In chapter 6 of The Color of Color of Compromise, titled “Reconstructing White Supremacy in the Jim Crow Era,” Jemar Tisby continues to develop his theme that racism is infinitely adaptable to changing historical trends. Not only did the Southern white planter class cling to the “Lost Cause” myth of an antebellum, slaveholding aristocracy as they undid Reconstruction and enacted Jim Crow laws; their northern counterparts perpetuated a similar myth as they sought to “civilize” and proselytize Native American people well into the 20th century.
Tisby doesn’t mention Native Americans, but in each case, a romanticized myth of a benevolent “virtuous, patriotic group of tight-knit Christian communities,” in his words (89, 96), underlay what can only be described as as an unconscious attitude of white supremacy.
Where do the Lutherans fit in? At best, their efforts to help in the post-Civil War period were “marked by parsimony and limited to acts of mercy,” in the words of Richard M. Chapman of Concordia University in Moorehead, Minn. (“Tragically,” he adds, “the larger cause of racial justice was deferred.”) At worst, they look an awful lot like an early example of what Nigerian-American author Teju Cole calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex.”
(Cole’s concept is worth keeping in the back of our minds. It shows up in movies as a “trope in which a white character rescues people of color from their plight.” And it’s part and parcel of colonialism. Wikipedia says the white savior complex becomes problematic when “people of color in economically under-developed nations that are majority non-white are denied agency and are seen as passive recipients of white benevolence.” The same can happen in settler-colonialist societies like the US, Canada and Australia.)
That said, most Lutherans turned inward after the Civil War.
As immigration from northern Europe increased dramatically, the newcomers formed ethnic synods of their own. As the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll puts it, they “lost influence with the public at large, promoted a parochial spirit [and] strengthened their dependency on the memory of Europe.” I’m not sure that’s quite fair to them. I have argued elsewhere, in a paper I presented in 2020 at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the immigrants’ insistence on the confessional Lutheran theology they brought over from Europe helped lead to the cultural and religious pluralism of today.
There were other factors that limited Lutheran involvement in Reconstruction and mission work among the American Indians. There weren’t that many Lutherans in America to begin with. One estimate, by Timothy Smith, calculates that just before the Civil War (1855) there were only 205,049 Lutherans nationwide, compared to 1,577,014 Methodists and 1,105,546 Baptists.
Language was another. CFW Walther, considered the founder of the Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States (today’s Missouri Synod), once wrote a letter to the Rev. F. Sievers: “It will be difficult to begin mission work among the ‘colored people’ as long as we have not more menwho are conversant with the English language.” Missouri Synod Lutherans were especially active, however, in establishing Black parishes, mostly with white pastors.
All in all, different Lutheran synods were active to some degree both in Reconstruction and on the Native American reservations. In both instances, but especially in their work with American Indians, they weren’t immune to what we now recognize as white supremacist notions that privileged — and still privilege — Anglo-European Christian cultural and religious norms.
Reconstruction
Richard Chapman, the Concordia University historian in Minnesota, suggests the Lutherans had good intentions, with postwar “missionary efforts […] and a permanent church-planting enterprise [that] began in 1877, even as the light of Reconstruction flickered out.” But on the whole, their efforts were limited and ineffectual:
Lutherans’ gifts to black citizenship were thus marked by parsimony and limited to acts of mercy, yet works of mercy and charity were certainly necessary. Retrospectively, one wishes there had been more, not less mercy, in this historical moment.
The Missouri Synod (and one of the squabbling Norwegian synods, then allied with Missouri on confessional grounds) committed itself to “mercy work” among African Americans at its annual conference in 1877. An LC-MS history of the synod’s Black ministry says:
Rev. Herman A. Preus, president of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod, submitted an important question: Had the time finally come for the Synodical Conference to direct its mission attention to work among the blacks and Indians of this country? The question was turned over to a committee, which reported favorably. Under the invocation of God and with great enthusiasm, the Conference unanimously resolved to begin and carry on a mission among the neglected and forsaken blacks of the land.
