To My Fellow White Pastors: Continuing Reflections on Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story
“[Pastor] Boltzius began his mission to blacks by first appealing to friends in Germany to provide him with money to purchase young black children directly from slave ships so that he could raise them as Christians.” – Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, page 62
I try to imagine what I would have been like sitting at a rostered minister’s meeting, looking around at my beloved colleagues seated at various tables, and seeing the one or two who enslaved humans. They, no doubt, would be dressed the same as me. Obviously, they would be white men like me, quite likely seminary classmates of mine with whom I shared notes or church leadership ideas in the late hours after class.
I try to imagine myself throwing tables and pitching fits. I’d be fighting racism and slavery with a Bible and an axe. Maybe I’d be like John Brown, kicking ass and taking names, starting a revolution in the name of liberation and the fundamentals of Lutheran doctrine.
Yeah, right. I’d probably just sit there and drink my watered-down coffee and laugh at the bad jokes and grumble about whatever the Bishop was doing. I would have done nothing. Because its normal for humans to own humans. Right?
Dr Jeff Johnson, in Black Christians, is clear, that’s pretty much what non-enslaving white men pastors did to their slave owning colleagues. Absolutely nothing. Its clear because there are no stories of uprisings and strong abolitionist movements in our Lutheran history. Dr Johnson does note that there were some abolitionists within our ranks, specifically naming the Franckean Synod as speaking “out vigorously against slavery on moral grounds and [taking] the position that they would not have fellowship with any Lutheran who favored slavery” (p.123). Unfortunately, that’s about it for notes on good white Lutherans being good throughout the book.
For some Lutheran congregations, it was not simply the resident pastor getting into slavery. In colonial Virginia in the early 1740’s, a capital campaign was formed by a congregation in Hebron to raise funds for a 685 acre farm and “slaves to work the land.” They owned at least nine humans.
In Guyana, a Lutheran congregation connected to, and funded by, the Dutch East India Company, asked for 500 acres. It was named “Plantation Augsburg” and the land was “worked by slaves owned by the church” (p. 87). In 1838, when emancipation came to the enslaved people through British decree, the Lutheran church were judiciously compensated for the “180 slaves on Plantation Augsburg, [receiving] over 9000 pounds as their reimbursement for emancipation” (p. 91). In today’s dollars that is approximately $1.4 million.
Side note: what is the origin story of your congregation’s endowment? If your white church has financial reserves, where did they come from?
But lets take a moment to sit with that first truth about Pr Boltzius. He launched a GoFundMe in his native Germany to buy humans. Specifically, children directly off of slave ships. He participated in the entire machinery of enslavement in the New World and did with the absolute arrogance of a white man hoping to bring these poor people to Jesus. He did it without regard for humanity, divine identity, or any sense of decency. This was his mission field. I am confident that when he first floated this idea to his colleagues, to you and me, we responded with nodding heads.
This is not Lutheran history that we can read about and ignore. This is our history. This is my history. I have been complacent. I have been passive. I have sat in conference meetings with rostered colleagues and nodded my head. Said nothing. Once in a while, even had a passing question of integrity or justice, but said absolutely nothing.
Because, my white pastor and rostered friends, that is our pattern. It is our history and our present and it directly impacts the lives of God’s people to whom we are called to love with a glimpse of Christ’s love. How could anyone have thought that Pr Brotzius was loving the ones he went down to the slave houses to buy? The same way we convince ourselves that the embedded, systemic racism in our congregations and denominations is acceptable.
We think of it in terms of good order. We assume, as we do when a non-white pastor is targeted and defrocked without a proper judicial process, that they clearly did something to deserve it. We convince ourselves that every congregation, including historic black churches in deeply impoverished communities, need to pay their own bills the same as our very white, very wealthy suburban congregations. We establish training and affirmation processes to lift up clergy that are shaped in white thinking and wonder why we don’t have many black, brown, and Latine clergy. We show no regard when black women clergy are ushered out of church leadership and bishop roles because the white voices tell us there was simply a conflict of priorities.
