Would you pray here? pic.twitter.com/LVpj7qzKgr
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 26, 2023
I’m stuck on this.
Ever since President Matthew Harrison published his condemnation of the “un-Christian teachings” of the “alt-right,” I have been thinking about this all weekend. It has raised a lot of questions about my faith and especially about my understanding of Lutheran history. Unfortunately, I don’t have many answers, but I am eager to dig into this subject and learn more and get to the bottom of this. Perhaps I missed something because a lot of what I am hearing from the LCMS today contradicts its own past.
LCMS:
“Dear friends in Christ,
The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, its president, vice-presidents and all 35 district presidents, along with its ministerium and congregations, categorically reject the horrible and racist teachings of the so-called “alt-right” in toto (including white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, even genocide).
The Synodical explanation of Luther’s Small Catechism teaches that the Fifth Commandment, “You shall not murder,” includes the prohibition of “hating, despising, or slandering other groups of people (prejudice, racism, and so forth).” The Scriptures agree: “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 John 3:15). Every human being is precious to God and as valuable as the very blood of Jesus Christ shed for all, “for God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). …”
Here are my research questions:
1. In what year did “racism” become a sin? The Bible has nothing to say about “racism.” I have never come across anything about “racism” in Martin Luther’s writings. As far as I can tell, the term “racism” didn’t start to take off in the English language until the 1930s in the context of the beginning of World War II. We’re now told that “racism” is such a grievous sin that it warrants excommunication, but Martin Luther and the founders of the Lutheran Church are silent on it. In fact, it seems like no one in the Lutheran Church spoke out against “racism” through the most racist periods of American history like the Reconstruction era, which is strange since we are told that the Bible is clear on this.
2. Did the LCMS oppose “white supremacy”? Missouri was a Jim Crow state. It had segregated schools. It banned interracial marriage. The LCMS was around during the War Between the States, the Reconstruction era and the Jim Crow era. Did the LCMS speak out against “white supremacy” on the basis of the notion that “racism” was a sin during this era? Did the LCMS take a stand against “racism” and “white supremacy” by excommunicating “white supremacists” during the Jim Crow era? If not, why?
3. Why did the LCMS oppose abolitionism? We’re told that slavery is evil and a sin and one of the “un-Christian beliefs” of the “alt-right,” but C.F.W. Walther who was the founder of the LCMS didn’t see things this way. Slavery is a moot issue in our times. No one is calling for the return of slavery. When slavery was a salient issue and a moral and religious challenge for the LCMS, why didn’t the LCMS oppose slavery in Missouri on the clear grounds that “racism” is a sin and “white supremacy” is evil?
4. Did the LCMS perform interracial marriages in the Jim Crow era? We’re told that it is evil and sinful to oppose interracial marriage. This is one of the evil “un-Christian” beliefs of the alt-right which used to be customary for most of American history. If that is the case and this has always been true because “racism” has always been a sin, did the LCMS ever perform interracial marriages in defiance of Missouri’s anti-miscegenation laws? Did the LCMS speak out against laws which banned interracial marriage in the Jim Crow era? Did the LCMS take a bold stand against actual white supremacy? If not, why?
5. What is the traditional Lutheran position on coverture? What was the legal status of women in post-Reformation Northern Europe? Did women in Lutheran Europe have the right to own property? Did they have the right to vote? Did they become doctors of theology? If not, why? Why didn’t anyone like Martin Luther speak out against the evils of subordinating wives to their husbands?
6. Why were open homosexuals executed in Lutheran Europe? As far as I can tell, homosexuality was punished by the death penalty in the states and kingdoms of Lutheran Europe until the 18th century. Why didn’t anyone in the Lutheran Church speak out in defense of homosexuals at the time? Homosexuality was a crime in Germany until the post-World War II era.
7. Is Lutheranism compatible only with liberal democracy? This one is creating quite a stir on Twitter, but Lutherans typically lived under authoritarian governments from the time of the Reformation until the 20th century. Even in Adolf Hitler’s time, “liberal democracy” was a novelty that had only recently been introduced during the Weimar Republic. There was no such thing as religious tolerance in Lutheran Europe for centuries after the Reformation. How can Lutheranism only be compatible with a form of government which didn’t emerge in the United States until the middle of the 19th century?