Among their activities was a “Colored Lutheran Church” and day school in Little Rock that lasted well beyond Reconstruction; even after they closed the church and school, members gathered in a parishoner’s home “where they read the Bible, recited the Catechism and sang Lutheran hymns.” They also established Black congregations in New Orleans and elsewhere.
According to Chapman, other synods in the South also established segregated Black congregations:
Lutheran leaders in the South fiddled between, on the one hand, maintaining the status quo antebellum and, on the other, training and licensing black leadership to serve autonomous black congregations. Anticipating the future, the Tennessee Synod declared for the second of the two, “owing to the plainly marked distinctions which God has made between us and them, giving different colors, etc.”
In terms that still sound familiar today, they suggested that Black people preferred it that way. Says Chapman:
Separatism as a strategy subtly recognized that freedmen, as in slavery, wished to form their own religious communities, showed little interest and less desire to follow white ecclesiastical authorities or church regulations. Realistically, Lutherans could not hope to compete with Baptists and Methodists who held many advantages in claiming or retaining African-Americans, since their style, structure, and spirit were more attuned to the existential situation of black folk.
On the other hand, white Lutherans showed little interest in ordaining Black pastors. Chapman continues the story:
In 1869 the South Carolina Synod stopped reporting figures on black membership. The project to sponsor separate black congregations gained little momentum, became caught in organizational indecision, and succumbed to dwindling moral commitment and meager financial resources. It petered out in the 1880s. “The only ordained colored Lutheran minister in the world,” as D. J. Koontz was known, provided the notable exception. His North Carolina congregations, set adrift [after Koontz’ death in 1890] by the General Synod of the South and rebuffed by the General Synod of the North, appealed finally to the Missouri Synod who dispatched a missionary in 1891.
Indian Boarding Schools: ELCA Truth-Seeking
Only in the last few years is the story of boarding schools for Native Americans coming to be told. The US Interior Department, the Canadian government and churches in both countries — including ELCA — have pledged to research their — our — “complicity in the history of church-sponsored Indian boarding schools and these schools’ deliberate, devastating impacts on Native people and their communities, then and now,” as an ELCA program summary describes the effort.
An interim Interior Department report, released in 2022, found the same pattern nationwide. The online newspaper Indian Country Today reported:
Federal boarding schools first started with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819 when the government enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools. For more than 150 years, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools that focused on assimilation.
It also found that schools focused on “manual labor and vocational skills that left American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian graduates with employment options often irrelevant to the industrial U.S. economy, further disrupting Tribal economies.” The name of the Indian Civilization Act tells us as much as we need to know about the white savior complex behind the schools. A magazine cover from the Carlisle Indian School a hundred years later (shown above) is equally telling. A farmer, perhaps dreaming of the old ways, plows his field while a quote from Benjamin Franklin admonishes, “Plow deep while sluggards sleep / And you’ll have corn to sell and keep.” The white man’s burden in a nutshell!
Other than ELCA’s announcement of the truth-telling program, there isn’t much available on Lutheran activity on the reservations. I did find a 1922 book Lutheran Mission Work Among the American Indians by the Rev. Albert Keiser, an English professor at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.C. It’s clear he had the best of intentions. In a preface, he says the book was a “labor of love” and hopes it “should acquaint the reader somewhat with the Lutheran contribution to the Christianization of the Red Man, and instill in him true love for the noble task.” Yet there are echoes of the white savior complex throughout.
Rather than summarize the book, which starts with the 17th-century Swedish colony in what is now Delaware and goes up to the early 20th century, I’ll just quote from Keiser’s report on the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wis. The school, and town, were founded in 1886 by the old Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Synod and sold to the federal government in 1900.
Keiser notes that “children from different tribes” attended the school. This, he said, meant “the work of education and civilization was greatly aided, as the children were thus forced to desist from using their native dialect in play and conversation.” In spite of “partial control by the Government,” Indian children “were taught the fundamentals of the Christian religion, they had their morning and evening devotional exercises, and on Sundays attended the regular service” (172-73).
