After weeks of uncertainty and changes, the 2024 presidential matchup is finally set. The Republican ticket will be former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance. Seeking to hold the White House for the Democrats will be Vice President Kamala Harris and her newly-announced running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Largely unknown outside the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Walz is the subject of numerous biographical pieces this week. Democrats quickly highlighted his time as a school teacher, his service in the National Guard, and his record in office. Republicans meanwhile seek to paint him as a leftwing figure, highlighting policies they dislike and relitigating the protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And by attacking his church.
Attempting to defeat a candidate by attacking their religion is almost as old of an American tradition as the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on religious tests for office. Thomas Jefferson found his unorthodox religious views under attack in 1800, but he won anyway. Others also faced whisper campaigns and outspoken bigotry, like Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 because of their Catholicism, and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 because of his Mormonism. Barack Obama faced attacks in 2008 because of the preaching of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Muslim candidates for Congress have also faced political attacks because of their religion in recent years.
Despite the mostly unsuccessful record of faith-based attacks, desperate partisans employ such a strategy in hopes of finding political salvation in the ballot box. Walz is the latest target of a political heresy trial.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz arrives at a campaign campaign rally on Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. (Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press)
A self-described “Minnesota Lutheran,” Walz is nearly from central casting for a movie adaptation of Garrison Keillor’s Minnesotan world of Lake Wobegon. He’s a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, one of the key mainline Protestant denominations. Despite the word “evangelical” in the group’s name, it’s one of the “seven sisters” of the mainline Protestant world that’s had a lot of political and cultural influence (so it’s surprising there’s not been a Lutheran serving as president or vice president yet).
The ELCA is the second-largest faith group in Minnesota (after Catholics), and it’s the biggest Lutheran denomination in the country. According to the U.S. Religion Census, the ELCA is the largest Protestant group in 302 U.S. counties (mainly in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, and Michigan). The only groups leading in more counties are the Southern Baptist Convention (1,252), nondenominational churches (781), and the United Methodist Church (375, though that likely dropped because of the recent schism).
Despite the mainstreamness of the ELCA, rightwing publications are already blasting the denomination and Walz’s small church in hopes of scaring some voters. The Daily Caller, which was cofounded by Tucker Carlson, attacked the ELCA for affirming LGBTQ+ people, ordaining women as pastors, and rejecting “inerrancy.” The piece also blasted Walz’s local church for supporting reparations, not using male pronouns to refer to God, and encouraging interfaith dialogue with Muslims. A fundamentalist website called his church “a trainwreck of heresy and blasphemy” for similar reasons. And some conservatives have criticized the denomination and the church on social media. Like Mollie Hemingway, a writer for the conservative publication The Federalist, who claimed to be “a confessional Lutheran” and dismissed the ELCA as “an extremely left-wing sub-denomination” (which is a bit like me calling the Southern Baptist Convention a “sub-denomination”).
Anyhoo, this issue of A Public Witness shows up like a hotdish with, dontcha know, a look at Minnesota Nice Lutherans and why, gosh darn it, the attacks on Walz’s church are worse than Wisconsin.
Diet of Walz
In light of the attacks on Walz’s denomination and church, I reached out to Word&Way’s resident Minnesota Lutheran, Rev. Angela Denker. A member of Word&Way’s board, she is an ordained ELCA minister and a journalist. She’s served multiple ELCA congregations in her home state (and beyond), including right now as pastor for visitation and public theology at Lake Nokomis Lutheran Church in Minneapolis. She’s also been to Walz’s church in St. Paul multiple times, even leading sessions there on Christian Nationalism.
“I have attended Pilgrim Lutheran Church, and I find their witness to the gospel to be very humble,” said Denker, author of Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind. “It’s a small neighborhood church. It’s not one of those churches that’s really a public congregation. And that may be why Gov. Walz has chosen to attend there when he can, because it’s really a place that has a neighborhood feel and that’s very committed to its commitment of inclusive welcome, the same inclusive welcome that was the witness of Jesus.”
Denker also told me the church is “grounded” in its Minnesota culture — like having Celtic worship and Scandinavian emphases — in ways that show their creativity and welcoming nature. She’s worried, though, about the political attacks on the local congregation and pastor that haven’t sought the public spotlight.
“There should be some level of privacy around pastors’ ability to just be a pastor, even to politicians. And politicians need to be able to have pastors who aren’t involved in their lives for political reasons, but just simply to be a faithful guide,” Denker said. “I think that that’s really important. And that’s the model of pastoring that I have certainly seen most commonly in in the ELCA, is that pastors see themselves not as public figures, not as celebrities, not as people who are looking to have talking points on Twitter, but really as faithful stewards of neighborhood churches who are trying to share the gospel.”
In addition to talking about Pilgrim, we discussed the ELCA more broadly and the claims it is an extremely liberal denomination. A majority of ELCA members actually voted for Trump in 2020. The 52% of voters in the ELCA backing Trump isn’t as high as that found among many other groups, like the United Methodist Church (62%), Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (69%), Southern Baptist Convention (72%), or Assemblies of God (78%). But it’s a far cry from what a Republican activist and Missouri Synod member told The Daily Caller in their piece attacking Walz’s denomination as satanic.
“The ELCA is, broadly speaking, a liberal American mainline Protestant denomination,” claimed Jonah Wendt, a policy advisor at Mike Pence’s political advocacy group. “Satan wants to do everything in his power to separate Christians from the one true faith.”