8. Are the Lutherans who fought for the Third Reich still Christians? This is a tough one. Lutherans fought on both sides of World War II. Millions of Lutherans fought for the Third Reich and supported Hitler. The Allies firebombed Dresden in Saxony in the very heart of Lutheran Europe. Should German Lutherans have resisted Hitler? If so, would that have violated their faith which clearly teaches Christians to obey their rulers? Is Lutheranism only compatible with liberalism? If so, why?
These are only some of the questions that come to mind.
I’m having a hard time squaring LCMS doctrine with LCMS and Lutheran history. If “racism” is a sin and “white supremacy” is evil, then why did the LCMS have to be integrated between the 1940s and 1960s? Why did Lutherans own slaves in Missouri? Why did the LCMS itself have racially segregated institutions? Why didn’t it excommunicate the “white supremacist” politicians who ran Missouri in the Jim Crow era? Why didn’t it always speak out against “racism”? Why didn’t the LCMS challenge segregation? Why didn’t it perform interracial marriages in church in Southern states in the Jim Crow era?
Once again, these are only some of the challenges that spring immediately to mind. Everything that I have read so far about the subject has left the impression on me that “antiracism” swept through American culture between the 1940s and the 1960s and the American federal government committed itself to integration in the 1950s … the LCMS simply tagged along and adapted its doctrines to fit with the times. This is also why it is happening again in our own times with Wokeism which has spread through the culture and through the federal government and now this fad is trickling into the LCMS.
There is nothing wrong with hating the blood of those who persecute and torment the weak and the innocent. The predator and his predatory nature have no place in civilized society and in living among civilized man. And for his refusal to accept Christ and his teachings and continuing to live according to the rules of the jungle, the blood hatred is appropriate.
Let me be clear on this point, I am a hater, I hate the blood of all who persecute and torment the weak and the innocent. So help me God.
Can you justify it theologically though? Couldn’t you and your own blood be hated on the same basis? (“Read a history book” if you need to be reminded of the details.)
When Christianity really want to survive, it must become little more intolerant. Like Islam. First comes the bitter truth that those illiterate goatf..rs were right all the time but later things will go better fast.
Church of course will implode. When even in Vatican, there are more than 50% homosexuals, then serious crusade is needed to fight this institution back.
Or, will the churches go the way of those in Scandinavia and Italy, just empty museums serving as background for tourist’s photos ?
In the near future slapped-together ‘Murcan churches won’t even have that much value.
Off topic: Heavy snow fell in Los Angeles. Hell has frozen over.
It is 80 degrees here
My reaction to what you’ve said here, Mr. W.—to these questions you’ve raised—is itself a question, an overarching one: Do you really think the LCMS will be flummoxed by this? Do you think the synod’s advance into wokeness will be halted or even impeded by what you’ve written here? I ask because I’d guess that halting or impeding it is your goal.
My own sense is that liberals have a stock response to gotcha rhetoric of the kind you’ve deployed here. They mock it—well, as what you yourself have pretty much called it: “Just asking questions.” A culture-war student such as you are should have noticed at least that.
Were the persons who are directing the LCMS inclined to do more than mock, as I’ve just said, this rhetoric of yours—or, as is more likely, simply ignore it—they’d have little trouble, I’m sure, rattling off remarks to the effect that Christianization is an ongoing process of enlightenment. Thus would they explain, as dereliction, their institution’s past conduct, with respect to slavery, Jim Crow, and so on. They might color this with a bit of self-flagellation—for good measure.
Whatever they might do, the outcome is unlikely, in my view, to be a restoration of the pre-woke LCMS—not in any vigorous form. Were your rhetoric to prove a success in thwarting the woke advance through the LCMS, the result would probably be a disintegration of the institution. Its present members who might share your outlook would become, at best, a rump group—like anti-Vatican-II Catholics.
The world has not yet seen a freight train derailed by a coin placed in its path; and with respect to the freight train that is liberalism, rhetoric of this kind is exactly that.
No, I don’t.