In addition to catechesis, the Lutherans at Bethany were involved with acculturation. Keiser chronicles the process in a passage that deserves extended quotation:
When more than thirty years ago the missionaries began work among the Winnebagoes in the forests of Wisconsin, the Red Man paid only slight attention to them. No material want existed then, for there was an abundance of deer in those days, deer hunting being the main source of sustenance for the Indians. Every one was then dressed in buckskin, and quite often the wigwams were also covered with the same material. In winter it was a common sight to see one or more carcasses of frozen deer hanging outside of the wigwam. Before the first fall hunt a dance lasting one or two days was held, when by speeches and supplications they implored divine blessing for the first hunt. These Indians, happy and contented, were entirely deaf and indifferent to the pleadings of the missionaries to send their children to school. As hunting became poorer and want made its presence felt, a gradual change took place. A few children began attending school, and reading and writing came to be looked upon as a good thing. .But when it became known that the children received instruction about the Triune God, there was violent objection from the medicine men, of which the tribe of fourteen hundred had about seventy-five.
In course of time, however, a great change also appeared in this respect, and very gratifying results in the Christianization of the Indians were secured. Superintendent Jacobson narrates one instance which tends to destroy the fallacy that one cannot civilize or Christianize a heathen in the first generation. “I have in mind a Winnebago boy, a relative of Bighawk the chief. I tried and tried for a couple of years back in 1888 or 9 to get the father to send him to school. He was a bright looking lad about eight years old, clad in buskskin from top to toe, also wearing the long cue down the back of his head. One day I succeeded in getting him into school. I took him below to the laundry building, clipped his hair, and dressed him up in white man’s clothing. The next day the father appeared, looked at the boy in a surly manner, and eyed me in no more lovable style. At last he pointed to where the cue had been and also made signs as to the buckskin clothing. I walked along down to where I had clipped the hair, and the old man carefully hunted until he found the cue of hair, and after carefully wrapping this up in the buckskin clothing, he left satisfied. The unexpected happened. The boy stayed right here at the mission, learned to play the E-flat bass horn in our Indian brass band better than any white boy, was baptized and confirmed. He was a real Christian spirited boy. We sent him to the Carlisle Indian School for further training. (179-82)
At Carlisle, presumably, he would have learned to plow his fields like a white man and quote Ben Franklin.
Links and Citations
Kalle Benallie, “US boarding school investigative report released,” Indian Country Today, May 11, 2012 https://ictnews.org/news/us-boarding-school-investigative-report-released.
Richard M. Chapman, “Just Enough? Lutherans, Slavery, and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” The Cresset, Trinity 2008 http://thecresset.org/2008/Trinity2008/Chapman_T2008.html.
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “Indian Boarding Schools: ELCA Truth-Seeking and Truth-Telling Initiative,” ELCA.org https://elca.org/Our-Work/Congregations-and-Synods/Ethnic-Specific-and-Multicultural-Ministries/Indigenous-Ministries-and-Tribal-Relations/Indian-Boarding-Schools/Truth-Initiative.
Rev. Dr. Roosevelt Gray, “The History of LCMS Mercy Work with African Americans,” Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod https://files.lcms.org/file/preview/6E1271B2-E274-4889-8051-FAF2084F22EE?.
Albert Keiser, Lutheran Mission Work Among the American Indians (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1922), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/lutheranmissionw00keis/page/n5/mode/2up.
Mark A. Noll, “The Lutheran Difference,” First Things, Feb. 1992 https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/02/the-lutheran-difference.
Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (1980), cited in my paper: “Swedes in Roger Williams’ Garden: Acculturation in Immigrant Churches, 1848-1860,” Conference on Illinois History, Abraham Lincoln Public Library and Museum Springfield, October 5-9, 2020 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/swedes-in-roger-willliams-garden/.
Wikipedia Teju Cole, white savior and Wittenberg, Wisconsin.
[Uplinked March 8, 2024]
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