We keep nodding our heads and sipping our watered-down coffee, chuckling at the bad jokes and griping about this or that, while saying nothing about our history. One that is continuously being manifest right in front of us.
Friends, it doesn’t need to be this way. Christ liberates the oppressed, and we are co-conspirators in the oppressive narrative of good order and passivity. We are also liberated from our sin through the cross and set loose as people of God to speak God’s Word of justice.
Read this book. It is a divine pry bar that wedges open our eyes once squeezed shut by our acceptance of the systems we are part of. Let’s read it together and create a conversation. Let’s listen to our black and brown colleagues without the filter of good order and with the expectation that God is speaking to us. May we be cut loose of our complacency and our need to be good white Lutherans.
This reflection is part of a short series on Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, Jeff G Johnson, Concordia Publishing House: St Louis, 1991. You can purchase a copy of this book through the link and read the prior post to White Lutherans here.
To My Fellow White Lutherans: Periodic Reflections on Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story
“What brought together Lutherans from Europe and blacks from Africa…was the need for labor, that is, slaves. For almost two and a half centuries, from 1623 to 1865, slavery and colonialism were the primary context for contact, conversion, and Christian brotherhood, if indeed those labels can be used.” – Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, page 22
As a white man with a Germanic Lutheran background who checks every box of privilege, I knew nothing of black Lutherans. One could easy argue that I still know next to nothing. People of origins other than Scandinavian and German were not taught or discussed in my home churches. The only humor I learned was rooted in white midwestern food choices and how Lutherans are known for eating certain dishes. In seminary, I only heard about black Lutheranism from the black Lutheran theologians.
This short reflection series is not going to fix much of that, though I hope that in lifting up this book, Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story by Dr Jeff G. Johnson, some of us of paler, northern European heritage who claim the Lutheran tradition as “ours” might come to realize that the church does not belong to us. Though there may be historical connections to the Scandilands and Germanic hills, the Church belongs to Christ and is formed by a multitude of peoples longing for Christ’s liberating promise of grace.
I also want to offer this profound book to my fellow white people of the Lutheran tradition to demonstrate that there are very clear, very racist reasons for why most of us have no experience or understanding of Lutheran churches outside of our own white models. We (collectively, historically) created our churches, synods, and national church bodies to reflect our own image. We were intentional, direct, and clear in our want to keep the Lutheran church white and homogenous. This profound book by Dr Johnson is plain in exposing our systemic racism.
Black Christians spans a robust history from 1623, when the first recorded Lutherans landed in New Netherlands (now New York/New Jersey) to 1991 when it was published. To put this timeline in context, Black history reminds us that the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of the New World in 1619. As Dr Johnson notes on page 231, there have been three myths of Black Lutheranism: “(1) the myth of no contact (ie, Lutherans have had little contact with black people), (2) the Johnny-Come-Lately myth (ie, that black people are essentially newcomers to the Lutheran Church), and (3) the myth of the unbridgeable chasm (ie, that the difference between Lutheranism and the black heritage is so great as to be unbridgeable).”
Further on page 231 he writes, “On the average, once every eight years beginning in 1669, Lutherans have launched a new and/or additional effort to work with black people somewhere in the New World.” Like a broken record, we white folk have conjured a plan to interact with black and brown people on our terms, by our rules, and with our prescriptions roughly every eight years.
We see this pattern of stumbling, self-centered intentionality in my churchwide presence, the ELCA. In 1993 we wrote a social statement reflecting a goal to increase our cultural and ethnic representation to 10%, and a Pew Research study released in 2014 reveals that the ELCA is still 96% white. In 2016, the ELCA churchwide assembly called for the organization of a Task Force for Strategic Authentic Diversity and in 2019 they offered an Executive Summary calling for clear steps toward a “change of heart and mind” in the whole church. These steps were forged by a task force made up of non-white voices from within our church and many of these clear, achievable actions continue to remain on a shelf, ignored. Maybe we are waiting for another 8-10 year cycle to give these words from our non-white leaders another passing glance.
