Lutheran churches in America have an ethnic origin–they were usually started by communities of German, Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian immigrants–and that has definitely shaped the culture of local congregations, sometimes putting off new people who want to join. I remember marveling at the Germanness of our congregation in Wisconsin, with its Men’s Club singing “Sie Leben Hoh” on birthdays and drinking beer and eating cannibal sandwiches while playing Sheepshead, after an extremely brief devotion from Herr Pastor. This didn’t bother me–I got a kick out of it and actually liked it–though I was highly conscious that I was an outsider.
The distinguished sociologist of religion Peter Berger, an ELCA Lutheran, writes about this phenomenon, though he concludes that today the ethnic identity stuff is largely absent from American Lutheranism. It is still a factor, he says, in American Orthodoxy. Also, I would add, in the various ethnic Catholic parishes and in black churches. I would further add that cultural identity is a factor in distinctly “American” churches too, with the upper class WASP Episcopalians and obviously southern Southern Baptists. There is also the distinct culture of middle class white suburbanites in the megachurches of the land.
Is this a problem, or not? Or are churches preserving something precious, something distinctly “cultural” in our current society that is actually “anti-cultural”? Do you agree with Berger that ethnic identity is mostly gone from Lutheran congregations, or can you still see it, and, if so, where? Where it persists, are there ways congregations can help newcomers navigate these cultural shoals?
What Peter Berger says, after the jump. His article will also serve as a map for people trying to figure out the Lutheran landscape.From Peter Berger,After Ethnicity – The American Interest:
My preferred cognitive style is free association—that’s how I remember so many jokes. One joke leads to another. I don’t really want to know whether this is due to some faulty electrical wiring in my brain. But this is the first time this has happened in writing for my blog: the last post dealt with ethnicity and Eastern Christian Orthodoxy in America; then I thought of American Lutheranism, which has had a very different history with ethnicity (mainly German and Scandinavian). I think the differences are interesting. [I am Lutheran myself, of a rather heterodox sort. But I don’t see why this should preclude my writing about this curious denomination in America.]
The first Lutheran church in America was founded in 1646 in Christina, a Swedish colony which we now know as Wilmington, Delaware. It was captured by the Dutch in 1655, as they pushed out from New Amsterdam (aka New York). The Dutch soon faded out of the Lutheran picture on the East Coast. Lutherans came in large numbers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The biggest group of Lutheran immigrants was German, with Scandinavians next in numbers. They came into a Protestant country where they did not have to face the deep religious prejudices which Catholics had to face, and they felt comfortable in America from early on.
[Keep reading. . .]
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