Lutherans on St Patrick's Day

 

We were Lutherans, but not Midwestern Lutherans, from 1976-1986. I come from centuries of Swedish Lutherans on one side, and some of the culture did transmit. The most famous of the Swedish-American children's books was The Golden Name Day, by my Aunt Jennie, whose grave we still visit. But while my grandmother and her sisters were close to Jennie, they recognised that she had come from the more traditional side, where Swedish was still spoken in the home, and Jennie's father Henning was the editor of the Swedish newspaper for New England (though mostly New Hampshire and mill town Massachusetts, like Lowell and Worcester. The many Swedes way up in Maine on the Canadian border weren't so much connected to our people.

We were Swedish on special occasions, and this was true of Gethsemane Lutheran Church as well by the time we were there. The distinctiveness goes away more quickly in cities, because of intermarriage with people that you met in school or in the mills and shops.  Out in the country your whole high school is likely to be drawn from one or two groups, as Lake Wobegon is. So Lutheran traditions become closely associated with ethnic traditions.  This seems to be just the way we all are.  The Greek Orthodox Church has a yearly Glendi festival that is mostly food and costumes, not much Eastern Christian theology; the anniversary celebration of the Londonderry Presbyterian Church in 1889 had a previous pastor speak who lamented that the mothers in that day no longer baked the good Scots black bread that he felt was so important to developing character.  I don't think John Calvin would have much approved. The St Benedict Center out in Richmond NH is very much in the Feeneyite tradition of traditional Catholicism that is more mill city neighborhood than it is Anselmian or Thomist. 

So the traditions hold up better in the country but become ever more ethnic than religious, and Minnesota Nice becomes a theology of its own. Keillor was already nostalgic for a Lutheranism (even though he was himself raised Brethren) that was vanishing in the 1980s, and now the nostalgia is for people who even remember the nostalgia. Lutherans aren't very Lutheran anymore, just as Congregationalists and Unitarians aren't very Puritan, and Episcopalians aren't very Anglican. A lot of Baptists don't think much about baptism these days, and Methodists don't practice much Wesleyan method. Alot of Evangelicals talk more about bad news than good news.