As I understand it, the way our culture changes is that fads and trends catch on with the liberal ruling class and get incorporated into federal law and policy. Christian elites then adapt their doctrines to catch up with the secular popular culture. Whether it is LCMS elites or Southern Baptist elites, they all want to be seen as respectable and accepted by the elites above them and they will do whatever it takes to change their theology and conform it to popular trends.
Putting aside what I said at an earlier post—re use of the word “fad”—I’ll say that what you just wrote there, re the move from cultural change to law and policy, probably does sum up the process pretty well. We might want to add that each of the various changes probably originates in some specific book or essay, i.e., in some work by a particular person or organization.
A quarter-century or so ago, I was struck by something that relates to what you said. Ensconced in the introduction of a textbook on Family Law was something like the following:
“Before 1970, it was very easy for an employer to fire an employee and very difficult for a man and woman to get a divorce. Since 1970, it is the opposite.”
What that made clear to me was something pretty basic, something that you and my fellow commenters here, at Occidental Dissent, probably know but that was, to me, a revelation: Every major change in the U.S. over the past half century—well, half-century-plus, at this point—may be traced to a Federal statute.
I don’t have to know—as in fact, I don’t—what statutes brought about the inversion that’s mentioned in the quote I just now presented, above, but I can be sure such statutes exist. In this particular case, the statutes were a big step in America’s Marxification. An employer is no longer really an employer but a functionary, a proxy, by which the government provides medical insurance (“health care”), pension, and, above all, something close to a guaranteed income. When a business owner hires someone, he or she, the owner, effectively takes on a charge. Marriage and family, on the other hand, are all but dissolved. Any dignity they retain is theirs only at the sufferance of the regime, to which any ineradicable sentiment that individuals attach to them is probably nothing but a potential lever, a means of manipulation.
My coming to know of the 1965 Immigration Act resulted from my first application of the rule that that textbook taught me. One day, when I’d been struck—as I should have been struck years earlier—by the racial changes here in Philadelphia, I said to myself, “There must have been a statute. This can’t have happened in America spontaneously.” Before long, via the internet, I’d learned of the 1965 act.
Which makes them all & what the religion they profess worthless.
Brad, I’ve got to be thinking that your late father-in-law has to be rolling over in his grave.
I’ll add myself that, considering how the LCMS cucked out to George Floyd and BLM three years ago, that none of this that is happening now comes as a surprise to me.
One more thing: No matter how hard it cucks out, the LCMS is going to find out the same thing the Mormon Church, which is on the same path — That the left will never be happy with them that they cucked out, but instead that they’re forever going to harp on what they used to be.
This is what happened with antiracism and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Once it became a priority of the federal government during the Truman administration, the LCMS changed its tune and embraced antiracism and integration. In one of the church documents on “racism” from the 1990s, it literally says that the LCMS embraced integration because the Supreme Court had “exploded the morality” of segregation. Church doctrine is just adapted on the fly to fit the whims of the federal government. A little halo was put over the Civil Rights Movement.
A religion has to have a foundation of beliefs which can’t be changed. If everything can be altered as the fads come and go then what does the religion even stand for? What is even its purpose anymore? Why even bother listening to them or going to their church?
So now, not only will Whites be enemies of the state, but we’ll have to deal with a full blown Holy war against us. Will killing a White person be an automatic ticket to Heaven soon? Don’t laugh, it’s not as far fetched as it sounds.
@Adit…
“A religion has to have a foundation of beliefs which can’t be changed.”
That’s the attitude of Eastern Europe and, thus, Eastern Orthodoxy.
I agree with that, by the way – either it’s true from the start or it ain’t.
Which is it?
Reminds me of what Jerry Mugabe, former African Methodist bishop said to the international meeting of Methodists in 2018, over how to deal with homosexuality.
His words?
‘Y’all came to Africa a century ago and told us homosexuality was an evil thing. Were y’all lyin’ about that?
The greater question is this, can you rely on theology that is so fickle that it will bend to every breeze that blows across the socio-political landscape ?
It is more certain that god is the author of reason than any particular book.
@Arrian…
I totally agree with you that reason, analysis, and philosophy are very important.
That said, they, in and of themselves, do not suffice.
Why?
Because our existences are not reasonable, nor based on reason, but, on what is seemingly unnecessary and, thus, supernatural.
