Lutheranism

Lutheranism. Lutheranism, the oldest and largest branch of Protestant Christianity worldwide, has over eight million members in the United States, nearly all in two denominations, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS). Lutheranism, emerging from the early sixteenth‐century reformation of Martin Luther, was formalized in the Augsburg Confession (1530) and spread to northern and central Europe. Dutch and Swedish Lutherans first came to America in the 1620s, with larger groups of German Lutherans arriving after 1680. Lutheran settlements stretched from New York to South Carolina but were heaviest in Pennsylvania, where Henry Melchior Mühlenberg organized scattered congregations into the Pennsylvania Ministerium in 1748. Other regional groupings of congregations, called synods, were organized, and in 1820 many formed a national organization, the General Synod, under the leadership of Samuel Simon Schmucker. By the early nineteenth century many colonial Lutherans had acculturated to the United States and, led by Schmucker, this “American Lutheranism” moved closer to Reformed and Evangelical Christianity.

From the 1840s until World War I, another, larger wave of Lutheran immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia organized independent denominations along linguistic and theological lines. These immigrant Lutherans settled primarily in a broad band of territory from Ohio to the Dakotas, which remains the center of Lutheran strength. These immigrants were often more conservative in doctrine and practice than the “American Lutherans.” One group of Germans formed the LCMS in 1847, under the direction of C.F.W. Walther. A similar conservative movement within the General Synod led by Charles Porterfield Krauth resulted in the formation of the General Council in 1867. The later immigrants assimilated into American society early in the twentieth century, pushed by nativist feelings during World War I. From 1917 to 1962 a wave of denominational realignments resulted in three major Lutheran denominations. After World War II, American Lutherans began to play an important leadership role in American Christianity and world Lutheranism through various ecumenical organizations. In the early 1970s, the LCMS underwent a struggle between moderates and conservatives; the moderates left and eventually merged with two other Lutheran groups in 1988 to form the ELCA. The 5.2‐million‐member ELCA is generally identified with mainline American Protestantism, while the 2.6‐million‐member LCMS is much more conservative. Of a number of other, much smaller conservative Lutheran denominations, the largest is the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, with 400,000 members.
See also German Americans; Immigration; Religion; Scandinavian Americans.

Bibliography

E. Clifford Nelson, ed., The Lutherans in North America, 1975.

Mark A. Granquist