To the ELCA: An Apology and Helpful Suggestion

I have been having an ongoing discussion with a few ELCA members, including an anonymous person who claims to be an ELCA pastor. I learned something from these conversations: we in the LCMS are a terrible scandal to the ELCA. Since we share the name “Lutheran,” we are an albatross around their collective neck. When ELCA members and their friends and family members are conversing, and the topic of religion comes up, it is with great shame and trepidation that they admit that they are Lutheran. It is like that horrible moment that your brother in law shows up for Thanksgiving dinner without a mask and wearing a MAGA hat. I’m sorry. I should have issued a trigger warning for that analogy. I need to be better. But at any rate, once having confessed to be Lutheran, ELCA members must go into damage control and quickly add: “But we’re not LCMS!”

You see, we take it for granted that we are Philistines, uncouth knuckle-dragging fundamentalist hillbilly snake-handlers with German accents. I mean, it is normal for us that we are racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, cisnormative, heterosexualist barbarians. It is the water we swim in, to the point that we don’t even see how primitive and ridiculous we look to modern America. We don’t realize what a crime against the ELCA it is that God allows us to draw our next breath.

I had no idea that we were so problematic. We don’t have any female ‘pastors’ at all, not even the kind without tattoos, without pronoun drama, and without hyphenated names. We stubbornly refuse to marry same-sex couples and let love win. Very few of our churches would consider flying the rainbow flag. Our health plan doesn’t cover abortion. We teach children that the earth is only six thousand years old, and believe in talking snakes, a virgin birth, and idle tales of people rising from the dead. Hello? It’s 2022!

Oh, the humanity!

I have never paused and considered the hurt and the shame that must go on in the more urbane and sophisticated ELCA circles, where nary a PBR or a Miller Lite is drunk, and where a ‘bishop’ might, in fact, be a lady, but won’t cop to it in her pronominal preferences. Even with our gals who push the envelope, as far as I can tell, none of them drop f-bombs in the pulpit, accuse Jesus of “screwing up,” or melt down promise rings into golden idols depicting genitalia. We’ve come so far, but there is still so much more to be done, sisters, brothers, and people of nonbinary gender identity. We are so lost in our backwater backwardness, and in our regressive regression.

The struggle is real!

And even though, as I have learned, literally a “legion” of LCMS pastors are hemorrhaging into the ELCA to avoid us persons with mental challenges in the LCMS, and that the LCMS is going to dwindle to only a dozen or two members in the next decade (that is, assuming that the world doesn’t end thanks to climate change), we remaining True Believers, being stubborn in our malignance, will not surrender the name “Lutheran.”

And thus, our betters cannot avoid our stench. It must be so hard.

I never realized this before, and I feel really bad about it. I’m trying to be better. I have placed myself on the stools of repentance, and am embracing the Maoist struggle session. And so after having a good cry and a box of chocolates, I have come to a painful conclusion, the only one that can serve as a balm to the ELCA hearts that we have wounded and broken. We must apologize for being us. We’re so sorry. For slavery too, as well as the slaughter of the Amalekites. Our bad.

And it should have come to me sooner. It might have were I not so selfish in my being such a synodical company-man. Yes, that’s me. I learned that. I am a synodical company man. But at any rate, here is the solution:

Since we are too selfish and stubborn to jettison the name “Lutheran,” the only way our sisters, brothers, and others in the ELCA can finally be liberated is to remove the shackles of the name “Lutheran.”

Indeed, Luther is a dead, white male. He was European. And worse, he was German. He was not only anti-Semitic, but he clearly did not support the voices of the LGBTQIAA+ community. His students and congregation were all white. Where are the brown and black and Latinx voices in those regressive days of the sixteenth century? Luther did not ordain women, perform same-sex marriages, or vote Democrat. Not even once. He did not accept that men can get pregnant and chest feed his/her/their children without assigning his/her/their gender. Luther was, like members of the Missouri Synod, deplorable.

The time is long overdue to remove statues, change street names, rechristen universities and seminaries, chapels and congregations, hymnals and marketers of inexpensive and woke Asian swag that all glorify white supremacy and male Eurocentric hegemony. The time has come for the ELCA to embrace social justice and remove this name of Luther in all its forms - so hurtful to people of color (and this is one area that we need to keep under wraps, that the ELCA is even more white than the LCMS, that will be our little secret).

Moreover, the ELCA has outgrown the “Lutheran” label, subscribing to the Lutheran confessions in a quatenus manner, going into full communion with non-Lutheran bodies such as the Episcopal Church, Presbyterians, Reformed, the United Church of Christ, the Moravians, the United Methodist Church, and goddess worshipers. The name “Lutheran” is too restricting. It puts a period where God puts a comma, and handcuffs the Holy Spirit. And I’m sure there must be some Islamophobia in there somewhere.

The ELCA finally freeing itself from the name and legacy of Lutheranism is the ideal solution that leaves that deplorable name with us dwindling members of Bible-thumpers and meat-eating, SUV-driving, drag-the-women-by-the-hair cavemen in the LCMS. At last, the ELCA will be free of any unsavory association with us. They will finally be able to hold their heads high at the pride parade.

And though we will be further isolated, and nobody will confuse us with them any more, somehow, we will just have to soldier on and pay the price for our stubbornness. We will finally get what we deserve, and we will have to figure out how to live with it.

But it would certainly be a win for the ELCA.