, you know, there would. There. There was. There were some conflict. There was obviously, it was a. It was a very emotional issue, but. But it happened so quickly, and it was sort of a denominator, sort of a generational wave that all of a.

Sudden, when you said that the. In the colonial times that only about 20% of the population belonged to a church.

Right.

Where are we at with that in, you know, at the turn of the century?

About half. Okay, okay, okay, 50%. So there is a strong push towards being. Towards religiosity that peaks by about 1965 or so. And, and from 1965 to the end of the 20th century, it plateaus at about 2/3. About 2/3 of Americans belonged to the church.

Yeah. And I remember hearing somebody speak a couple of years ago. I can't recall the individual's name, but he said that, you know, you were mentioning in our last episode, the golden age that people were always trying to get back to in our part of the country. People talk about the golden age of being in the, you know, the kind of the 1950s and 60s, and they have this image that that's how the church was from, you know, the establishment of the United States of America.

No, no.

Until the end of World War II. And then it began to fall apart. But really, it's. That was, as you just said, that was the peak. That's what people were trying to get back to. But it wasn't always like that. Leading up to that point.

It was not always like that. People think that that back in. That the peak of American religiosity and by the. By means of religiosity of people going to church and having church membership and, you know, the kinds of things like that, that there's a steady growth of that kind of religiosity from about 15 to 20% in the colonial period of time to the late 1960s, when it peaks at about 65%. All right. And then it plateaus for a long time. Now we can talk about. There's. There's lots of caveats to that and everything else like that. But. But, yeah, I mean, the growth of organized Christianity is. Is steady from the colonial period of time through the late 1960s.

So then with the end of. Of the First World War and. And all the things that are happening with society, science is becoming a thing, and we're looking at the world a little differently. We get the introduction of modernity with things like, you know, I'll keep going back to working at Greenfield Village because, you know, I work at The Wright Brothers Home, where Milton Wright was a bishop in the United Brethren Church and led a schism there in York, Pennsylvania in 1889. And the, the, the introduction of this, these new modern ways of looking at the world that, you know, come from enlightenment and that. But, but we think of the search for the historical Jesus and the introduction of the historical critical method of looking at the Bible and then, and then the opposition to that. So we get the modernists and the fundamentalists and they come to a, they come to, to or almost come to blows, maybe. Probably did come to blows in some cases.

Yes, they did.

Most, I think of it as in the, maybe mid to late 1920s. That, that happens, right?

Yeah. It's affecting the old stock Protestant mainline churches, especially the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Northern Baptists the most.

Yeah. So it would seem like the Lutherans would get hit by this too.

No.

Why not?

They're aware of these things. They're certainly aware of these things, but that's not what they're fighting. They're fighting about confessional issues. They're fighting about the 16th century Lutheran confessions and, and how to understand them. They, they know what's going on and they're not stupid. They're. They know what's going on in the modern world, but it's not their universe.

All right, are they kind of denying.

They'Re neither fundamentalist or modernist?

So is it because there's a spectrum or is it because they're just removing themselves from the conversation?

Most Christians weren't either fundamentalist or modernist. Those were just fringes. Okay, all right. It takes a long time for a lot of that stuff to sort of gradually move into the, into the churches by the 60s and 70s. And I, I talk about the, Well, I talk about the, Tell my students about the, the unholy trinity. All right, okay. Darwin, Marx and Freud. Okay, the three, the three horsemen of the, of what you might call modernity.

Sure.

And these are not, I mean, these, the, the leaders of the, of the Lutheran churches know about these people. They're not dumb. But it's not what they're, it's not their world. It's not, they're not fighting about these things. The Lutherans are all talking about. Well, now that we, now that we all speak English, what do we do? You know, and so we get these three major waves of, of merger. But, and, and occasionally Lutherans will borrow language like inerrancy or infallibility, but they're not fundamentalists. They, they think that, they think that those Words and see, because. All right, when, when the Lutherans start speaking English, they've got to start doing theology in English, right? Which is tough because Lutheran theology hadn't really ever been done in English. And what words in English mean what you think? So they, Lutherans have a, have a. Lutherans have a concept, for example, of biblical authority. Well, how do you express the Lutheran concept of biblical authority in English? Some use language that they borrowed from the fundamentalists, but they don't mean the same thing. So it's not really until after World War II and when the Lutherans are really moving in the, in the 50s and 60s into the, the real mainstream of American life that these, that these issues of modernism and other sorts of things like this become really important in American Lutheran life.

And then all at once, it seems.

And then all at once, right.

Yeah. Huh. That is very interesting. Is there, is there a corollary to Europe? What did, what did the European Lutheran Church do? Was it dictated from on high? I mean, was it still a, a govern. Did the government choose the, the. Well, I guess they're thinking in German, so they don't need to deal with how Americans look at these things.

