Note: A copy of the abstract and notes I used when I presented my paper “Swedes in Roger Williams’ Garden: Acculturation in Immigrant Churches, 1848-1860” over Zoom at the Conference on Illinois History, Abraham Lincoln Public Library and Museum Springfield, Oct. 7, 2020. As I said in an email at the time, it was “probably a little clearer about where I’m going with it than the abstract is (!) … I plan to use it as an outline for possibly expanding the study later.” A copy of another draft of the paper is archived HERE; it has been edited, and some footnote numbers may vary from those included here. The inserts below are verbatim quotes from the paper that I read aloud over Zoom.
I use my blogs for “organizing and archiving some of this clutter [on my desk] on the World Wide Web in a forum that doesn’t necessarily require the extensive documentation and endless fine-tuning so often associated with scholarly publication,” as I explained in my first post to my first blog 15 years ago. Call them electronic filing cabinets, if you will.
***
ABSTRACT
Abstract. When Scandinavian immigrants formed Lutheran congregations in Illinois during the 1850s, they faced an American Protestant expectation that church membership be limited to those who claimed they were converted or “born again.” The American Home Missionary Society, a somewhat ecumenical organization with Congregational and Presbyterian roots, in fact made it a condition of its funding that church members document a conversion experience. This went against Scandinavian cultural norms, as well as the basic Lutheran understanding that church membership is conferred with baptism. “The Swedes have been members of a State Church,” explained the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn of Andover, who received funding from the AHMS, “and the greater number of them have lived in places where the true religion, conversion, and new birth and sanctification are unknown or mentioned with contempt and disdain.”
At issue was an evangelical doctrine of American revivalism, derived from the 17th-century Calvinism of Puritan New England, restricting membership in a covenanted church to an elect who could prove they were chosen for salvation. As cultural historian Garry Wills suggests, this covenant theology was intricately bound up with the American ideal of separation of church and state, or, in Roger Williams’ words, a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” To quote the English historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Protestant American ethos of the day was one of “covenant, chosenness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden … served up with a powerful dose of extrovert revivalist fervour.” The Puritan heritage led to “a Christianity shaped by a very different historical experience from western Europe.”
Northern European immigrants quickly set about adapting their religious heritage to Protestant American expectations. During the 1850s, they would develop an immigrant Lutheran church organization that was neither Scandinavian nor American but a creolized blend of the two. The term, coined by cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, describes a process of acculturation whereby immigrant or diaspora cultures create creole, or hybrid, forms that combine old-country and New World elements and “put things together in new ways.” Esbjörn and other Lutheran pastors worked out a compromise whereby prospective members in effect would affirm their baptismal vows instead of testifying to a conversion experience, and that compromise would become the policy of the old Swedish-American Augustana Lutheran Synod formed in 1860.
***
SWEDES IN ROGER WILLIAMS’ GARDEN – FINAL SCRIPT
UNPACKING THE TITLE: Between the lines, it’s about immigrants from a state church culture in Sweden and how they adapted to freedom of religion and religious diversity in America (RW’s garden)
BUT FIRST – DEFINING TERMS — A TYPE OF ACCULTURATION CALLED CREOLIZATION – (not in the title) – a term from cultural anthropology for blended, or hybrid, cultures that combine old-country and New World elements and “put things together in new ways” (Ulf Hannerz). They like to quote post-colonialist novelist Salman Rushdie, who once said his writing “fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” I also like to slightly misquote a folklorist named James Leary, who wrote about “polkabilly” bands of the 1930s and 40s — “here reside North Coast creoles.”
INSERT A – Ulf Hannerz and cultural anthropologists
The terms are clunky, but they have the advantage of reflecting the complexity of the process better than earlier studies of “Americanization” that tended to assume that immigrants simply shed their Old World cultures and became Americans, when in fact the cultural interaction was, and is, a complex multidirectional process.
In a nutshell, I argue that the Swedes who in 1860 created the Augustana Lutheran Synod headquartered in Rock Island developed such a creolized, or blended, Swedish-American culture.
SWEDES – in 1850 Swedish immigration was first beginning and only 3,559 Swedes lived in the US — 214 in Chicago, and smaller communities in Andover, Galesburg and northern Illinois. All Swedes were baptized into the Lutheran state church, taught the catechism and confirmed as youngsters … but Swedish-American Lutheran pastors got no support from the state church and they faced bitter competition from frontier revivalist preachers, mostly Methodist and Baptist.
INSERT A1 – Hedstrom (per Esbjörn)
… that the Lutheran church is dead; that it is the Babylonian harlot [and] … the Swedish preacher [Esbjörn] has come to burden these free citizens with the shackles and fetters of the State Church; that there are no Lutheran congregations in America: that the Methodists are the genuinely true Lutherans but with another name.
The Swedes had to adapt quickly to American norms, partly because of the competition and partly because they received funding from Congregationalists and Presbyterians in the American Home Missionary Society, whose Calvinist theology demanded what theologians call a gathered community of saints, or of the elect.
