James C. Burkee, Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict that Changed American History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011).

Editors’ Note: An excerpt of Burkee’s book will appear in the Spring 2011 print issue of Lutheran Forum. Further reflections on Burkee’s book will be considered for posting on LF online: send your submissions to editor-at-lutheranforum-dot-org.

Some months ago I was asked to write a blurb for the upcoming Fortress book by James Burkee: Power, Politics and the Missouri Synod—A Conflict that Changed American Christianity. (Though I am sure Burkee was not responsible for it, the title is a bit grandiose. American Christianity has not been changed much, but a whole lot of Lutheran history in America has been.) Along with the request came the full electronic file of the book. I read it and came to this response: “What a dark, dark story, far darker than I had ever imagined.” But what sort of blurb to write? I certainly had no truck for the conservative Missouri insurgents of the 70s. They acted horribly. However, after this book, I thought, it will be easy for everyone else to “pile it on,” and that seemed superfluous for me.

Moreover, the “piling it on” might show contempt for the current incarnation of the Missouri Synod, in which I have many dear friends and for which I have genuine respect. (It is more likely to carry an orthodox Lutheran witness into the future than the ELCA.) Further, the current Missouri Synod has honored my work—especially on the relation between church and society—far more than my former church, the ELCA.

Complicating matters more, Martin Marty has written a laudatory preface to the book and I didn’t want to appear to endorse his position as a casualty of the Missouri war.

Given this inner turmoil, I decided to write a properly ambivalent blurb in which I accentuated one of the findings of Burkee’s book: that the conflagration need not have happened if just one or two strong-willed, arrogant men had had the grace to back down a bit. I tried mightily not to identify with either side. You will have to read the blurb for yourself when the book appears.

After reading the manuscript, I sent it along to my colleague, Paul Hinlicky. I told him that I found its account far darker than I had expected, so I thought he would read it right away. I waited to detect the smoke coming out from under his office door. For whatever reason, he did not read the book right away. But, sure enough, a couple of weeks ago the smoke appeared, and you have Paul’s response to the book. Indeed, he gives so much detail it makes the first part of my task easier; I will only list a few major learnings that I gleaned from the book.

First, I did not fathom how extensive, lengthy, complicated, and massive the insurgent attack was on the “liberals.” (I will follow Burkee and call them that.) And how mean-spirited and amoral—if not immoral—it was. Participants in the current conflict in the ELCA are playing by the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules compared to the bare-knuckle brutality of Missouri’s Great Unhappiness. All this made even the current Missouri less attractive. If even a smidgeon of that sort of brutality survives, I want no part of it.

Second, I had not realized how deeply the political/cultural upheaval of the 60s (which I believe lasted from 1965-1975) affected the Missouri conflict. As old-fashioned as Missouri seemed in those days, I assumed they would not be as caught up in the 60s vortex as much as they were. Burkee interprets the insurgents driven more by conservative political and cultural commitments than by theological, and it is hard to deny their very words, which he quotes copiously. However, the conservatives were sorely provoked by the rambunctious and irresponsible role Richard Neuhaus and a bevy of fellow-radicals played from the left. They virtually fused their religious commitments with their radical politics. (A huge irony in American Lutheran history is that when Neuhaus turned in a conservative direction, he spent much of his energy trying to distinguish sharply the “First Things” of religious commitment from political agendas of every sort. I should mention that, unlike Hinlicky, I moved with Neuhaus to what has been called “neo-conservatism,” even though I did not follow him into Roman Catholicism.)

Third, I was shocked at how little theological argument played in the sorry story. Burkee reports little in the way of theological engagement among the parties. It seemed that after the gloves came off theology went by the wayside, much as it did once the sides were drawn in the ELCA conflict over sexuality issues. But I wonder. I think biblical and theological issues underlay the simmering discontent many Missourians had for years with the St. Louis faculty and with a number of home-grown theological and political radicals. Certainly biblical authority and interpretation was front and center. And gospel reductionism and antinomianism were indeed promoted by some of the faculty. The latter issues have become central to the warfare in the ELCA over sexuality issues, but more on that later.

Fourth, the book confirmed for me both the arrogance and the strategic cluelessness of the liberals. Arrogant in the sense that they really thought they could get away with their biblical, theological, and cultural liberalism without offending a much more conservative constituency. All these things had changed dramatically in St. Louis but there was little effort to educate the church along with the students. Arrogant, too, in the sense that the liberal leaders would not give an inch before the charges of the conservatives. At one poignant moment in Burkee’s account, it seemed as if Preus would call off the hounds if Tiejten would have been willing to make even a small apology for the faculty’s errors in judgment. But that was not to be.

The book also reveals the strategic weakness of the liberals, who were swept up in the romantic allure of exodus, when in fact they should have employed the gritty tactic of making Preus come after them one by one. After about three public trials—and the attendant blood spilled and momentum lost—there would have been little zest to continue the attack. Giving up one’s turf when it was not necessary was not very shrewd, to say the least.

Those events were long ago. But it seems as if Missouri has been unable to rid itself of ongoing in-fighting. The breathless exposés of Herman Otten provide a living link to that past. The voting lists and politicking continue. Heresy charges and trials for even bringing up borderline issues—women teaching theology in Missouri universities—persist into the 21st century. Added to such continuing political strife are the Brief Statement and its reiteration in the mid-70s, whose affirmations seem to elevate quasi-fundamentalist and anti-evolutionary planks to confessional status. Those affirmations can be used as a sledge-hammer to quash any attempt at biblical or theological creativity. Further, there are the issues of women’s ordination and closed communion. So, while I could worship happily in many Missouri congregations and districts, it would be almost as difficult to affiliate with the national expression of Missouri as with the ELCA.

