A Lutheran Response

Full disclosure:  At least part of my father's family has Lutheran roots.  The operative word there is "roots."  I did not grow up Lutheran (nor did my dad for that matter, my grandmother had left the Lutheran church she attended as a child before she married my grandfather), and the only times I've been to a Lutheran service has been for weddings, funerals, or for professional reasons.  And it is for professional reasons that Lutherans are on my mind today.

Next month will mark two years since the publication of The Mainline.  While for me, that will be an important enough milestone, it is nice to know, professionally, that the book is still being read and being reviewed.  In the latest issue of Lutheran Quarterly (Spring 2014, pages 457-458), the Reverend Dwight Zscheile of Luther Seminary was kind enough to offer up a review of my book.  I was pleased to first hear about the review several months ago, and happy as well to read it.  Not only does the Rev. Zscheile provide a very nice summary of the book's contents, but also offers up a sound critique (as a professor who often assigns his students review assignments, it is the kind of review I'd like to see them write).

Part of that critique hints at something I'm planning to address in a later blog post, religious pessimism.  In the past year  or so, I've seen it crop in a host of articles, mostly centering around the notion that organized religion is in decline (whether liberal or conservative in theology), that the youth (read Millennials) have abandoned the Church, and that assumptions that say the Religious Right held firm to throughout the twentieth century no longer hold true in the twenty-first, not to mention the "evangelical crack-up" that has been reported of late.  Indeed, the Rev. Zscheile end's his review with the question "is the concept of a 'majority faith' relevant in twenty-first-century America?"

As I said, that question is one I hope to take up in the weeks ahead (quick answers:  the decline might not be as bad or as real as some commentators believe; no, not all Millennials have left the Church; no, the Religious Right isn't dead; the evangelical crack-up is kind of the norm within American evangelicalism; and yes notions of "majority faith" do indeed matter).  Instead today, I'll leave you with another line from the Rev. Zscheile's review:   "While in some circles, the very premise of Christianity being 'mainline' in any form in twenty-first-century America is hotly contested, Lantzer wants to retain and redefine the term."  On that note, he get's it exactly right!