Thirty years after Dr Johnson’s book was published, the pattern still holds. Another reason for us white Lutherans to read his work, recognize our role in our self-perpetuated history, seek confession and, as our baptismal promise states, “strive for justice and peace in all the earth” (“Affirmation of Baptism,” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, page 236).
I will continue to lift up passages from Black Christians throughout the coming month and I ask you to hold me accountable to this task, as well as hold me accountable for seeking meaningful reconciliation through confession, forgiveness, and works of justice. This history of white American Lutheranism we share will be difficult for some of us to read, and we will resist it. I have resisted it, and no doubt continue to, in my own subconscious, defensive ways.
To my fellow white Lutherans: will you join me in reading and reflecting on this book with me? Can we see ourselves in these historic movements of intentional racism? Might we acknowledge, confess, check our biases, hear our embedded language, notice the art on our walls, and be moved toward transformation? I pray these reflections will break us open and break our long held patterns through Christ.
link to purchase book: Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, Jeff G Johnson, Concordia Publishing House: St Louis, 1991.
This Land is (Not) My Land
I grew up in the rolling hills of northwest Illinois, part of what is regionally called the Driftless Area. All those awesome sledding and hiking hills survived a glacier that slid across Iowa and most of Illinois, making those territories far less interesting because of their prairie flatness. For all the places I have had the fortune to live, some part of me will always call that specific corner of Creation home.
And since I have a significant connection between my identity and the earth I spent my youth playing, working and driving across, it takes me an extra moment or two to remember that the land was there long before me, far longer than my German and Swiss ancestors showed up, and was already home to several Native peoples for at least a couple millennia before European immigrants arrived. I readily acknowledge this privilege and shortsightedness.
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day Monday, October 8, I decided to do some overdue research on the people who were nourished and loved by same corner of Creation that nourished me.
Who’s land do you live on today?
For your own research, start where I did, with this incredible interactive map.
My spiritual home is among the sloping geography spreading East from the Mississippi, though I now live in the valley of the Rock River. Absolutely no irony is lost on me that within 10 minutes of my home is a statue of a Native American meant to honor the people who once inhabited the valley. The same people, the Sauk, who were forced West by land cessations and slowly decimated by US military power. A prominent battle named after the Sauk chief who led the actions, Black Hawk, was more of an uprising against immigrant oppressors who were cutting off supplies and denying access to land and water.
In historical records written by white people, Native Americans are typically drawn as irrational, violent, and ready for battle. The Sauk, or Ozaagii (which was shortened by the French to “Sac”), it should be no surprise, were generally peaceful. They welcomed an alliance with the Meskwaki people who were badly wounded by French colonials and forced West into Illinois. Both peoples are Algonquin in heritage, a broad culture that spanned from the East Coast in the Great Lakes region. Together the Sauk and Meskwaki cared for each other, shared resources, and travelled together, protecting each other from warring tribes and violent white immigrants. In time, both peoples were relocated to Iowa, then Kansas.
Imagine being told that your home is no longer your home.
I don’t have to and probably never will. I’m a white, middle class hetero normative man living in Middle America. I literally can’t picture some outside army from a strange land showing up at my door and evicting me to Kansas. Or Missouri. Or worst yet, Oklahoma. Such is the life of privilege.
Who was there before you?
The township I grew up in is called Menominee, I can only assumed named after the Menomini or Mamaceqtaw people. With some rudimentary digging, I couldn’t find any notes saying the Mamaceqtaw people lived as far south as Illinois, at least not for a significant period in time. This is a reminder that any information in this reflection is up for critique and correction.
