Lutherans in America: A New History

Abstract

With Lutherans in America, Mark Granquist has taken on a daunting task. He has provided the first general survey of Lutheranism in North America in forty years, and in so doing has presented an alternative to the standard text on the subject, E. Clifford Nelson's The Lutherans in North America. Granquist begins with a survey of the Lutheran tradition's European origins, from medieval antecedents through the struggles with liberalism and secularism at the end of the nineteenth century. After this sweeping introduction, Granquist progresses chronologically through eleven chapters on the North American context, each covering between twenty and forty years except for chapter 2, “Beginnings, 1619–1720.” The chapters are followed by excursuses, brief topical essays on themes like Lutherans in the Caribbean, the history of hymnals, and the Lutheran college system. Chapters 2 through 5 essentially cover the long eighteenth century, beginning with Lutheran arrivals in the mid-1600s and continuing up to 1820. Chapters 6 and 7 span the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. The final five chapters focus on the twentieth century, including two chapters that will fascinate anyone with vested interest in the Lutheran Church today—chapter 11 covers among other things the events surrounding the largest merger in American Lutheran history (between the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church), and chapter 12 is Granquist's assessment of the current landscape.As is to be expected, a great deal of this volume is concerned with immigration and institutions. Granquist, as a skilled historian, investigates these requisite themes with creativity. It is an old chestnut that the Lutheran church in North America is an immigrant church, by which it is typically meant that waves of Germans and Scandinavians laid the foundation stones of a Lutheran infrastructure in this land, which their offspring maintained. Naturally, Granquist describes the European Lutheran immigrations to North America, but he also notes the growth of Lutheranism within non-Lutheran immigrant populations, notably Asian and Hispanic communities. He even refers to the explosive growth of the Lutheran church in Africa. Granquist also brings keen analysis to bear on this theme, noting that an immigrant church must also be a mission church (39). Removed from European state support, the early American Lutheran church was a mission field. Transplanted European pastors who behaved otherwise were not successful. Likewise, contemporary congregations who fail to see their changing communities as mission fields will also struggle to survive.As subtle as Granquist's treatment of immigration was, the real achievement may be his even-handed navigation of the fault lines in the increasingly polarized Lutheran landscape. Reviewers from the two largest Lutheran bodies in the United States today—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LC-MS)—have already voiced appreciation for Lutherans in America. It is a further sign of Granquist's discipline as a historian that he could tell these histories without alienating either audience, even while delivering fair and trenchant criticisms along the way. Granquist did not shy away from controversial episodes, nor did he attempt to dance between the raindrops, whether discussing the conservative takeover in the LC-MS at the end of the 1960s, or the formation of the ELCA in 1987.Readers of this journal will be glad to know that Moravians make more than a brief cameo in Lutherans in America. The index identifies twenty-three page references for the Moravians and Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf combined. Granquist's discussion of the encounter between Henrich Melchior Mühlenberg and Zinzendorf is especially good and represents one clear improvement over Nelson's volume. The impartiality shown by Granquist when dealing with Lutheran denominations is evident also in his treatment of the Moravian Church. For example, he writes, “Although the Moravians had some close affinities to Lutheran Pietism (Zinzendorf was at one point ordained as a Lutheran pastor) … Muhlenberg considered them to be schismatics” (89). I appreciate the critical distance between Granquist's voice and Muhlenberg's eighteenth-century judgment of the Herrnhuter Pietists. It is also good to see an acknowledgment of the historical proximity between Moravians and Lutherans. Unfortunately, Granquist was not able to mention the twentieth-century ecumenical concordat between the two traditions, which places them in full communion since 1999. Readers with an interest in Moravian history will also note a factual error on page 49, wherein Granquist mistakenly dates the beginning of Moravian missions in the Caribbean to 1717, ten years before the Renewed Unitas Fratrum came into being.This is not an ideal book for students looking to go deeper into the literature on a specific subject. By design, the book makes very sparing use of notes, and the bibliography is select. Students will not find an exhaustive list of titles related to Pietism, for example. The lack of a thorough apparatus and the natural inability of a single author to always go into great detail in a survey of this kind will occasionally leave the reader hungry for more. Nevertheless, this book is an incredibly useful single-volume history of Lutheranism in North America, which is precisely what it aims to be. Anyone interested in the subject can do no better than Lutherans in America. It will certainly be assigned at Lutheran seminaries and colleges for many years to come, and will serve admirably as a survey book in those classrooms. In some circles, this book is referred to as “the new Nelson,” but this is a disservice to the legacy it will have in its own right. A decade hence, young seminarians may very well refer to this simply as “the Granquist.”