ROGER WILLIAMS’ GARDEN – Roger Williams’ formula for the separation of church and state was a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” We need to understand it was to keep the state – and secular society — from contaminating the church, which Williams and other Puritans saw as a gathered community of believers. And it was – and is – inextricably wrapped up with the American ideal of freedom of religion and religious diversity. By the 1850s the Calvinism of early New England had evolved into a “folk religion” of fire-and-brimstone sermons, camp meetings and dramatic conversion experiences where sinners were “saved” and joined the gathered community of saints, where they were subject to church discipline.
INSERT B – Diarmaid [Deer-mad] MacCulloch
Throughout American history these ideas have been inextricably bound together, and the separatist ideal of a pure community of believers set apart from the wickedness of the world was inherent in the 19th-century ideal of a system of voluntary religious associations, free of government interference in a New World. Diarmaid MacCulloch, the English historian, catches its spirit very well in his magisterial survey Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, when he speaks of “the rhetoric of covenant, chosenness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden … served up with a powerful dose of extrovert revivalist fervour.” All of this, he says, would lead to “a Christianity shaped by a very different historical experience from western Europe.”9
ACCULTURATION – For Swedish Lutherans, you became a member of the church when you were baptized. But the American expectation was that you had to document you first had a conversion experience, i.e. you had been “saved.” The Home Missionary Society made this a condition of helping fund startup congregations. It was a nice, and unusual, ecumenical gesture, but it created problems.
INSERT C — Esbjörn
“The Swedes have been members of a State Church,” explained the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn of Andover, who received funding from the AHMS, “and the greater number of them have lived in places where the true religion, conversion, and new birth and sanctification are unknown or mentioned with contempt and disdain.”
Esbjörn feared, with some justification, if he tried to enforce the Home Missionary Society’s rule, he would lose members to the Methodists who were actively proselytizing in the area. So after some drama, the Swedes worked out a compromise. As it was finalized in 1853 by Pastor Erland Carlsson of Immanuel Lutheran Church, Chicago, prospective new members from Sweden would be vetted by the pastor and congregational council and then reaffirm their baptismal and confirmation vows and promise to follow church discipline. They would be asked:
INSERT D – Erl. CarlssonDear friends, you have asked to become members of this our Evangelical Lutheran congregation. Since you have been born and nourished within the Lutheran Church we do not require any new profession of faith. We desire only to know if also in this land you will remain true to our ancient unforgettable faith and teaching. On behalf of the congregation I therefore ask if with sincerity of heart you will faithfully adhere to the Confession you have already made at the altar of the Lord (in confirmation), and accordingly will hold to the unaltered Augsburg Confession?
Carlsson’s policy, based on Esbjörn’s compromise, seems to have worked:
INSERT E – Immanuel Church Council Minutes, Chicago
The published version of its minutes for Thursday, May 28, 1857, drily records, with the names left blank, that:
A request to become a member of the congregation had … been received from _____ __________, and though he had handed a certificate to the Church Council from Justice J.L. Miliken stating that _____ __________ because of insufficient evidence had been acknowledged innocent of the charge preferred against him by _____ __________: nevertheless the Church Council felt that this matter as well as the status of _____ __________ in general were of such a nature that it is unwilling to be responsible for accepting him as a member of the congregation; but resolved that the question be submitted to a vote of the congregation itself, and that this vote be taken tomorrow evening after the close of the service and the reading of these minutes.
Meeting after Friday vespers, the congregation voted 26-15 not to admit “_____ __________,” whoever he was and whatever the charges against him might have been.42 Carlsson’s compromise came in handy.
ACCULTURATION was, and is, a two-way street and not a simple process of assimilation.
INSERT F — Speaking in 2012 to the Augustana Heritage Society, James Bratt of Calvin College cited the experience of the Dutch Reformed, and other churches:
The bottom line … was expressed well 120 years ago by one of my own Dutch immigrant subjects: “We are not and will not be a pretty little piece of paper upon which America can write whatever it pleases.” Acculturation is a two-way, not a one-way, street. We read the same lesson in the annals of Norwegian and German immigration, among Jews and Catholics of various national origins, and also in Maria Erling and Mark Granquist’s history of Augustana. A good many people in all these groups came to the United States looking not so much to find a new way of life as to preserve an old one.
MY CONCLUSION: In later years, Swedish-Americans would pride themselves on how rapidly they assimilated. But in actuality, the process was more complex.50 I would argue that in their ethnic congregations of the 1850s, the Swedes created hybrid forms, that “put things together in new ways,” in Ulf Hannerz’ words, and brought something new into the world. Like so many other immigrants throughout history, they rejoiced with Salman Rushdie in mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that. Seeing their experience through the lens of acculturation and creolization offers us a more nuanced picture of how American culture evolved and how it might evolve in the future.
[Uplinked March 9, 2024]
Ordinary Time 