Worth noting, the Menomini Indian Tribe suffered a significant attack from the US government in 1953 with the Menominee Termination Act. Their identity was denied and their existence was threatened. The Menomini people fought back and in 1973 they won the Menominee Restoration Act. An entire culture was nearly wiped from history if not for the strength of that culture to stand up to their oppressors. 45 years ago. Are you old enough to remember 1973?
Historically, the land around the Mississippi River was populated by the Mississippian culture. The sketchy reliability of websites noted, the Mississippian culture stretches back to roughly 1000 CE and moved through a couple iterations until the mid-1500’s when the white people showed up. Within the Mississippian culture were sub-cultures, such as the Oneota, who lived throughout the Eastern Plains and Great Lakes regions. The Oneota are dated 900-1650 and became Sioux cultures.
From the Mississippian culture came several peoples such as the Otoe, Ioway and Missouria, as well as the Sioux. Sioux, from the French word Nadousesssioux, spanned the upper Midwest and today are mostly affiliated with the Dakota lands. Of course, before forced removal by the US, Sioux peoples were in Wisconsin and Illinois.
Does a name matter?
Getting closer to “my” home along the Mississippi, the region is known for its unique land forms called mounds. Though the Native peoples credited for building the ceremonial and burial mounds are called Hopewell, this is an English name applied by a archaeologist who researched the mounds on a piece of property owned by the Hopewell family.
Take a step back with that information. An entire people is identified in history books by the white family who just happened to hold land rights to a particular mound that was dug up by an archaeologist.
With the limited time and knowledge I had, I could not find the origin name of the peoples who may have built the mounds. In the general region of the Driftless Area, the land was inhabited by Sauk, as well as Ho-Chunk or Winnebago peoples. Being Sioux speaking Native peoples, the Ho-Chunk are in the Mississipian and likely Oneota lineage, there is some possibility that they are related to the early mound builders.
The Ho-Chunk, or Hoocąągra, were spread across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa, though primarily rooted to the lands of Wisconsin. The Ho-Chunk suffered devastation due to a violent storm while settled in the Green Bay area and later from infectious diseases brought across the land by white immigrants. As with most Native peoples, they were forcibly relocated to reservation lands in Wisconsin and Nebraska (?!) in the 19th century. The Ho-Chunk tribes have been strategic in reacquiring land in Wisconsin, however, and claim property throughout the state.
Is knowledge enough?
Heck no. And if you’ve made it this far through this reflection, you’re probably of the same mind. Its lovely to have all this information rumbling in the brain and it doesn’t offer much consolation. I also don’t know if being aware of this history is for shame and guilt, either. I cannot say that my people didn’t know any better. I cannot deny that my existence in the Driftless Area and my continued presence in the Rock River Valley is because other cultures were cleared out.
Local (white) history will always speak of the bold, courageous pioneers who braved the cruel weather and torments of sparse living in order to make a better life for their families. That’s the usual narrative. Until this paltry research project, I knew no history of the Native peoples who were here for at least 2000 years.
I offer up this reflection in order to hold myself accountable to tell these stories and correct the narratives told in history museums and local lore. I am going to keep reading and learning, specifically from Native peoples resources, to make sure I’m getting it as right as I can. I will continue to steward the land I walk on and the broader Creation that surrounds me because it is not mine. It never was mine. In my frame of vision, all of it belongs to God.
And I invite you to click a few of the links in this text or do it even better than me. Use better books and more accurate reference materials. We white immigrants have only been here a few hundred years and we have not been compassionate to our Native brothers and sisters. Frankly, we have all but erased cultures from the earth using systemic genocide in various forms.
We can pray for forgiveness for the role our ancestors played and the false stories we’ve been given. We can pray for God’s people isolated on sparse, neglected lands and denied basic services or support. We can pray for our nation to find ways to offer meaningful reparations for the atrocities and injustices we’ve brought in the name of progress. We can advocate. We can listen and we can do better. I pray God grants me the wisdom and direction to do better.
TrustNGrace 