Thus, I am ambivalent about Missouri past and present. But I’m not very ambivalent when I survey the damage done to the ELCA by the Seminex/AELC leadership that migrated from Missouri to the church bureaucracies and seminaries of the ELCA. Starting with its baleful influence on the Committee for a New Lutheran Church (CNLC), it has made a “long march though ELCA institutions” that has given a significant push to the ELCA’s journey to liberal Protestantism. In an odd twist of history, the Missouri liberals lost one skirmish to powerful conservative insurgents in Missouri, but were crucial in winning another from powerless conservatives of the ELCA. Now they are free; they will have no more enemies from the right.

Truth be told, both the ALC and the LCA were slipping toward liberal Protestantism before the new church was planned. The hermeneutic of suspicion in its various guises was already being applied to the inherited tradition within those churches. The informal magisterium carried by the likes of George Forell and William Lazareth in the LCA and Kent Knutson in the ALC, which kept the churches on an orthodox trajectory, was already in trouble by the time of the CNLC. For one thing, the baton had not been passed to a new generation of orthodox theologians. Even if it had, the chances for success would not have been great.

The quota-ized CNLC put the kibosh on any such meager hopes. The home-grown radicals of the LCA and ALC were joined by the Seminex/AELC contingent to overwhelm the staid old voices of the ALC and LCA. The latter didn’t have a chance against the young radicals. Read all about it in Anatomy of a Merger by Edgar Trexler, who tells an amazingly honest story of that ill-fated birth. The radical coalition made sure that we had quotas (which were highly unpopular among church members), that theologians and bishops would have little real theological authority in the church, that a quota-ized national assembly whose make-up was 60 percent lay would vote on church doctrine, that there would be no opportunity for synods and congregations to rescind those votes, and that a huge central bureaucracy would have its own way over time. A couple of notorious happenings of that time still ring out: changing name of God from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier failed by a 33-30 vote. A black radical member opined that “my blackness is my competence.”

Following Burkee’s analysis, one could argue that the new ELCA was dramatically re-defined by a coalition of 60s radicals. The re-shaping of the ELCA parallels that of the Democratic Party from 1968 on. Jesse Jackson and George McGovern and their followers moved the Democratic Party to the left not only of the country, but of its own membership. It took the Democratic Party twenty years to move enough to the center to begin to win elections. In democratic politics, however, the citizens can throw the rascals out. But such was not possible in the politics of the ELCA. Once the new DNA of the ELCA was set by the CNLC, there was little chance to challenge the bureaucracy. It could be slowed down but not really altered.

The “march through the institutions” radiated from Chicago to many synods, agencies, colleges, and seminaries. Just as I was leaving the Lutheran School of Theology in 1982, an interesting conversation took place in Carl Braaten’s living room. The question before the group was: in view of the demise of Seminex, how many of its professors should LSTC take? I argued that taking more than two or three would dramatically alter the seminary. LSTC wound up with over a half dozen, if not more. Before long they were the dominant faction. It seems that the only thing the original faculty of LSTC agreed upon was that the seminary’s faculty-led democratic tradition soon became a top-down chain of command, fully attributable to the new faculty. Their liberalism gradually pervaded the seminary so thoroughly that by the time of the sexuality battles of 2009 every member of the faculty signed one of the flimsiest documents—in favor of revising church doctrine—ever written by a Lutheran faculty.

LSTC is certainly not the only seminary affected strongly by the refugees. Indeed, to my accounting, not one of the deployed former Seminex faculty wound up on the side of the traditionalists in the run-up to the Churchwide Assembly to 2009. Except for Paul Hinlicky, I cannot think of one theologian from the Seminex/AELC stream that did not support the revisionist pressures working within the ELCA.

How about church leaders such as bishops? Again, a similar story. The ALC and the LCA provided for the ELCA many revisionist bishops—Erdahl, Chilstrom, Hanson, Olson, Jessen, Riley, Hicks, Rogness, et al.—but they have been given significant impetus by the active presence of the likes of Landahl, Rimbo, Boerger, and Bouman. The last-named could well be the next presiding bishop of the ELCA.

On the other hand, there have been many faithful and competent orthodox pastors and laity who have enriched the ELCA after their migration from Missouri to the ELCA. My own pastors have Missouri origins but did not go the Seminex/AELC route. But there is something about those Seminex/AELC types who have taken leadership positions in the seminaries, colleges, bureaucracies, and synods of the ELCA that has bent them toward the revisionist side. Was it because their tormentors were from the right and they could recognize no dangers from the left? Was it that they had become battle-hardened by earlier struggles and were very adept at maneuvering for power? Was it those German genes? Or was it because they were liberals from the very beginning and have found a most hospitable place in the ELCA?

At any rate, from the beginnings of the ELCA, that leadership has been instrumental in pushing the ELCA over the brink. Indeed, one could argue that the CNLC did all it needed to do to insure that liberal Protestantism was the ELCA’s destination.
So, while the battle that Burkee so chillingly documents did not change American Christianity much (Lutherans after all are a small and declining tradition, both absolutely and as a percentage of the population), it certainly did change American Lutheran history. It blew apart what had been a strong church and provided an important impetus for the break-up of another. The reverberations continue. Perhaps one of them, the North American Lutheran Church, will provide a new embodiment of centrist Lutheranism in North America.

Robert Benne is professor emeritus at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and the Director of the Center for Religion and Society.