Friday Reflection: Moderate Majority
Timothy D. Grundmeier on Lutheranism, the Civil War, and the Making of a Distinctive Faith
Why This Conversation Matters
American religious history often gravitates toward the dramatic. We talk about revivals. We talk about prophets and entrepreneurs. We talk about religious radical abolitionists and preachers advocating racial chattel slavery. We know the loudest voices.
But what about those groups, communities, and denominations typically ignored? What about the religious communities that were neither revivalist innovators nor southern apologists—but something more complicated?
Timothy D. Grundmeier argues that nineteenth-century Lutheranism was not marginal but central to American religious culture. Lutherans were the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900. He argues that the institutions they built i and debates that shaped them in the late nineteenth grew from the crisis of the Civil War Era. This crisis revealed tensions between theology, ethnicity, American constitutionalism, and political loyalty, and that complicates our familiar narrative of the Civil War, and of American religious history.
A few questions to consider:
What happens when a denomination prides itself on moderation during a period of moral crisis?
How do theological disputes become inflamed—or transformed—by political conflict? And not always in the ways you might think?
And how can a church grow enormously while simultaneously becoming more culturally isolated?
Throughlines
The conversation begins with definition. What is Lutheranism? Grundmeier wisely resists a simple doctrinal checklist. Lutherans are, at the most basic level, those who trace themselves to the Lutheran branch of the Reformation and confess foundational texts like the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Catechism. But by 1850, American Lutheranism had splintered into distinct varieties.
The first were the “New” or “American” Lutherans, represented by Samuel Simon Schmucker—religious entrepreneur, seminary founder, and tireless institution builder. Schmucker sought to align Lutheranism with the Anglo-American evangelical mainstream. He embraced revivalism, temperance activism, and Protestant benevolent societies. He was uneasy with Lutheran sacramental theology, and the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century, fearing that both appeared too “Romanish.” He believed Lutherans should shed parochial German identity in order to become fully American.
Moderate Lutherans, centered in the Pennsylvania Ministerium, were less ambitious. They were content within Pennsylvania German culture and less eager to revise Lutheran doctrine or identity. They were neither separatist nor aggressively assimilationist.
Then came the Old Lutherans—many recent immigrants from post-Napoleonic Germany—who would coalesce in the Missouri Synod under C.F.W. Walther. Initially a small, self-conscious separatist minority, they insisted on strict adherence to the Lutheran confessions and rejected theological compromise.
Here is where the Civil War reshapes the story. Unlike Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, Lutherans did not fracture along sectional lines in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, Lutheran unity was growing right to the eve of the war. When division finally came, it did so in two ways: a familiar North–South split, and a distinctly Lutheran theological schism among Northern synods over how strictly the Augsburg Confession should be enforced.
The war intensified doctrinal debates. “Unionism” became both a political and theological metaphor. Just as Americans fought to preserve the Constitution, some Lutherans argued that the church must stand uncompromisingly on its confessional foundations.
The most startling episode came when Walther and leaders of the Norwegian Synod publicly defended the permissibility of slavery in 1864—not from enthusiasm for the institution, but from a conviction that abolitionism threatened biblical authority and divinely ordered society. The Civil War, for them, dramatized the dangers of revolutionary ideology as much as the evils of slavery.
Yet after Reconstruction, Lutheranism took a sharp turn. Engagement gave way to quietism. Denominations built vast networks of schools, orphanages, hospitals, and publishing houses, even as they withdrew from mainstream Protestant cooperation. By 1900, Lutheranism was large, organized, confident—and culturally isolated.
The irony is profound: in seeking to become more distinctively American, Lutherans ended the century both deeply American and widely regarded as outsiders.
Questions for Reflection & Discussion
Why has Lutheranism often been overlooked in narratives of American religious history?
How did the three varieties of American Lutheranism differ in their understanding of doctrine and American identity? How were they similar in institution building?
Why did Lutherans avoid sectional schism before 1861 when other denominations did not?
How did the Civil War transform debates over the Augsburg Confession?
What does the concept of “unionism” reveal about parallels between theology and politics?
Why did Walther and others defend the permissibility of slavery so late in the conflict?
How did Lutheran moderation shape its response to slavery and the war?
Why did Lutheranism shift toward quietism during Reconstruction? Were the two things related? If so, how?
How can a denomination grow rapidly while becoming more culturally isolated?
What does this story suggest about the relationship between religious identity and national identity?
For Further Investigation
Timothy D. Grundmeier, Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith (LSU Press, 2026)
Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1998)
George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (OUP, 2011)
Timothy Wesley, The Politics of Faith in the Civil War Era (LSU, 2023)
James Byrd, A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War OUP, 2021)
Richard Carwardine, Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Knopf, 2025)
Alison Efford, German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (Cambridge, 2013)
Kristen Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (LSU, 2016)
Bo Rasmussen, Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870 (Cambridge, 2022)
L. DeAne Lagerquist, The Lutherans (Praeger, 1999)
Mark Granquist, The Lutherans in America: A New History (Fortress, 2015)