Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, is a Lutheran. If he is elected, he would be either the first or second Lutheran to hold that high office. Fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the vice president under Lyndon Johnson, had been Lutheran, but then joined a Methodist church after his family moved to a community without a Lutheran congregation.
Walz is quite open about his church affiliation, often describing himself as a “Minnesota Lutheran.” This will doubtless attract attention to the rest of us Lutherans, but those of us with a confessional theology will need to get used to explaining that we are not that kind of Lutheran.
Walz is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), which is a mainline liberal Protestant denomination, much like all the others. “But his church has ‘evangelical’ in its name, so doesn’t that mean he is evangelical?” No, “evangelical” is another name for “Lutheran,” just as “Reformed” is another name for “Calvinist.” In this context, “evangelical” has no connection with American evangelicalism.
Walz belongs to Pilgrim Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in St. Paul. Some ELCA congregations are more conservative than others, but Pilgrim is as radical as they come.
According to an article in the Daily Caller on the subject by Robert Schmad, “Materials published by Pilgrim Lutheran Church instruct parishioners not to refer to God using male pronouns, push congregants to support reparation funds, encourage them to celebrate Ramadan and include a modified gender-neutral version of the Lord’s Prayer.”
Pilgrim Lutheran Church also takes a liberal stance on issues of sexuality and gender by sending its members to march at gay pride parades, working to amplify the “voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals,” having gender-neutral restrooms and celebrating “coming out day,” among other initiatives.
Saying that the “a patriarchal culture gave birth to the writing of scripture and the selection of the canon,” Pilgrim issued guidelines for gender-inclusive language for God. Their version of the Lord’s Prayer begins like this: ““Our Guardian, Our Mother, Our Father in heaven.”
I’m glad that the Daily Caller article distinguished between the ELCA and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod by quoting Jonah Wendt, a policy advisor for former Vice President Mike Pence and a member of the LCMS. “The ELCA is, broadly speaking, a liberal American mainline Protestant denomination,” he said. “They reject the inerrancy of scripture, ordain women to the pastoral office [and] hold what many would believe to be unbiblical views on abortion and homosexual behavior.”
And yet, according to the congregation’s website, Pilgrim used to be LCMS! But they left the synod with the Seminex walkout of 1974, a schism whose 50th anniversary we mark this year. The congregations like Pilgrim that left, mainly over the issue of Biblical inerrancy, formed the American Evangelical Lutheran Church (AELC), which in turn became a catalyst for a union of the other liberal Lutheran synods into the ELCA.
Tim Walz has another connection with the LCMS. Governor Walz, a zealous COVID shutdown enforcer, issued a decree forbidding churches from holding worship services. But the Minnesota district of the LCMS joined forces with the Minnesota Catholic Conference to defy the governor’s order. Two days after the confessional Lutherans and the Catholics issued a statement to that effect, Gov. Walz backed down and rescinded his order.
Photo: Tim Walz, Office of Governor Tim Walz & Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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