Calling a group “liberal” for giving 52% support for Trump is, broadly speaking, nonsense. The data goes beyond just voting for Trump in 2020. Pew Research Center found 41% of ELCA members identify as political moderates, 32% as conservatives, and only 24% as liberals. These and other findings actually put the ELCA slightly to the right of the overall American populace — but one of the denominations closest to the average.
ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton (left) speaks during the ELCA Churchwide Assembly in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 9, 2022. (Emily McFarlan Miller/Religion News Service)
“A big thing about the ELCA in general,” Denker explained, “is that it’s a very rural church. Many of our congregations are in rural areas and, of course, rooted in the Midwest. Whether it’s Minnesota and the Dakotas principally, but also places like Ohio and pretty much historically wherever German and Scandinavian churches have been.”
One of the main areas those attacking Walz’s denomination and church highlight is the goal of addressing systemic racism. The Daily Caller complained that Walz’s church cares about racial justice. To “prove” such an allegedly offensive position, the piece noted this statement from the congregation: “We lament the suffering caused by our racism. We endeavor to live more fully a gospel commitment to love our neighbors as ourselves by listening well, changing our hearts, and partnering with our neighbors in building an antiracist community of justice where all may thrive.” Denker said such efforts are not unusual in ELCA life.
“The ELCA also has its own shameful history around racism,” said Denker, author of the forthcoming book Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. “We remain the Whitest denomination in this country, and have worked really hard — especially after George Floyd’s murder — by looking in the mirror at where have we continued to define ourselves by our Whiteness or by our Scandinavian or German culture, where have we been complicit in taking land from Indigenous peoples for our churches.”
“What’s been really encouraging to me about the Lutheran tradition in general is that there’s such a strong emphasis on repentance and confession. And I always find myself saying Jesus’s line about ‘remove the log in your own eye before you take the speck out of someone else’s,’” Denker added. “I see some of that in Tim Walz too.”
Before we hung up, Denker had already started playing the Midwestern game of six degrees of separation with Walz, though she did that pretty well as her grandfather pastored a Lutheran church in the Nebraska city where Walz went to college (and she had, like Walz’s wife Gwen, converted her husband to being a Minnesotan). Others in Minnesota, she noted, feel connected since Gwen went to the ELCA-affiliated Gustavus Adolphus College. And both Walzes were public school teachers.
“I think so many of us see our own stories in his story too,” Denker. “As a pastor there are no better people to have in your congregation than teachers and retired teachers. They make up the bulk of our volunteers, Sunday school teachers, people who serve on church councils. I just can’t say enough about how important it’s been for me to have teachers in my congregations.”
Of course, in today’s political environment, public school teachers have also become frequent targets and attacked as if they’re leftwing activists.
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The Audacity of Ope
As Republicans looked for ways to attack Barack Obama in 2008, one area of attack came by playing short, incendiary clips from his longtime pastor. Some of Wright’s comments — particularly outside of sermons as he addressed the controversy — included racism and antisemitism. But as Trinity United Church of Christ argued, the controversy was mainly because of out-of-context clips playing on loop on Fox News that showed little understanding of the Black church prophetic tradition or even how some basic Christian theology can clash with American values.
Just as with Obama, attacks on Walz’s faith are inappropriate. The question for voters isn’t if Walz is orthodox in his religious theology but if he’s right in terms of policies, experience, and character. We shouldn’t vote against or for Walz because he’s Lutheran — just like we shouldn’t vote for or against Harris because she’s Baptist and we shouldn’t vote for or against Trump because he doesn’t go to church.
The attacks on Minnesota Lutherans also seem unlikely to work. The targeting of Obama’s church was part of the effort to ‘other’ him, just like whisper campaigns suggesting he was a Muslim. The racial aspect helped the critiques. It’s a lot harder to ‘other’ a group of White, Midwestern Lutherans. It’s pretty difficult to make the church of Lake Wobegon look scary and extreme (other than what they do to Jell-O salad).
The irony is that the attacks on the ELCA and Walz’s church are mostly coming from Republican activists who are part of smaller, more extreme Lutheran denominations. From their perspective, the ELCA is liberal, but when compared to the American populace it’s actually the other Lutheran groups that are radical. So they’re attacking the ELCA for holding positions that a lot of Americans actually agree with. As in 2008, we see White evangelicals attacking the mainline Protestant church of a politician to act as if that church isn’t really Christian.
Although the inappropriate faith-based attacks on Walz seem unlikely to work politically, they will still create problems. The 2008 controversy eventually led Obama to withdraw his membership during the campaign and caused significant disruption and hurt within Trinity. The same danger exists now for Pilgrim and the broader ELCA. That means more people need to speak out against the attacks and encourage any congregation that finds itself targeted for partisan purposes.
“It saddens me to see news stories reporting such a caricature of a congregation that has been such a blessing to the UCC’s Wider Church mission,” Rev. John H. Thomas, who was the general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, said as he defended Trinity in 2008. “It’s time for us to say ‘No’ to these attacks and declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow political or ideological ends.”
You betcha! So we must offer solidarity to the Minnesota Lutherans under attack today. Here I stand, fer crying out loud, I can do no other.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
A Public Witness is a reader-supported publication of Word&Way.
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