Religion addresses itself to that, and religious practice can help keep you together when you suffer life’s difficult blows.
“When did “racism” become a sin?”
Since the Jews came to America, and, wishing to make it even more comfortable for Jewry than Europe was, Jewish thinkers began working on the problem of how to dethornify White American Gentiles over a century ago.
First attempts were made by Felix Untermeyer underwriting a new bible, – the Scofield Edition, which would lay the groundwork.
The Frankfurter professors, running from the Hitler they had had a part in making, to the Ivy League, began trying to figure out the psychological framework with which White American Gentiles could be conditioned to believe that any advocation for White Gentile American interests was a bad thing – a reprehensible thing.
The idea was to hit the equality thing – thing being the cover Jewish thinkers would need to make it seem like they were doing a just and right thing – intended to better all.
Add to that decades of relentless media hammering and here we are – identifying with who you are, something God put into every man’s psychic eye, now dangerously taboo.
New England is in on this, too, as they, as a group, are ever in favour of constructing a secularist religious states that strives for perfection through asceticism.
How long a country can go in, in denial who it is, as opposed to what, is an interesting problem for the theoreticians.
In reality, things have grown so uncomfortable here that I note many Jews are now growing horrified of what has happened – unaware that is was something of their own tribe’s hatching.
No, the New England thing is about antipathy to Christianity, ie, what they used to call “Popery.” That hatred is a core part of their identity, but it evolves as times change. Today, the remnants of “Popery” are the traditional family, opposition to abortion, homosexuality, racism, etc. Don’t think for a moment that these people were ever NOT opposed to Christianity, in its essentials. Whether its George Floyd, John Brown, or James Nayler as “Christ figures,” it’s all the same hypocritical, blasphemous, hate-filled shit. They have always despised Christian society. The Restoration, “the Enlightenment,” the extremes of the French Revolution and Reconstruction might have temporarily disinclined most of them to their habitual extremism, but the feminine psychosis you hear in the voice of the NPR women is the same as it has always been. And the Jews have always been in the shadows manipulating the psychology of these people.
@JPS…
Yes, the Jews have been manipulating people psychologically.
Yes, New England is anti-Christian, or, at least, they did become that in the 20th century.
The religion of New England is secularism and big government.
I lived up there and I have had them explain this to me, in so many terms.
Thank you for your reply. It was well-thought out.!
Yep!!!
So let’s get on winning!
Smoking and Drinking,
A sound arrangement via Danny Brown
If you need an escape!
Fight fire with Fire!
Win!
I am sorry, Dear Sunburn, but, I cannot reply, as I do not think I understand your comment.
All the best to you and yours!
“Add to that decades of relentless media hammering and here we are – identifying with who you are, something God put into every man’s psychic eye, now dangerously taboo.”
Certainly not for kikes & their mud monkey weapons: only for Whites.
That’s very true, Dear NBF – the prescription is prescribed for White Gentiles.
Not for Jewish consumption.
Have a great week!
>decades of relentless media hammering
https://twitter.com/PRook1580/status/1630190044085465088
Good link, Dear Stoecker.
Yes, we are almost completely made up and controlled by visual media.
And, given that we have not realized how gullible we are, it’s a serious problem.
Thank you for your reply!
Ivan said: “Jews are now growing horrified of what has happened – unaware that is was something of their own tribe’s hatching.
Oh, Please (rollseyes)… You seem to have a soft spot for niggers and jews while you slander National Socialists. ALL jews are aware of what the “big” jews are doing, wrecking White societies and working to replace Whites with nonwhites. If there are any socalled “good” jews in this world, let them come forward with the truth. Let them renounce with us the obscenities committed by their fellow jews against us, and let them renounce the International jewish plot to rule the world and their drive to exterminate the White Race.
Every adult jew works in service of jewry’s heinous goals, and every child jew will do the same. Most of them pretend to be Whites. They know they are not Whites, though we see many of them lying in universities, in the government, and in the jewsmedia pretending that they are Whites. Only knowledge of the jews — all jews — as a monolithic, unified, enemy explains how the government, the media, most lawyers, most doctors, most professors, all big retailers, the banks — how they could all do what they do and nearly always get away with it. Crime upon crime upon crime. Moreover, the totality of it has always been ANTI-WHITE.
