Is the LCMS Evangelical or Mainline Protestant?

The American mainline has never regarded itself as being sociologically outside the American mainstream. Rather it was the American mainstream to a large degree. In his excellent book An Anxious Age Joseph Bottum argues that American civic society for much of the post-Civil War era and especially in the 20th century was built on the three legged stool of the government, the market, and the church—by which he meant the Protestant Mainline. Bottum’s claim, one which I found quite persuasive by the time I finished, was that the single most significant factor in the transformation of American civic society over the past several decades has been the collapse of the Protestant mainline.

The reason why isn’t hard to understand. The American market generated wealth. The American government utilized that wealth to create power and security and opportunity. The American church, therefore, was necessary to provide moral guidance. She helped the market and government know what to aim for, you might say, or perhaps what not to aim for. The church, meaning the Protestant Mainline, was the moral conscience of the American social order.

As the Mainline has collapsed, no serviceable replacement has been found.

Evangelicalism couldn’t fill that void, for the reasons given above.  Neither could Catholicism, another outsider religion.  So today,  both government and business operate without the benefit of a broadly-accepted “moral conscience.”

I have been trying to think through where my own Lutheran Church Missouri Synod fits in with that.  I grew up in Mainline liberal Protestantism and then passed through a period of American evangelicalism before becoming a Lutheran, so I have experienced all three of these strains.  I think Meador is right about evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism, and his analysis is clarifying for us confessional Lutherans.  (I’ll be speaking specifically of the LCMS, though I suspect what I will have to say applies also, perhaps in different ways, to WELS, ELS, and other confessional Lutherans.)

I have long noticed that the media and different polls classify us differently.  Some of them lump the LCMS in with the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) as “Lutherans.”  Thus, when the headlines read “Lutherans Choose First Transgender Bishop” and the like, we have to explain to friends and concerned evangelicals that “we aren’t that kind of Lutheran!”  Other polls classify us with the evangelicals, since we too believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and in salvation through faith in the gospel of Christ.  Then when the headlines read “Evangelicals Support the Prosperity Gospel” and the like, we have to say, “we aren’t that kind of evangelical!”

But the classification difficulty goes beyond that.  Where do we fit in with the Protestant/Catholic binary? Of course we are Protestant–we started Protestantism–and have the Protestant hallmarks of making the Bible and the Gospel central.  And yet, we also hold to Baptismal regeneration, the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion, follow the traditional church calendar, and worship liturgically.  Like the Catholics.

In fact, other Protestants accuse us of being “too Catholic,” even as Catholics accuse us of all the faults of Protestantism, including those that don’t apply to us (such as individualism, subjectivism, and doctrinal relativism).

Lutherans are highly sacramental.  In that, we are more like Catholics and the Orthodox.  But they won’t have us, and we won’t have them, because we are also highly evangelical, due to our emphasis on God’s Word and the Gospel, both of which also animate our sacramental theology.

Back to Meador’s dichotomy. . . .As I’ve chronicled (here and here and here), this year is the 50th anniversary of the formal split in American Lutheranism.  With the SEMINEX walkout, Lutherans went in two directions, one faction joining Mainline Protestantism and participating in its collapse.  The other threw in with evangelicalism in an uneasy alliance–drawing on their Bible scholarship, using their curriculum, adopting some of their practices, and in some cases taking up their styles of worship– before eventually embracing its own confessional identity.

In terms of Meador’s observation that mainline Protestant churches have never been as alienated from the surrounding culture as evangelicals have been, I can see that.

The LCMS was a mainline Protestant denomination, but it was one of the few that did not adopt liberal theology.  So for all of our theological conservatism, we are much more open to culture than I have experienced when I was in purely evangelical orbits.  Things that were at least controversial in evangelical circles and even when accepted considered a guilty pleasure–alcohol, smoking, movies, Sunday entertainments–are no big deal in Lutheran circles.  And though the LCMS agitates for the pro-life cause and has often (successfully) taken religious liberty cases to the Supreme Court, it stays clear of partisan politics and utopian ideologies, unlike both Mainline Protestants and evangelicals I have known.

Lutheranism in Europe did serve the culture-supporting role that he describes.  The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms meant that God rules both in both the secular and the spiritual spheres, with the church supporting the moral Law in the former, while still keeping its distinctiveness by proclaiming the Gospel of salvation through Christ in the latter.  Sadly, though, the state churches went the liberalizing way of the American mainline denominations and made themselves irrelevant.  (I argue in Post-Christian that the main reason for the secularism of Europe is the secularism of the churches.)

And yet, we are also evangelical, in the most profound sense of making the Gospel and the Word of God central in all of our theology.   In fact, we are the first evangelicals.   We are the people of the Word and the Sacraments.  Those are not opposed to each other, as both Catholics and Protestants often assume, nor are they both irrelevant, as mainline Protestants often assume.  Rather, they both convey the evangel, the good news of Christ crucified for sinners.

Lutheranism is hard to categorize because it embraces the best of the mainline and the best of evangelicalism, the best of Catholicism and the best of Protestantism, enabling us to draw on all of these traditions, while steering clear of their faults.  Conversely, it lets the other traditions draw on what we have to offer.

Photo:  Lutheran Church Missouri Synod International Center, St. Louis via LCMS Careers, Facebook.