The Luther Anniversary and the Year 1933 in the Mirror of U.S. Church Press Reports

Abstract

My assignment for this conference on Luther celebrations was to observe and describe the response of U.S.-American churches to Martin Luther’s 450th birthday as celebrated in Germany in November 1933.1 Read narrowly, that project would result in relatively little material. I quickly concluded, however, that the assignment was less about one particular birthday of Martin Luther than about one particular and momentous year. Luther’s 450th birthday happened to occur in 1933, just that year when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. Every observer at that time, whether in Germany or abroad, knew that the rise of Hitler was an important news story. Hitler took over in the face of dramatic crises and with intent to impose dramatic new policies. His appointment as chancellor, therefore, caught widespread attention. Furthermore, hindsight now shows us that the rise of Hitler turned the next twelve years into one of the most tragic episodes in modern world history. During 1933, people in Germany and the United States paid attention to Hitler because he brought dramatic change. Today we are interested in Hitler because his changes turned out so very badly: a World War, at least 50 million dead, six million dead Jews, and a subsequent worldwide condemnation of those Nazi ideas and policies that brought all of this to pass. Because of the importance of this entire year, I have focused my research on every sort of response to Germany in the American church press from January through December. The modest American response to Martin Luther’s birthday in November 1933 simply fits into this broader picture. My second question involved the choice of which church publications to study. Lutherans in the United States had the most obvious reason to pay attention to Luther’s birthday celebration. Therefore, I have focused on five Lutheran journals, all of which were published weekly. I read them from beginning to end through the entire year, looking for any references to Germany. As a counterpoint, I also made the same search of a very prominent non-denominational weekly, the Christian Century. I will indicate below the results of my study. However, I will first add some information about the nature of Lutheranism in the United States in 1933: it was divided among a large number of ›synods‹, independent organizations with very specific ties to individual European nations. (It is still divided, by the way, though less so than in 1933, since a tendency toward merger has continued.)