Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict that Changed American Christianity (review)

Unlike most of American Lutheranism, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod takes pride in the fact that it has never merged with another church body. Founded in 1847, it once flirted with a like-minded Lutheran church regarding altar and pulpit fellowship as well as experienced—also unlike most of American Lutheranism—the pain of schism.

James Burkee, associate professor of political science at Concordia University Wisconsin, did not experience the Lutheran civil war of the 1970s as did most of those who have written about it to date. The present book, the first nonpartisan account, narrates the evolution of a conservative movement that succeeded in driving more moderate voices from the synod by the mid-1970s.

At the center of the conservative element was Herman Otten, whose seminary faculty in 1957 refused to certify him for ordination after he leveled charges of heresy against them. Burkee considers Otten the synod’s “most infamous figure” (p. 8), yet finds him among its most pitiable characters. Since 1962, Otten has published the Christian News, a weekly “church tabloid” (p. 43), in which he has vilified individuals and institutions and through which “he defined conservatism for the Missouri Synod, created a sense of crisis,” and “turned a handful of anxious pastors and laymen into a movement” (p. 6).

Yet Burkee finds little consensus within the so-called movement and even less trust. Using extensive quotations from interviews with key players from the era, he weaves an account of growing discontent fueled by Otten’s publication, a drumbeat that led to blatant politics by the synod’s 1969 biennial convention, “as awkward and schizophrenic a gathering as Missouri Lutherans had ever seen” (p. 90). With the election of Jacob Preus, the conservative candidate who ousted the more moderate incumbent, the synod set on a path to clean house of all things liberal, in particular Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Seven years later, the schism was complete with the departure of 250 congregations.

Burkee correctly puts Missouri’s conservative-moderate conflict within the larger context of the rising polarization of American society during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Calls for law and order like those that put Richard Nixon in the White House echoed in Missouri conservatives’ demand for purging the St. Louis seminary of liberal theology. Despite describing the conflict as “a war of ideologies, primarily but not exclusively theological in expression” (p. 45), Burkee’s narrative is largely devoid of any discussion of the profound theological differences represented by the two camps.

The story told here is instead a sordid tale of secret meetings, threats, electioneering, blackmail, backbiting, and backstabbing. The book’s title would be more accurate without commas—power politics became the order of the day with the conservative takeover of the synod, which “is today as politically managed and charged as ever” (p. 12). Unfortunately, the author does not make a convincing case for the claim of his subtitle. The conflict did, however, change American Lutheranism, most dramatically the Missouri Synod itself, a body Burkee concludes “has become an also-ran, struggling for existence and relevance even as it continued the fight to define itself” (p. 183).

The book offers valuable insight into what Robert Wuthnow has called the restructuring of postwar American religion and serves as a case study of the extremes to which the conservative/liberal divide can impact churches. Burkee’s account of an “all-out war that has not ended and whose outcome is uncertain” (p. 11) leaves the reader little sense of hope. Primarily an unmasking of perpetual malcontent Otten, whose unbridled arrogance and disproportionate influence remain unmatched in Missouri Synod history, it is not, as Martin Marty suggests in his foreword, a happy story.