But they've gone through this earlier. I mean, see, remember, since most of the Lutheran clergy are trained in the universities, then in the Enlightenment, as the German universities are moving in ways they're not really modernist in the late 19th, 20th century, but they're moving in historical, critical, method and other sorts of things like that. So it's coming very differently. It's coming in theological education in the 1840s or 1860s or 1880s or something like that.

It's almost the reverse. Then in Europe you've got the theological educational academic circles are shifting ahead of, you know, the laity.

Oh yeah.

And the science and, and the modernism. In the US You've got the reverse. It's the, the modernism is, is going on and people are learning about science and Darwin and Freud and then the, and then the theological community almost has to play catch up to it.

Yeah, I, that might be a way of looking at it. Yeah.

If your name is Keith.

Well, yeah, I mean, what, what happens is in the, in the 1950s and 1960s, then a lot of American Lutheran, bright American Lutherans are going over to Germany and Scandinavia and getting doctorates there. And then they're start. And then they're starting to bring some of that stuff back or, or they're learning it and at places like Harvard or Yale or Union or other sorts of places like that in Chicago and Bringing it into theological education, then.

Okay, that makes sense.

So what would a layperson in Lutheran America think of something like the Scopes Monkey trial, where they're trying to put Darwin's theory of. They try to put evolution on trial. Right. What would an American Lutheran response to that be? Was it just silly?

I think, remember, the whole question is the question of God. Is God at work in the world? Does God cause things to happen? You know, evolution basically says, you know, it's random chance, there's no God, kind of thing like that. I'd say 99 out of 100 Lutherans would have completely rejected that idea that. That God was not involved in the world.

So they wouldn't have thought that God was involved in the evolutionary process.

Some might have, but it might take.

Some creativity to get there.

They might say, well, you know, there was this sort of line that evolution is God's way of doing things, which completely misunderstands evolution.

Right, right.

And probably God. Okay. And so that explains why Lutherans didn't schism when these other churches did.

It wasn't their issue.

Yeah. And that leaves the schism for our next talk that we'll do.

Oh, yes.

Which. That'll be the adventurous part of Lutheranism in America, right?

Yes, sir.

Right. Yeah, that. That combined pattern of combining synods and coming together at the same time as we start, then peeling apart, too.

Yeah.

A pattern that still continues today.

All right, absolutely.

Well, Mark, thank you again so much for taking the time to be with us.

Thank you very much for the good questions and for listening to me.

Yeah. This has been enlightening, and I think it'll be very helpful to folks trying to figure out, where do we exist in this historical timeline of Christianity here? All right. I look forward to our next talk.

So if you want to. I will say that if you want to learn more about this, I wrote the book.

All right. We'll have a link to that in our notes.

It's called Lutherans in America and New History. So you can pick that up wherever you pick up your fine theological reading.

Absolutely. Yeah. We'll definitely have links to that.

All right. Thank you very much.

All right. Thanks, Mark.

Well, that was really something. It's such a privilege to be able to Talk with with Dr. Mark Granquist from Luther Seminary about the history of our denomination, how we get to where we're at. It's amazing how much the influence of world events, immigration trends and things, even after they get to the United States, how that affects who we become as a denomination. And we'll have even more of that in our Next talk with Dr. Granquist.

Yeah, looking forward to that.

He mentions his book. We have links to those, to his book and other information connected to this episode in our episode notes. Our catechism questions for today, our last episode. Now, we didn't get any responses from our last episode yet. Send them in.

That means there's still time for you to reply.

That's right. But our most recent question was what do most Lutherans consider to be the greatest of God's gifts? We had answers of the created world. Coffee. Keith is really leaning hard on that one. The Holy Bible. And then we have the grace of God through the life, death and resurrection. It's scrolled off my page here of Jesus Christ, which is available to us by faith. And of course, that is the correct answer there. So, yeah, we've got a new catechism question. Amazing that we have another one.

Yes, indeed. We keep coming up with them this episode. Again, kind of leaning into the topic that we heard from Dr. Dranquist on the question for this week is where did the majority of Lutherans immigrate to North America from? And this is in that 1800s time period. So where did the majority of Lutherans immigrate to North America from? Your answers are German, Germany, Norway and Sweden, Germany, Norway and France, Austria, Australia and Antarctica, or Wittenberg, Wartburg and St Olaf. And Ben will tell you how to respond in just a moment.

Absolutely. Because Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Folt. You can reach us by [email protected] so go ahead and send your answers to that if it's easy. Our website is mainstreetlutherans.com we're also on the socials as Main Street Lutherans on Facebook, Instagram threads and YouTube. You can also call to leave us a message at area code 734-250-9554. That is in the episode notes as well. The show is produced by Folk Media Productions. And until next time, go in peace, serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.