Dear DiCarlo.
I agree with you that, in theory, German National Socialism was a very good thing.
But, as it got 20 million Germans killed, treated most of the occupied peoples of Europe badly, killed 20 million Russians (less than the Judeo-Bolsheviks, themselves, admittedly:) killed 3 million Poles, and untold amounts of gypsies, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, yes, Jews, I do feel that it was not a good thing.
National Socialism is worthy of slander, because it was not nice.
There, I said it.
Oh, and it, Nationals Socialism, also permanently lost East Prussia, The Sudetenland, and Silesia to non-German hands.
Great German cultures – permanently lost, and, as well, millions and millions of dead and displaced families from these places.
Hard to feel sentimental about this.
Thank you, as always, for your thoughts and time.
The term “racism” itself has a very curious history. Richard Henry Pratt the first to use the term (1902). Mr. Pratt was most interested in eradicating a particular race of people – the American Indian. Here are a couple of quotes:
“Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or hinders their growth. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.” However, Pratt is better remembered as the man who coined the phrase “kill the Indian …save the man,” as a reference to the efforts to educate Native Americans.
“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is the race which should be dead. Kill the Indian in a person, and save the man”
As the linked article notes, the next person to use it widely was the Jew known as Trotsky, who wanted to eradicate another ‘race’ of people – the slavs, and Russians in particular.
I think it was Samuel Untermeyer who arranged for Oxford University Press to publish Cyrus Scofield’s heretical bible with commentary. Untermeyer was the Jew who bought Woodrow Wilson’s soul by paying off the woman he had an adulterous affair with. Untermeyer seems to have been the attorney for the Lotos Club, and influential Gentlemen’s Club in NYC which Cyrus Scofield joined in 1901. Untermeyer is not listed in the Lotos Club’s WP page among the ‘notable members’ but both Scofield and Mark Twain are, along with Andrew Carnegie and other rich and famous of the Gilded Age. The club is still in operation…
Scofield is an early example of how Christianity’s enemies walk into a church and start subverting. That which is called Judaism today has nothing whatsoever to do with the religion that existed before Christ. Much of Christ’s own teaching has to do with fighting the already present subversion of the Mosaic faith by the Babylonians (Pharisees and Saducees) who would go on to compile the Satanic collection of rules known as the Talmud around 500 years after Christ. Scofield, who styled himself as “D.D.”, was never awarded this degree by any seminary. After abandoning his first wife and his children, he was ordained as a preacher by the Congregationalists (who he later abandoned for the Southern Presbyterians). In light of the abandonment (his first wife finally divorced him) and remarriage (before the divorce was final), he should not have been allowed to preach or teach in any church worth its salt.
That’s how we ended up with Sodomy and Pedophilia being sacraments and “racism” (whose definition morphs and shifts all the time) being a mortal sin. (Infiltration – subversion – inversion).
As per usual, Dear Exalted Cyclops – you’ve given an excellent and very pertinent comment.
Thank you so much for that.
Your scholarly and thorough-going intellectual approach is a credit to this site.
The Southern Baptist Convention has ousted Saddleback because of its female pastors…….LAtimes
The virus of wokism continues to spread throughout society.
As Keith Alexander has pointed out, it’s the long march through the institutions. The march continues.
(Saddleback is a mega church in once very conservative Orange County Ca.)
@Arrian…
If there is one major American Protestant denomination to not give into this current cultural milieu, I think it is going to be Southern Baptist.
To be clear, the situation with them is, as the Duke of Wellington remarked of the Battle at Waterloo, ‘It was the damndest near run thing I think I’ve ever seen.’
And so it looks with the Southern Baptist Convention, though, the fight is far from over or won.
It’s just that, when they got rid of Dr. Russell Moore, it was the first such thing to happen, with a major American institution, to take some vigorous steps against usurpation.
Really, I do not know if my South is going to survive this fight.
It has troubled me for many years.
https://twitter.com/Ezekiel33_9
>LCMS Antinomians have succeeded in reducing the Law proclaimed at the synodical level to two commandments:
1. Abortion is bad, and 2. You can’t say mean things about anyone to your left